Khartoum March 1884, troops loyal to the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad started a siege of Khartoum, against defenders led by British General Charles George Gordon. The siege ended in a massacre of the Anglo-Egyptian garrison when on 26 January 1885 the heavily-damaged city fell to the Mahdists. On 2 September 1898, Omdurman was the scene of the bloody Battle of Omdurman, during which British forces under Herbert Kitchener defeated the Mahdist forces defending the city. In 1973, the city was the site of an anomalous hostage crisis in which members of Black September held 10 hostages at the Saudi Arabian embassy, five
Khartoum North the area of the Nile confluence before the Egyptians established Khartoum as their military garrison and administrative center in the 1820s. It was thereafter eclipsed by the Egyptian Khartoum, its Mahdist replacement Omdurman, and the British refounding of Khartoum following their reconquest of the country in 1898. Khartoum North began to grow again, however, as the southern terminus of the Sudan Military Railroad, which was completed in 1899. (The Blue Nile was bridged in 1910 and the line extended to Sennar, but Khartoum North continued to serve as the main railroad station and yard.) On August 20, 1998 the Al-Shifa