In pictures: the liberation of Khartoum

The story of the war in Sudan has mostly been told from elsewhere – from the desperate, dusty refugee camps in neighbouring Chad or the formal, stilted diplomatic meetings in New York or London. Access has been all but impossible, be it for journalists, diplomats, aid groups or the UN.

Throughout most of the two years since the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group formed out of the Janjaweed, broke from the government and began fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control, Sudan has been all but cut off from the outside world. That’s made even the death toll impossible to confirm – depending on who you ask, the number of people who have lost their lives is in the tens or the hundreds of thousands.

The Irish photographer Ivor Prickett was one of the few photojournalists to gain access, most recently spending three weeks in Khartoum in March for the New York Times, just as the SAF managed to win back control of the capital, ­crossing the Blue Nile to take back the presidential palace.

“There was definitely this air of confidence around the troops – they’d had huge victories over the RSF in the previous couple of months,” said Prickett. The RSF retreated from Khartoum in March, leading to huge relief in the capital, but its withdrawal revealed just how dire the humanitarian situation had been.

Hopes that the RSF’s retreat from Khartoum could be a major turning point in the war have since been dashed. They have retained control of large swathes of the country, including Darfur – and in the past two weeks, have used drones allegedly supplied by the United Arab Emirates to attack the country’s main port, Port Sudan, which is controlled by the SAF.

Words by Steve Bloomfield