The military says it is working to ‘clean up the remaining rebel pockets’ inside the capital of Gezira state.

The Sudanese military and allied armed groups have entered Wad Madani and were pushing out the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary from the strategic city in Gezira state, according to the army.

In a statement on Saturday, the armed forces “congratulated” the Sudanese people on “our forces entering the city of Wad Madani this morning” after more than a year of RSF control.

“They are now working to clean up the remaining rebel pockets inside the city,” the statement said.

There was no immediate comment from the RSF.

The office of army-allied government spokesperson and Information and Culture Minister Khalid al-Aiser said the army had “liberated” the city.

The army posted a video appearing to show soldiers inside the city that has been held by the RSF since December 2023.

Sudan’s army and the RSF have been at war since April 2023, causing what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis and declarations of famine in parts of the northeast African country.

Wad Madani is strategic because it is a crossroads of key supply highways linking several states, and is the nearest major town to the capital Khartoum.

Army ‘in most parts of Wad Madani’

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, said the army forces had been advancing towards the city over recent days.

“They have been taking over villages in the south and southeast of [Gezira] state until this morning, when they took over Hantoub Bridge – a decisive bridge that leads into the city,” she said.

“The army is now in most parts of Wad Madani,” she added.

“The army and allied fighters have spread out around us across the city’s streets,” one witness told the AFP news agency from his home in central Wad Madani, requesting anonymity for his safety.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of committing war crimes including targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.

The paramilitary forces have been accused of summary killings, rampant looting, systematic sexual violence and laying siege to entire towns.

The United States on Tuesday said the RSF had “committed genocide” and imposed sanctions on its leader, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, also known as Hemedti.

The local resistance committee, one of hundreds of pro-democracy volunteer groups across the country coordinating frontline aid, hailed the Wad Madani advance as an end to “the tyranny” of the RSF.

Witnesses in army-controlled cities across Sudan reported dozens of people taking to the streets to celebrate the news.

Twelve million displaced

The recapture of Gezira state as a whole could mark a turning point in the war that began over disputes on the integration of the two forces, which has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.

Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands and uprooted more than 12 million people, more than three million of whom have fled across borders.

In the early months of the war, more than half a million people had sought shelter in Gezira, before a lightning RSF offensive displaced upwards of 300,000 in December 2023, according to the UN.

Most have been repeatedly displaced since, as the feared paramilitaries moved further and further south.

The RSF still holds the rest of the central agricultural state of Gezira, as well as nearly all of Sudan’s western Darfur region and swaths of the country’s south.

The army controls the north and east, as well as parts of the capital Khartoum.

PARIS (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has tossed expansionist rhetoric at U.S. allies and potential adversaries with arguments that the frontiers of American power need to be extended into Canada and the Danish territory of Greenland, and southward to include the Panama Canal.

Trump’s suggestions that international borders can be redrawn — by force if necessary — are particularly inflammatory in Europe. His words run contrary to the argument European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are trying to impress on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But many European leaders — who’ve learned to expect the unexpected from Trump and have seen that actions don’t always follow his words — have been measured in their response, with some taking a nothing-to-see-here view rather than vigorously defend European Union member Denmark.

Analysts, though, say that even words can damage U.S.-European relations ahead of Trump’s second presidency.

A diplomatic response in Europe

Several officials in Europe — where governments depend on U.S. trade, energy, investment, technology, and defense cooperation for security — emphasized their belief that Trump has no intention of marching troops into Greenland.

“I think we can exclude that the United States in the coming years will try to use force to annex territory that interests it,” Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pushed back — but carefully, saying “borders must not be moved by force” and not mentioning Trump by name.

This week, as Ukrainian President Zelenskyy pressed Trump’s incoming administration to continue supporting Ukraine, he said: “No matter what’s going on in the world, everyone wants to feel sure that their country will not just be erased off the map.”

Since Putin marched troops across Ukrainian borders in 2022, Zelenskyy and allies have been fighting — at great cost — to defend the principle that has underpinned the international order since World War II: that powerful nations can’t simply gobble up others.

The British and French foreign ministers have said they can’t foresee a U.S. invasion of Greenland. Still, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot portrayed Trump’s remarks as a wake-up call.

“Do we think we’re entering into a period that sees the return of the law of the strongest?” the French minister said. “‘Yes.”

On Friday, the prime minister of Greenland — a semiautonomous Arctic territory that isn’t part of the EU but whose 56,000 residents are EU citizens, as part of Denmark — said its people don’t want to be Americans but that he’s open to greater cooperation with the U.S.

“Cooperation is about dialogue,” leader Múte B. Egede said.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the U.S. “our closest ally” and said: “We have to stand together.”

Analysts find Trump’s words troubling

European security analysts agreed there’s no real likelihood of Trump using the military against NATO ally Denmark, but nevertheless expressed profound disquiet.

Analysts warned of turbulence ahead for trans-Atlantic ties, international norms and the NATO military alliance — not least because of the growing row with member Canada over Trump’s repeated suggestions that it become a U.S. state.

