Khartoum limps back to life after army retakes the capital, but Sudan’s fracture is far from healed
Markets have reopened, phone lines are flickering back and the army says the worst of the paramilitary threat has passed. Residents of Khartoum are less certain.
On the morning of 11 July 2026, shopkeepers in central Khartoum pulled steel shutters off storefronts that have been welded shut for the better part of two years. Minibuses traced their old routes through Omdurman. Mobile money agents re-stocked float and propped up chipped satellite dishes on their roofs, looking for a signal. The mood across the capital, by every account from residents quoted by Africanews on 11 July, was cautious rather than triumphant: life was resuming, but no one could say for how long.
What changed is that the army now holds the capital again. After a grinding counter-offensive that began in early 2025, Sudanese Armed Forces units recaptured Khartoum state and the historic city centre from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), ending the paramilitary group's two-year occupation. The relapse is real; the durability is not. Khartoum's revival is a wartime lull, not a peace.
A city relearning its own streets
Africanews's 11 July dispatch from Khartoum describes a city relearning routine at half-speed. Goods are moving again. Traders in Omdurman's souks have reopened. Some residents have begun returning from the displacement camps in Madani and elsewhere, though many of those displaced have no functioning homes to come back to. Public services, including electricity, running water and the phone network, remain patchy. Reports from the capital note visible damage across several districts and unexploded ordnance warnings from the army.
The tempo is set by security, not commerce. Residents say they stay indoors after dark. Army patrols have replaced RSF checkpoints on the main bridges across the confluence of the Blue and White Niles. Families who fled to neighbouring countries have begun trickle returns, but the data on how many are returning, and on what scale, remains thin. Africanews reported on 11 July that residents expressed fear of a renewed RSF attack, a counter-current that runs underneath every other signal from the city.
The simplest read is that Khartoum has crossed a threshold. The harder read, also present in residents' own accounts, is that the worst scenario, a permanent RSF occupation of the capital, has been averted without the wider war being resolved.
The rival army in the west
The RSF's territorial position has not collapsed. It has shifted. The paramilitary force, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and rooted in the Darfur janjaweed militias of the 2000s, retains control of large parts of Darfur and parts of Kordofan, and continues to project force into the peripheries of the capital.
That is what residents mean when they speak about fears of another attack. The capital's liberation is, in the language of the army, a "military victory" in the centre of the country. In the language of residents, it is the moment when the war moved further out of sight, onto the roads they would have to drive to come home, into the provinces where the next battles will be fought.
The Sudanese Armed Forces, under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has framed the Khartoum operation as proof that the army can defeat the RSF on its own terms. International mediators who spent 2024 and 2025 shuttling between Port Sudan, Nairobi, Jeddah and Cairo have produced frameworks; none have held. The Khartoum campaign is, for now, the only framework that has changed facts on the ground.
What the war did, and what did not heal
The numbers behind the capital's return tell the story of a country that has been hollowed out. Before the war, Khartoum state was home to roughly eight million people; most have been displaced at least once. The civil war, which began in April 2023, has driven more than eleven million Sudanese from their homes, produced what the UN has called the world's largest displacement crisis, and triggered acute hunger across Darfur, Kordofan and parts of the Greater Khartoum area. Famine was confirmed in several displacement camps in 2024 and 2025.
None of those drivers reset when the flag went back up over central Khartoum. The administrative state has been gutted; ministries in Port Sudan have run the country by decree and video link for two years. Returning civil servants have no functioning offices. Returning judges have no functioning courts. Returning teachers have schools that are mostly rubble.
The pattern is familiar across post-conflict African capitals: the visible enemy is gone, the structural enemy, the absence of functioning institutions, of finance, of services, is not.
The African layer nobody in the capital can fix
The war's external ecosystem is part of why a Khartoum victory does not equal a peace. Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have backed the SAF in the centre; the UAE's role, repeatedly alleged by a UN panel of experts and by U.S. officials, has been a chronic irritant in relations between Khartoum, on its reconstruction path, and Washington. Egypt's stake is older and geographic: the Nile waters and the Halayeb triangle, both touchstones of Cairo's regional posture, run through Sudanese territory.
On the other side, the RSF's external backing has been murkier and more diffuse, channelled, according to multiple investigative reports, through networks in Chad, Libya, and parts of West and Central Africa. The implication for the continent is that Sudan's war is not Sudanese, it is a war with Sudanese front lines and external supply chains that span the Sahel and the Horn.
That is why African Union mediators, working with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and the UN, have struggled to translate any internal momentum into a wider settlement. A capital retaken is not a country remade.
What the next six months will show
The honest read of Khartoum on 11 July is that residents got back their city in the narrow sense, their streets, their shops, their bridges, their central skyline at the confluence of the Niles. They did not get back their country. Three tests will determine whether July 2026 is remembered as a turning point or as another missed one.
First, whether the army can hold the capital without a renewed RSF offensive on the peripheries. Residents' fear, plain in the Africanews reporting, is precisely that the RSF will pivot to attritional pressure on the routes leading into the city. Second, whether international donors reopen serious funding for Sudanese state institutions in Khartoum rather than the Port Sudan interim apparatus; the gap between an internationally recognised government and an internationally funded capital is the practical block on reconstruction. Third, whether the war's violence moves into the territories that neighbours, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, the Central African Republic, cannot afford to absorb.
For now, Khartoum is open for business in a way it has not been since April 2023. For how long, and on what terms, is the question that the next few months will have to answer.
Desk note: Monexus framed this dispatch around residents' own words, sourced from Africanews, rather than around either army's communiqué. The wire frame on the war has tended to flatten Sudan's complexity into a SAF-versus-RSF binary, with external actors rendered into a footnote. This piece treats the external ecosystem as co-constitutive of the conflict, not because the actors are equivalent, but because the war cannot be understood without them.