The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth

[John Ashworth]

The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth: Sudan’s devastating civil war
shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, September 2025

In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid
Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers
lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the
militia’s commanders would turn their artillery on residential
neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we
heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from
the Sudanese capital.

From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a
middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two
more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side.
Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother
killed, a house destroyed.

Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening
because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate,
bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron
skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone
brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed
through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later,
probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar
falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away.
This wasn’t merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism
and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities
closed, futures curtailed.

In the mornings, we drove down streets on the outskirts of Khartoum
that had recently been battlegrounds, swerving to avoid remnants of
furniture, chunks of concrete, potholes, bits of metal. As they
retreated from Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces—the paramilitary
organization whose power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces has,
since 2023, blossomed into a full-fledged civil war—had systematically
looted apartments, offices, and shops. Sometimes we came across
clusters of washing machines and furniture that the thieves had not
had time to take with them. One day we followed a car carrying men
from the Sudanese Red Crescent, dressed in white hazmat suits. We got
out to watch, handkerchiefs covering our faces to block the smell, as
the team pulled corpses from a well. Neighbors clustered alongside us,
murmuring that they had suspected bodies might be down there. They had
heard screams at night, during the two years of occupation by the RSF,
and guessed what was happening.

Another day we went to a crossing point, where people escaping
RSF-occupied areas were arriving in Sudanese-army-controlled areas.
Riding on donkey carts piled high with furniture, clothes, and kitchen
pans, they described a journey through a lawless inferno. Many had
been deprived of food along the way, or robbed, or worse. In a house
near the front line, one woman told me that she and her teenage
daughter had both been stopped by an RSF convoy and raped. We were
sitting in an empty room, devoid of decoration. The girl covered her
face while her mother was talking, and did not speak at all.

At al-Nau Hospital, the largest still operating in the Khartoum
region, we met some of the victims of the shelling, among them a small
boy and a baby girl, Bashir and Mihad, a brother and sister dressed in
blue and pink. The terror and screaming of the night before had
subsided, and they were simply lying together, wrapped in bandages, on
a cot in a crowded room. I spoke with their father, Ahmed Ali. The
recording of our conversation is hard to understand because several
people were gathered around us, because others were talking loudly
nearby, and because Mihad had begun to cry. Ali told me that he and
his family had been trying to escape an area controlled by the RSF but
had been caught in shelling at 2 a.m., the same explosions we had
heard from our apartment in Omdurman. The children had been wounded by
shrapnel. He had nowhere else to take them except this noisy ward, and
no plans except to remain at the hospital and wait to see what would
happen next.

Like a tsunami, the war has created wide swaths of physical wreckage.
Farther out of town, at the Al-Jaili oil refinery, formerly the
largest and most modern in the country—the focus of major Chinese
investment—fires had burned so fiercely and for so long that giant
pipelines and towering storage tanks, blackened by the inferno, lay
mangled and twisted on the ground. At the studios of the Sudanese
national broadcaster, the burned skeleton of what had been a
television van, its satellite dish still on top, stood in a garage
near an accounting office that had been used as a prison. Graffiti was
scrawled on the wall of the office, the lyrics to a song; clothes,
office supplies, and rubble lay strewn across the floor. We walked
through radio studios, dusty and abandoned, the presenters’ chairs
covered in debris. In the television studios, recently refurbished
with American assistance, old tapes belonging to the Sudanese national
video archive had been used to build barricades.

Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction
in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of
fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of
them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad,
Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them.
At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a
significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million
people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of
people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million
children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic
rages. Malaria is endemic.

But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of
meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical
destruction. I felt this most strongly in the al-Ahamdda
displaced-persons camp just outside Khartoum—although the word camp is
misleading, giving a false impression of something organized, with a
field kitchen and proper tents. None of those things was available at
what was in fact a former school. Some 2,000 people were sleeping on
the ground beneath makeshift shelters, or inside plain concrete rooms,
using whatever blankets they had brought from wherever they used to
call home. A young woman in a black headscarf told me she had just sat
for her university exams when the civil war began but had already
“forgot about education.” An older woman with a baby told me her
husband had disappeared three or four months earlier, but she didn’t
know where or why. No international charities or agencies were
anywhere in evidence. Only a few local volunteers from the Emergency
Response Rooms, Sudan’s mutual-aid movement, were there to organize a
daily meal for people who seemed to have washed up by accident and
found they couldn’t leave.

As we were speaking with the volunteers, several boys ostentatiously
carrying rifles stood guard a short distance away. One younger boy,
dressed in a camouflage T-shirt and sandals—he told me he was 14 but
seemed closer to 10—hung around watching the older boys. When one of
them gave him a rifle to carry, just for a few minutes, he stood up
straighter and solemnly posed for a photograph. He had surely seen
people with guns, understood that those people had power, and wanted
to be one of them.

