Issue No. 77

Two Years of War in Sudan

Tuesday marked two years since war erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). What began as a conflict between two rival wings of Sudan's military has metastasised, drawing in a host of other armed groups as well as foreign powers with vested interests in the country's natural wealth and strategic location. And two years later, the brutal fighting has devastated the country, plunging the population into the world's largest displacement, hunger, and protection crises. The largely ineffectual international community has been repeatedly unable and unwilling to formulate any coherent response to the violence, while the UN and the AU have been missing in action. Absent any credible peace process and with both the domestic and international drivers of the conflict unabated, the war shows no sign of easing.

Since the start of the war, civilians have borne the brunt of the destructive conflict. Estimates of those killed are haphazard, but several exceed 150,000, while tens of thousands more are missing. Over 12 million have been uprooted, and an estimated 30 million people-- more than half the pre-war population-- are now in need of humanitarian assistance. Rape and sexual violence have been wielded systematically as a weapon of war to subjugate rival groups, with a UN fact-finding mission describing the scale as "staggering" in a report last year. In Darfur, the RSF's brutal campaign of ethnic targeting of indigenous groups, including the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa, bears the hallmarks of genocide, with UN investigators citing "reasonable grounds" that crimes against humanity have occurred. The SAF, on the other hand, has carried out indiscriminate aerial bombardments of civilian areas and has systematically blocked aid to RSF-held territories, using starvation as a weapon of war. 

During the past two years, the momentum of the war has see-sawed between the RSF and the SAF, repeatedly exposing communities to intense fighting and reprisal attacks. Early in the conflict, the paramilitaries, who had come to form Sudan's infantry and with experience in Darfur, Libya, and Yemen, seized substantial territory, sweeping through Darfur, advancing into the Kordofans, and capturing Wad Madani, the capital of Sudan's agricultural breadbasket, in December 2023. A brutal stalemate ensued as the flood of weapons from Gulf actors and others, including Türkiye and Russia, continued to fuel the fighting. However, fresh injections of Iranian drones and other military armaments, as well as mass mobilisation of ethnic militias drawn from eastern Sudan and Islamist brigades, began to turn the tide for the Sudanese army towards the end of 2024. This eventually culminated on 21 March 2025 with the symbolic recapture of the Republican Palace in Khartoum, forcing RSF forces to retreat westward across the Nile. But Khartoum lies in ruins, having been stripped of its wealth and its role as the economic centre of the country by the twin impacts of looting and bombardment. Though its recapture perhaps offered a moment for a fresh impetus for negotiations, the Sudanese army, a fractious coalition with an increasingly influential Islamist faction, appears unmoved-- and prepared for years of fighting. 

In turn, the broad reconfiguration of the country is ongoing, with the RSF simultaneously launching yet another offensive to seize El Fasher in North Darfur-- the last capital in the western region not under its control. It is an attempt to consolidate the paramilitary's grip on Darfur, as well as Sudan's western border with Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic, from which it sources weapons, supplies, and fighters from the transnational Sahelian tribes that comprise the bulk of the RSF. The atrocity risks facing El Fasher remain immense, with the RSF's allied militias ready to settle historic scores in the overcrowded, starving city. With the SAF having asserted control of Khartoum and increasingly Omdurman, these developments have hardened a de facto partition between central and western Sudan, controlled by the army and its allies, and the west, held by the RSF. The entrenchment of the Libya-style fault line will now be further accentuated by the paramilitary's declaration of a formal rival government.

In February 2025, the RSF and its newer allies, including the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (al-Hilu), controversially met in Nairobi to begin the process of forming a parallel government. Then, on Tuesday, the anniversary of the war, the paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo 'Hemedti' formalised the creation of the so-called 'Government of Peace and Unity.' It is an attempt to present itself as a viable governing authority and alternative to the SAF, having ceded significant ground in recent months. Part of the rationale behind the declaration of this government is ostensibly to 'protect civilians-'- a ludicrous claim considering the widespread atrocities carried out by the forces and one that will certainly complicate any future peace process.

