Almost everywhere I go, I am asked about Sudan. The questions are partly from concern for family and my birth country, and partly from a genuine desire to understand how the conflict there has turned into something so intense and seemingly unstoppable. This week, I break down what is happening in the country, and why it has escalated to catastrophic proportions.
A sense of incredulity
The first answer I give when asked about my thoughts on the war is always the same: I still can’t believe it is happening. Three years into the conflict, there is still a sense of incredulity that Sudan has unravelled so quickly. This is probably how it always feels to those whose countries have suddenly succumbed to war. To outsiders, war remains a story, a headline, a political event, and perhaps, particularly in Africa, not a remote or unexpected occurrence. But it is no one’s natural lot, and every day is as hard and bewildering as the one before.
Two histories of war
There are two histories to the war in Sudan. One long, and one short. The long history is of a country where political and economic power has always been in the hands of the few. Regions such as Darfur have historically been marginalised and ignored. The region has suffered competition for resources and conflict along ethnic lines between Arab and African groups for decades, and a genocide against its non-Arab population was perpetrated in the early 2000s by Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, with the blessing and support of central government. The result was that, even as Sudan as a whole never fell apart, intense localised conflicts rumbled on for decades, leading to the growth and empowerment of militarised groups. The most concrete legacy of that history is the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia that was formalised out of armed groups and is now at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
A sabotaged revolution
The short history has its roots in Sudan’s popular revolution of 2019, in which president Omar al-Bashir who ruled Sudan for almost 30 years was deposed after months of protest. It was a revolution that had two demands: first the removal of a dictator, and second the ejection of the military (from whose ranks Bashir came when he led a coup in 1989) from power once and for all. In the aftermath of the revolution, it became clear that the RSF, which had partnered with Bashir and his government to suppress rebellion in Darfur, had amassed significant power. With Bashir gone, the RSF and the SAF entered what was supposed to be a transitional power-sharing agreement with civilians in order to pave the way for civilian rule. It was short-lived. The SAF and RSF turned on the civilians, and then each other. Sudan, it turned out, was only big enough for one armed body.
What the war is – and what it isn’t
Sudan’s conflict is often described as a “civil war”. But there is no civilian feature to this war. They did not take up arms against one another, and their lives and livelihoods have been the price of the power struggle between the two parties. The war is also spoken of as the “forgotten war”, but that glosses over the fact that the duration, intensity, and reporting of the conflict leave little room for doubt that it is anything other than a war that just isn’t proportionally cared about. The war is not forgotten; it is ignored and sometimes tolerated. The UN’s humanitarian response plan for Sudan remains chronically underfunded. The Trump administration has gutted humanitarian aid, hitting Sudan particularly hard, and scaled back the entire Africa engagement effort. All the while, valiant accountability and reporting efforts continue, as do dogged campaigns to raise awareness and funds on the part of Sudanese at home and in the diaspora.
You will also hear of Sudan’s conflict as a “proxy war”, which gives the sense that outside forces are lining up equally behind all parties. Several actors have been drawn in, but the main outside influence in this war is the United Arab Emirates, which has pumped funds and arms into the hands of the RSF while denying any involvement. To the UAE, securing influence in Sudan, a strategically located, gold-rich and fertile country, would significantly expand the Emirates’ political and economic power.
What the war actually is: an existential battle between the old guard; the Sudanese army and the associated parties and interests it represents, and a new militia that amassed staggering influence and support outside the official auspices of the state, and now seeks to claim it.
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The violent, heartbreaking toll
It is difficult to know where to start. Again, statistics about the millions of displaced, hundreds of thousands estimated to have been killed, sexual violence, and humanitarian catastrophe and hunger still cannot capture the individual tragedies or their reverberations. The loss of home and loved ones resonates with my own family story. Our house in Khartoum was taken over by the RSF, looted, and then left gutted, deep holes dug in the ground and walls to extract even the pipes and wires. There are the millions of elderly people scattered around Sudan and the wider region, who now live their last days wrenched and in painful impoverished exile.
And there is the systematic massacre by the RSF of the African population in Darfur, re-opening the wounds of the earlier genocide. The largest SAF Darfur stronghold city of El Fasher, fell last month to the RSF after a year and a half of brutal siege, and the reports of summary executions that have soaked the land in blood continue to emerge.
With El Fasher’s takeover, the RSF consolidated its hold over the west of the country, leaving Sudan essentially divided into two, with the rest under the control of the SAF. Neither party seems to have the capacity to decisively overwhelm the other, and few western powers seem to have the appetite to decisively intervene to put pressure either on sponsors like the UAE, or apply leverage on to either belligerent party.
The uncertain future
Another strange psychological feature of war is the inability to conceive of a future other than the one that looks like the past. There is still a part of me that believes in an unrealistic return of the genie back in the bottle, a homecoming for all where we can pick up the pieces and somehow reconcile the country. But I know, and refuse to know, that this is not a likely scenario. In the meantime there is only hope that this cannot continue forever, and that the more the world learns about Sudan, the more its war becomes not just a lamenting headline, but a matter of intolerable urgency.
