GEOFF BENNETT: After nearly two years of brutal civil war between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a potential turning point.

The army recaptured the presidential palace and the center of the capital city, Khartoum, last week.

Our William Brangham gets a dispatch from the ground.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Sudan's civil war, and the fighting has triggered the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, with an estimated 14.6 million people displaced.

Both sides are credibly accused of committing war crimes, and the U.S. has accused the paramilitaries of committing a genocide.

The New York Times' Declan Walsh is in Khartoum, and he joins us now.

Declan, thank you so much for being here.

You and photographer Ivor Prickett were among the first into Khartoum after the army made these substantial gains and retook the center of the city and the presidential palace.

Can you tell us what it is you first saw when you entered the city?

DECLAN WALSH, The New York Times: We found -- when we crossed the River Nile into that city center area that until just days earlier had been held by the RSF, for the previous two years, we found these scenes of utter destruction, almost apocalyptic.

We drove along the Nile.

All of the buildings, the government buildings that symbolize power and authority in Sudan, the army headquarters, various ministries, and finally getting to the presidential palace, and they all lay in ruins.

There were destroyed cars everywhere.

Many shops had been looted, and it was just this picture of a city that has been really bent low after two years of war.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You reported that there is still fighting ongoing outside of the city, so is there any sense that this victory by the army could be a turning point in the war?

DECLAN WALSH: I think there's little doubt, William, that this is certainly a major moment in the war.

The paramilitaries have -- had held the capital from the first days of the conflict in April 2023 until just last week, and now they have lost it.

So that is certainly going to change the dynamic of the war.

Until certainly the end of last year, the United States and Arab and African countries were leading efforts to try and find some sort of diplomatic or negotiation settlement to this conflict.

But that does not appear to be in view right now.

The leaders on both sides have made it clear that they want to try and settle this militarily.

And, in fact, the Sudanese military, its leader just some days ago in a speech made it clear that he sees this the gains against RSF as a step towards retaking the capital entirely and then, as he puts it, to ending the war.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: This war, as you have so ably documented, has been an absolute humanitarian nightmare for the people of Sudan.

What is the current status of that humanitarian crisis?

DECLAN WALSH: It's extremely serious.

Since we have been here, we have traveled around parts of the city that had changed hands in recent weeks and months.

And we met many people who were in a dire situation, people with no water, no electricity, in many cases for the last two years, malnourished children in extremely badly provisioned hospitals, some of them literally gasping for life.

And their parents told us that they had been living in areas where they were unable to get any food or certainly very meager food rations because of the fighting.

There are aid groups that have accused both sides in the war of using food as a weapon of war, of denying food access to humanitarian groups in areas that are controlled by their enemies.

And we certainly saw on the ground here the really dire consequences of all of those factors coming together.

And that's just here in Khartoum, in the capital.

Out in the West of Sudan, in particular in the area of Darfur, conditions are in many cases even worse.

A famine has officially been declared already in parts of Darfur.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Do you have any sense as to whether the Sudanese army, if they are able to continue to hold the upper hand, would be interested in trying to ameliorate that humanitarian crisis?

DECLAN WALSH: Certainly, both sides in this war are very keen to show that they are for the people.

And the Sudan military has said that it intends to, after it recaptures the capital -- we spoke with senior generals today who told us they think it could be just a matter of weeks before the capital is fully back in the military's hands.

They say that they will start to rebuild.

They have already started to encourage some people who - - some Sudanese who've been displaced to cities hundreds of miles away to start returning home.

But, to be honest, when you look around the scale and intensity of the devastation in this city, one of the huge questions that looms is just how the Sudanese are going to set about rebuilding this broken city.

The -- there are no estimates yet of how much that would cost.

But you can only imagine that it would be a huge figure.

And it's hard to know right now where that money might come from.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: All right, that is New York Times reporter Declan Walsh from Khartoum, along with photographer Ivor Prickett.

Thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.

DECLAN WALSH: Thank you, William.