What was the alternative? There was no school at the camp, and no
work. There was nothing to do in the 100-degree heat except wait. The
artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery,
the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital—all of that
had led to nothing, built nothing, only this vacuum. No international
laws, no international organizations, no diplomats, and certainly no
Americans are coming to fill it.

The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around
a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like
Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has
become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan,
and there isn’t anything to replace it.

To understand Sudan, as the British Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub once
wrote, you need a kind of atlas, one containing transparent cellophane
maps that can be placed on top of one another, like the diagrams once
used in encyclopedias to show the systems inside the human body. One
layer might show languages; the next, ethnic groups; the third,
ancient kingdoms and cities: Kush, Napata, Meroe, Funj. When the maps
are viewed simultaneously, “it becomes clear,” Mahjoub explained, that
“the country is not really a country at all, but many.” Deborah
Scroggins, a foreign correspondent who once covered Africa for The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution—a job that’s hard now to imagine ever
existed—wrote in 2002 that a version of Mahjoub’s cellophane atlas
could also help explain how Sudan’s wars and rebellions are provoked
not just by ethnic and tribal divisions but by economic, colonial, and
racial divisions, each one layered onto the next so as to create a
“violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight
about without ever shedding any of the old ones.”

On top of these older maps, new ones now must be overlaid. One might
show the divisions created by a more recent war of ideas. On one side
of that battle are the Sudanese professionals, lawyers, students, and
grassroots activists who in December 2018 launched a broad, popular
protest movement, one that called for the rule of law, basic rights,
economic reform, and democratic institutions. Their slogan, chanted on
streets and painted on walls, was “Freedom, peace, and justice.” In
April 2019, following years of organizing, several months of street
demonstrations, and violent clashes between civic activists and the
military and police, the military removed Sudan’s long-standing
dictator, Omar al-Bashir, along with his repressive Islamist regime,
in an attempt to appease this mass civic movement. A civilian
government then briefly ruled the country, backed by the military. The
prime minister of that transitional government, Abdalla Hamdok, who
now lives in Abu Dhabi, told me that the “hopes and aspirations of
people that were coming together at that time were beyond
imagination.”

But even as the civilians took charge, the Sudanese military never
relinquished an older set of ideas: that officers should control the
government, restrict the national conversation, dominate resources. In
2021, acting on those beliefs, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan,
together with his deputy, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo,
known as Hemedti, carried out a coup and removed Prime Minister
Hamdok. Burhan leads the Sudanese Armed Forces, widely known as the
SAF, the body that has ruled Sudan, under different leaders, for many
decades. Hemedti controls the RSF, a mostly Darfurian militia created
by Bashir to control ethnic minorities and repress rebel groups. The
RSF, whose first members were Arabic-speaking nomads, was originally
known as the Janjaweed, an Arabic word meaning “devils on horseback.”

As many predicted, Burhan and Hemedti fell out. Although it is unclear
who fired the first shot, on April 15, 2023, the RSF attacked the SAF
headquarters, the Khartoum airport, and the presidential palace.
Burhan, genuinely surprised by at least the timing of the attack,
remained trapped for many weeks. According to one version of events,
he was freed with the help of Ukrainian commandos; another says that
he finally shot his way out. After that, Sudan fractured into a
multilayered conflict that now involves not just the RSF and the SAF,
but a bewildering array of smaller armies and militias that fight
alongside and against them. The democracy movement split too, with
some former members of the civilian government finding themselves on
the side of the RSF, others with the SAF.

The chaos enabled the spread of what might be described as a third
ruling idea, neither democratic nor statist, but rather anarchic,
nihilistic, transactional. This ideology, if that is what it can be
called, was unleashed in Khartoum in the spring of 2023, during an
evacuation so violent and chaotic that people I spoke with wept while
talking about it two years later. Embassies, international agencies,
and United Nations food-storage sites were looted. Private apartments
were ransacked, stripped of furniture and possessions. Three World
Food Programme employees were killed during the chaos. The Sudanese
army fled to Port Sudan, a small coastal city on the Red Sea that had
neither the infrastructure nor the mindset to be the capital of a
large country.

As the violence continued, civilians became not just accidental
casualties of the fighting but its target. The RSF’s coalition
contains a wide collection of fighters from across Sudan whom it can’t
always control, as well as mercenaries from central and eastern
Africa. At a SAF-controlled prison on the Omdurman army base, I was
introduced to one of the mercenaries, a 17-year-old Chadian who said
he had been duped into joining the RSF by a recruiter who came to his
football club and offered everyone there the equivalent of $2,000 just
to sign up. He went right away, without telling his parents; got a
week’s training; fought for a few days; and then was captured, in
February 2024. He never saw the money, which is a common story. Many
RSF fighters aren’t paid, which gives them extra incentive to rob
civilians, loot property, and obey commanders who promise they will be
rewarded for displacing villages or evicting people who occupy coveted
land. The SAF, which is the only group with an air force, has carried
out extensive bombing campaigns on civilian neighborhoods, taken
lawless revenge on alleged collaborators in recaptured areas, and been
accused of using chemical weapons, which it denies. Both the RSF and
the SAF have used food as a weapon, depriving their enemies of access
to outside aid and creating obstacles for aid organizations operating
inside the country.

