Issue No. 114

1,000 Days To Nowhere

Earlier this month, Sudan passed yet another grim milestone– 1,000 days of war. Since the conflict erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, many milestones have been crossed– the obliteration of a capital city, the persistence of IPC Level 5 levels of hunger, another genocide in Darfur, the ripping apart of Sudan's social fabric, the weaponisation of rape and sexual violence– to name but a few. And each day, the war has metastasised further and further, drawing in a morass of vying foreign powers and laying waste to much of the country. Now, Sudan is witness to the world's largest hunger, displacement, and protection crises. With little suggestion of a viable peace process on the horizon– and the domestic and international drivers of the conflict only intensifying– the calamitous war shows every sign of lasting another 1,000 days.

This is a war that brought decades of peripheralised violence home to roost in the Riverain and the Khartoum; a supposed reckoning with the mercenary, predatory nature of the Sudanese state. But it is the civilians– as ever– that have borne the weight of such a conflict, with estimates of those killed in the hundreds of thousands. Just a few weeks ago, the death toll of the RSF's genocidal overrunning of El Fasher remains unknown, but tens of thousands are believed to be missing; as anticipated, the Janjaweed of the 2000s returned in full savage force. Across the country, millions have been uprooted, either driven over borders into underfunded camps in Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad, and South Sudan or within Sudan into places like Zamzam, where cholera and diseases are rife. Access to limited humanitarian assistance, too, remains patchy at best, with both the RSF and the SAF having repeatedly weaponised aid against their own supposed constituents. And with the gutting of USAID, support for the Emergency Response Rooms—the most effective and localised distributor of aid – has rapidly shrunk as well.

Since the war began, the momentum of the conflict has swung back and forth between the RSF and the SAF, with fighting concentrated for several months on the Kordofans in central Sudan. Such active stasis with territory repeatedly changing hands has been destructive as well, repeatedly exposing the same communities to looting and accusations of collaboration at each turn by all sides. Having recaptured Khartoum in a pyrrhic victory last year, the military government is in the process of returning to the capital, promising restoration of services and the city's proud beauty on the confluence of the Niles. That remains a fantasy– Khartoum has been systematically looted and bombed, and the reconstruction costs are estimated to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. People are returning, though, attempting to pick through the debris of their homes and assess what can be salvaged. But the Islamist brigades-- including the revived Popular Defence Forces of the 1990s-- have made it clear who controls the city, killing and detaining civilians seemingly at whim. And the war has not only displaced populations but hollowed out the administrative and service-providing core of the Sudanese state, with entire sectors of governance having been replaced by ad hoc, militarised systems of rule.

Over 1,000 days of war, Sudan has been transformed into a brutal Gordian Knot of a proxy conflict– the fulcrum of a broader shifting regional order and culmination of intra-Gulf competition. These vying powers– principally the UAE and Saudi Arabia, allied with Egypt– are wrestling for supremacy on the Red Sea, driven by overlapping and distinct issues from its coastline to the once-fertile agricultural land to the role of political Islamism in post-war Sudan. Any route to peace now lies through the Arab and Gulf capitals, but their zero-sum understanding of the war endures to the detriment of the country. Iran, Russia, Türkiye, Qatar, and others are also helping to fuel the fire by dispatching arms and advisors, backing SAF principally in the war. Further, in recent weeks, with the bloody Saudi-Emirati rift being accentuated by a surge of proxy fighting in Yemen, there have been reports of a flurry of weapons heading to Sudan– turning up the temperature further still. And so has the international response been haphazard at best, more often than not failing to bring about inducements or pressure on the warring parties and their Arab sponsors. 'Forum shopping' has been one particular issue, allowing the RSF and the SAF to continue their atrocities while proclaiming their credentials.

With every African neighbour pulled into the duelling Arab camps, Sudan remains a gaping wound in the region– accentuating divisions and polarisation within the Greater Horn, dragging Addis, Juba, N'Djamena, Asmara, and others into this whirlpool of destruction. Eritrea has played a crucial role in the mobilisation and arming of thousands of ethnic militias from eastern Sudan, while at the same time, Addis is believed to be facilitating the deployment of arms from the Emirates, as well as a new base in Benishangul-Gumuz for training paramilitary fighters. And so this war is layering over internal issues within the Horn as well, including the Ethiopian-Egyptian rifts over the use of the Nile waters and the threatened war between Addis and Asmara– with Gulf patrons waiting in the wings, only too happy to ply weapons and patronage to further their own interests. The result, too, has been the eroding of the state; a circling of the wagons domestically and a collapse of the regional order. Whatever happened to IGAD or the African Union? Their absence in Sudan– moral and political– has been galling.

The cyclical history of coup-war in Sudan is well-documented, as is the typical decades-long trajectory of Sudanese conflicts. Despite persistent posturing and over 1,000 days of war, neither the coalitions that comprise the RSF and the SAF is interested in negotiations at this juncture– in part motivated by the vast sums swirling around the war, as well as the fact that both seek to dictate the terms of a post-war Sudan wholly to their own benefit. The economic rationale of the war– including a booming international gold and livestock trade– continues to flourish, while the transnational smuggling networks from Chad to Eritrea help to sustain the broader war economy. Commanders on both sides have built wartime coalitions that would be threatened by peace.

And though the capture of Khartoum by the army offered a theoretical opening for talks, the SAF has doubled down again, persisting in calling for the RSF's total withdrawal and disarmament as the starting point for any negotiations. Nor do the influential Islamist brigades and factions within the army want peace– total victory and a crushing of not only the RSF but any civilian or democratic movement is paramount. Meanwhile, with El Fasher having fallen to the RSF, the paramilitaries' grip on Sudan's western border has tightened further, granting it greater access to Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic. Each day, more guns, supplies, and fighters continue to flow in.

And with the grim destruction of El Fasher– the last state capital in Darfur not in the hands of the paramilitaries– there is now an entrenchment of a de facto split within the country. The RSF continues to operate under the 'Government of Peace and Unity' launched last year, which is supposed to "protect civilians", presenting itself as an alternative to the army and a secular, peaceable body with the support of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North. The army, meanwhile, has covered itself with a fig-leaf civilian administration, appointing Kamal Idris to serve as prime minister– though all know that the real power lies elsewhere. A fractious, overlapping coalition of Islamists, Bashir-era networks, and military officials, whether Abdel Fattah al-Burhan can maintain his shaky hold over them remains to be seen– and how he handles Riyadh's and Cairo's displeasure with the Islamists' ascendancy. Finally, the civilian movement remains unmoored– a combination of repression internally, the exiled elite, and all those being pulled into the gravity of the RSF and the SAF.
 
On 9 January, Sudan marked 1,000 days of the most significant, most brutal conflict of its fraught history. The collapse of international humanitarian law has been stark, with the waning international community preferring to turn its back on the country and conflict rather than grapple with the complexity of such a war. In turn, the internationalised conflict in Sudan is now pulling the broader region under, with the scale of the humanitarian, political, and regional challenges multiplying at each turn-- further, again, amplified by the pernicious influence of meddling foreign powers. Left unchecked, Sudan's war will not burn out but continue to harden into the violent core of a fractured Red Sea and Horn of Africa order. If the first thousand days shattered Sudan, the next may decide whether anything resembling a shared state can ever be rebuilt.

​The Horn Edition Team