Tragically, for Sudanese civilians, the prospect of any comprehensive political process emerging in the near future remains highly doubtful. Rather than using the retaking of Khartoum to press for negotiations from a stronger position, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his commanders appear intent on pressing westwards to Darfur. It would signal a return to the scorched-earth policies of Omar al-Bashir, who armed the Janjaweed, the RSF's forebears, to lay waste to the region as they did two decades ago. Today, in particular, the Islamist factions and the jihadist brigades within the SAF-- responsible for carrying out executions of perceived collaborators in Khartoum in recent weeks-- are anathemic to suing for peace with the paramilitaries. And more broadly, the economic drivers of the conflict endure, including the control of Sudan's profitable gold mines and the livestock trade. Transnational smuggling networks that predate the war have not only survived but flourished, fuelling a war economy that sustains both sides. Worse still, Sudan is no longer an isolated collapse but a regional implosion in the making, bleeding into Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and others. 

It is also impossible to understand the Sudanese conflict without taking into consideration its regional and international dynamics, and how it has transformed from a domestic power struggle into a tangled proxy conflict. Sudan's war is the brutal culmination of intra-Gulf competition and military, political, and economic perforation of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, among others, through the Horn of Africa. These powers have opted to manage rather than resolve the conflict, with various competing interests in Sudan's post-war political dispensation, as well as its strategic coastline and fertile agricultural land, as they seek to diversify their petroleum-dependent economies. Other capitals have further spied on opportunities to advance their own interests-- be it drone diplomacy or gold extraction-- in the fracturing conflict, including Türkiye, Iran, and Russia. The result is a fragmented, multipolar battlefield in which no single actor holds either the leverage or the legitimacy to end the conflict-- if they even want to. Both the RSF and SAF believe the only route is military victory, albeit for different reasons.

Nor has the international community and the arrayed Arab regional powers been able to formulate a united response to the fighting, allowing the RSF and SAF to 'forum shop' as they please. Without inducements to bring the principal belligerents to the table, nor any consequences for their utter disregard for International Humanitarian Law (IHL), they have been able to pursue their military objectives through the deliberate targeting of civilians. After the failures of Jeddah and Geneva, the latest conference, now in London, was intended to bring together a more collective understanding of the conflict and possible solutions. But in another major setback, the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia refused to sign a joint communique in London this week and establish a future contact group to promote diplomacy after a daylong disagreement. It remains the case that without placing significant geopolitical pressure on these capitals to stem the flow of weapons and leverage their Sudanese allies, any prospect of a political settlement remains distant.

However, a disengaged Biden administration prioritised its strategic relationship with the Gulf, preferring to focus on sanctions enforcement on Russia, countering Iran, and particularly the Israel-Gaza conflict, and, in turn, refused to wield its clout over the world's largest humanitarian crisis. The Trump government has yet to take any definitive position on the conflict but is likely to do the same, with even less consideration of IHL or a civilian dispensation of government. However, it has explicitly said that it will revive the Abraham Accords-- the normalisation and recognition of Israel by Middle Eastern Islamic powers-- and it appears that SAF has spied an opportunity to rekindle its ties with Israel in turn. And while other traditional donor governments voice concern, their response has been scattershot, symbolic, and depressingly out of sync with the scale of the disaster. 

The past week has seen the RSF seize control of the sprawling displacement camps of Zamzam and Abu Shouk, where famine was belatedly declared last year. Hundreds have been killed, and an estimated 400,000 people have been displaced again from the camps. Its seizure will further compound the complexities of feeding the millions starving in Darfur, with maximum aid through all taps needed to be turned on at once to battle the raging famine. That includes cross-line, cross-border, and support for the Emergency Response Rooms, the localised Sudanese response of which many emerged from the neighbourhood committees formed during the now-distant 2019 revolution. But as Sudan marks this grim two-year milestone, its war has become a Pandora's box of modern conflict—internationalised, ethnically charged and catastrophically uncontained.

The Horn Edition Team