Four years earlier, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had arranged a meeting at the Al-Hamra Palace in Jeddah between President Gaafar Nimeiry and opposition leader Sharif Hussein al-Hindi. The king wanted the two men to end their hostilities. They talked for six hours. Al-Hindi raised the 1970 Aba Island and Wad Nubawi massacres of the Ansar movement, which had left hundreds dead. Nimeiry blamed the killings on communists. Al-Hindi criticized Nimeiry's confiscations and nationalizations. Nimeiry offered the vice presidency; al-Hindi declined, saying he was not seeking personal gain. Both men promised to make joint public declarations. Neither followed through. Al-Hindi went back to his exile. Planning began for something more forceful.

On 2 July 1976, at three in the afternoon, residents of Khartoum heard gunshots and bomb blasts in scattered neighborhoods. The attackers wore long white pants and the long white araqi shirts that many Sudanese villagers wore daily. They asked passers-by for directions to the General Command Headquarters, which they quickly surrounded. The Sudanese civilians they approached were terrified, not liberated. The insurgents had been told Gaddafi's support and their own weapons would be enough to spark a popular uprising. Instead, ordinary Khartoum residents saw foreign-looking fighters - or more precisely, fighters who had clearly come from outside the capital - asking for military headquarters while speaking in accents of the western provinces. Many Khartoum residents, whatever their opinion of Nimeiry, reasoned that a dictator they knew was preferable to mercenaries they did not.

The insurgents engaged in three days of house-to-house fighting in Khartoum and Omdurman. According to Sudanese accounts, 3,000 people died - a figure that included hundreds of civilians caught between the factions. Officers and soldiers of the armed forces, caught at their homes when the attack began, could not reach the general command; the main and secondary roads were held by the rebels. Nimeiry, over the radio, told the country it had been invaded by mercenaries from Libya and ordered his forces to 'eliminate mercenaries without mercy or pity.' On 5 July at 11 am, the army began recovering key sites. El-Sa'ka special forces landed on the roof of the Telecommunications Authority building. A fierce battle destroyed much of the building; 124 died in that engagement alone. Captured militants were executed. The coup ended.

The failed coup had consequences that reshaped Sudan. Nimeiry, having defeated a secular-opposition uprising backed by a Muslim opposition leader, moved politically toward a 'National Reconciliation' in 1977 with some opposition figures, including Sadiq al-Mahdi himself, who had orchestrated the 1976 attempt. For a brief period the reconciliation produced genuine pluralism. But Nimeiry also moved toward ideological Islamism. By 1983 he would impose Sharia law on the entire country - including the non-Muslim majority south - in a decision directly linked to the post-1976 recalibration. That 1983 decision restarted the civil war that would eventually split Sudan in two. Relations with Southern Sudan's leadership had worsened after the 1977 National Reconciliation, with the shift to Arabic as the country's only official language and, ultimately, to Sharia. The Reconciliation collapsed. The war resumed. The country divided.

The three-city metropolis of Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman fills the angle where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile. The Presidential Palace sits on the east bank, within central Khartoum, near streets where the 1976 fighting happened and where almost every subsequent Sudanese political upheaval would also play out. The airport lies in Khartoum itself. The Telecommunications Authority, the General Command Headquarters, and the radio and television building - all focal points of the 1976 fighting - remain recognizable landmarks to anyone familiar with the city, though many have changed names and functions since. Nimeiry survived this coup. He did not survive the next one, in 1985, brought on by mass civil disobedience rather than tanks and suitcases.