“There is a possibility, of course, that this is just … a new sheriff in town,” said Flemming Splidsboel Hansen, who specializes in foreign policy, Russia and Greenland at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “I take some comfort from the fact that he is now insisting that Canada should be included in the U.S., which suggests that it is just sort of political bravado.

“But damage has already been done. And I really cannot remember a previous incident like this where an important ally — in this case the most important ally — would threaten Denmark or another NATO member state.”

Hansen said he fears NATO may be falling apart even before Trump’s inauguration.

“I worry about our understanding of a collective West,” he said. “What does this even mean now? What may this mean just, say, one year from now, two years from now, or at least by the end of this second Trump presidency? What will be left?”

Security concerns as possible motivation

Some diplomats and analysts see a common thread in Trump’s eyeing of Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland: securing resources and waterways to strengthen the U.S. against potential adversaries.

Paris-based analyst Alix Frangeul-Alves said Trump’s language is “all part of his ‘Make America Great Again’ mode.”

In Greenland’s soils, she noted, are rare earths critical for advanced and green technologies. China dominates global supplies of the valuable minerals, which the U.S., Europe and other nations view as a security risk.

“Any policy made in Washington is made through the lens of the competition with China,” said Frangeul-Alves, who focuses on U.S. politics for the German Marshall Fund.

Some observers said Trump’s suggested methods are fraught with peril.

Security analyst Alexander Khara said Trump’s claim that “we need Greenland for national security purposes” reminded him of Putin’s comments on Crimea when Russia seized the strategic Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

Suggesting that borders might be flexible is “a completely dangerous precedent,” said Khara, director of the Centre for Defense Strategies in Kyiv.

“We’re in a time of transition from the old system based on norms and principles,” he said, and “heading to more conflicts, more chaos and more uncertainty.”

___

AP journalists Jill Lawless in London; Raf Casert in Brussels; Daria Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia; Geir Moulson and David Keyton in Berlin; and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that his team is in the works of setting up meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

“He wants to meet. And we’re setting it up,” he told reporters during a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago club regarding Putin. “President Xi – we’ve had a lot of communication. We have a lot of meetings set up with a lot of people. 

“I’d rather wait until after the 20th,” he added in reference to his inauguration date later this month.

“President Putin wants to meet,” Trump added. “We have to get that war over.”

RUSSIA MONITORING TRUMP’S ‘DRAMATIC’ COMMENTS ON GREENLAND ACQUISITION

Trump pointed to the “staggering” casualty rates endured by both Russia and Ukraine and suggested the number of civilian casualties was also likely to be considerably higher than what has been reported. 

The Kremlin confirmed Trump’s comments on Friday and said it was ready “to resolve problems through dialogue,” reported Russian news agency Tass.

The Trump-appointed special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Gen. Keith Kellogg, told Fox News Digital that he has set a goal to end the war in Ukraine within 100 days of taking up the top job. 

Kellogg described the war as “carnage” but said he was confident that Trump can end the war in the “near term.”

The retired three-star general told Fox News’ “America Reports” on Thursday that he and Trump are going to make sure the cease-fire agreement is “fair” and “equitable,” though he did not detail what this means as far as withdrawing Russian forces from Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders. 

Former President Donald Trump, right, meets with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Trump Tower on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024 in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Trump has not detailed how he intends to end the three-year-long war, though he suggested he could support Putin’s demand that Ukraine be barred from entering the NATO alliance, and told reporters Thursday he “could understand [Putin’s] feeling about” not wanting NATO “on their doorstep.”

Prior to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow already had four nations on its borders that were members of the international security alliance, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Finland then joined NATO in 2023, applying for membership just 3 months after the Feb. 22, 2022 invasion. 

Moscow and Kyiv have made clear that stipulations surrounding Ukraine’s NATO membership are non-negotiable. 

NATO LEADERS PREDICT ERA OF 2% DEFENSE SPENDING ‘PROBABLY HISTORY’ AS TRUMP REPORTEDLY FLOATS HIGHER TARGET

Then-President Trump, left, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 29, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Trump did not detail when he could meet with the Chinese president, and it remains unclear if Xi has plans to meet personally with him.

Trump reportedly invited Xi to his inauguration ceremony, though Beijing said it would instead send a top-level envoy, which is more inline with tradition. 

In his final meeting with President Biden in November, Xi had expressed a willingness to work with the former and soon-to-be president of the United States.

However, Trump, who once said he and Xi “love each other,” in late-November promised to hit China with 60% tariffs and then this week said he would consider using military action to seize the Panama Canal, which the U.S. returned to Panama in 1979 before then ending its partnership over control of the strategic thoroughfare in 1999.

“The Panama Canal is vital to our country and its being operated by China – China. We gave the Panama Canal to Panama – we didn’t give it to China,” he added. 

The Marshall Islands cargo ship Cape Hellas and the Portuguese cargo ship MSC Elma sail on Gatun Lake near the Agua Clara Locks of the Panama Canal in Colon City, Panama, on Dec. 28, 2024. (ARNULFO FRANCO/AFP via Getty Images)

Fox News Digital could not immediately reach the Panama Embassy in Washington, D.C., for comment.

The Trump transition team did not respond to questions by Fox News Digital over concerns of sparking a military confrontation with China in Panama.