Hemedti Vows to Retake Khartoum on Video Four Days After Losing Ground in Kordofan
The RSF released the recording on 30 July. Its recording date is not established, and the capital has been in army hands since 2025.
Al Jazeera reported on 30 July that the RSF had released a video of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo telling his forces to seize Khartoum. The recording date is not established. The release came four days after the RSF lost Bara, Jabra al-Sheikh and Umm Sayala, and with its forces nowhere near a capital the army retook in 2025. Al Jazeera’s own framing pairs the video with fighting spreading across North Kordofan. Its counterpart is on the other side: Sudan Tribune reported on 26 July that Burhan had ordered a sweeping offensive to clear the entire country up to the Central African Republic border, a directive announced by a senior military officer who was not named, while Burhan himself addressed troops and supporters at the Military Medical Hospital in Omdurman.
Both statements sit inside a wider pattern of unverifiable battlefield accounting. On 16 July, Sudan Tribune reported the army claiming it had destroyed roughly 205 combat vehicles and supply trucks and four strategic drones in the preceding fortnight — a SAF figure with no corroboration. ACLED, whose Sudan analysts argued on 30 June that logistical realities and historical precedent keep a decisive RSF breakthrough at El Obeid out of reach, has since posted on whether the fall of Bara marks a turning point. Neither party’s declared objective — clearing to the CAR frontier, or marching back into Khartoum — corresponds to any force posture either side has demonstrated this year.
Assessment: Treat both as media artifacts, not intentions. A vow recorded on an unknown date and published the week your lines break is morale management addressed at three audiences: fighters who need paying, foreign patrons who need reassuring, and mediators who need to believe you can still impose costs. Burhan’s hospital speech does the same work in the same week. The tell in each case is the gap between the declared objective and the deliverable — Bara for the army, nothing for the RSF. What to distrust: any outlet that converts either video into a projected offensive, and any tally of destroyed vehicles issued by the side that destroyed them.