The intensity of this violence is partly explained by gold, mined in
Sudan since antiquity. Any Sudan atlas should contain a cellophane
layer showing the location of gold mines, as well as those of the many
people inside and outside the country who want access to them. Tiny
artisanal gold mines, a misleadingly charming term, can be found all
around the country. We stopped at one on the road from Khartoum to
Port Sudan that was no more than a deep hole in the ground and a shack
made of plastic sheets, wooden sticks, and bits of straw, housing a
single miner. But there are also much larger mines, some connected to
the broad seam of gold deposits running under the Sahara, discovered
in 2012, that has sparked violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger,
as well as in Chad and Sudan.

These larger mines shape Sudanese politics in both open and covert
ways. Hemedti’s control over a large gold deposit in Jebel Amir, in
North Darfur, is part of what consolidated his command of the RSF.
Burhan and Hemedti launched their coup in 2021 partly because they
feared that civilian control of the military would restrict their
access to gold and other resources. Both the SAF and the RSF fund
their soldiers by exporting gold—mostly illegally, to get around
sanctions, and often through the United Arab Emirates. Last year, The
New York Times published a description of a plane at the airport in
Juba, South Sudan, being loaded with $25 million worth of Darfuri
gold, bound for the UAE. The Russian Wagner Group, now reorganized and
renamed the Africa Corps—a name accidentally or intentionally evoking
Afrika Korps, the Nazi expeditionary force—has gold interests too, as
do Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Indeed, to fully explain not just the role of gold in the conflict,
but also the role of these many outside forces, we need a final layer
of cellophane: a map of foreign influence showing Sudan’s place in an
anarchic, post-American world, an era that does not yet have a name.
Colonialism is long past, the Cold War has ended, and now the
disappearance of any form of international order has left Sudan as the
focus of intense competition among countries that are not superpowers
but rather middle powers. The middle powers send money and weapons
into Sudan, hoping to shape the outcome of the conflict. Some take
part in the war of ideas. Some want gold. Some are there because their
rivals are there, and Sudan is a good place to fight.

The middle powers include Turkey, which has historic links to Sudan as
well as an interest—as one Turkish diplomat told me—in making sure
Sudan is governed by someone. Both the Saudis, who are just across the
Red Sea—Jeddah is an hour’s flight from Port Sudan—and the Egyptians
share this sympathy for hierarchy and control. Egypt has ties to the
Sudanese military going back to the 19th century, and the Saudis have
made major investments in Sudanese land and agriculture. All three
countries either sell weapons to the SAF, or fund their purchase.

On the other side of the conflict, the Emiratis not only back the RSF;
they do so with enough money and commitment to spark conspiracy
theories. After an iftar meal in Port Sudan, a Sudanese military
officer got out a map, swept his hand across the Sahel and the Horn of
Africa, and told me that the Emiratis were transforming
Arabic-speaking nomads into a force designed to dominate the whole
region, to create a new empire. I also heard more convoluted theories
about alleged Israeli interests, or even American interests, hiding
behind the Emirati support of the RSF, for which no evidence exists.

Plenty of evidence does connect the UAE to the RSF’s gold-trading
operations, as well as to the Sudanese army’s gold interests, but Abu
Dhabi has other ties of business and sympathy to the RSF too. Emirati
leaders have in the past hired the RSF to fight on their behalf in
Libya and Yemen (the Saudis have also hired the RSF to fight in
Yemen). They have donated billions in aid to Sudan and Sudanese
refugees, using some of it to build hospitals in Chad and South Sudan
that are known (or believed) to treat RSF fighters. Above all, the
Emiratis are repeatedly accused—by the Sudanese military, the United
States, and the UN—of supplying the RSF with the money and weapons to
fight the war, using their humanitarian aid as a cover, a charge they
repeatedly deny. When asked, the Emiratis say that their primary
interest in Sudan is to help reestablish an independent civilian
government, and to prevent the return of an Islamist regime that
threatens maritime trade and regional security. “We’d like not to see
Sudan become a global hub of terrorism again” is how Lana Nusseibeh, a
senior UAE diplomat who has been involved in Sudan negotiations, put
it to me.

The Iranians, by contrast, might be happy to see the return of an
Islamist regime, or at least a government with some Islamist factions.
The Iranians once enjoyed a close relationship with Bashir, the SAF
reestablished direct relations with Iran in 2023, and Islamist
militias are fighting alongside the SAF right now. Outside Khartoum,
we saw one of them waving flags and rifles from a military truck
heading to the front line. But Iran clearly sees Sudan as a market for
weapons, too: Iranian military transit planes have been identified in
Port Sudan, and Iranian drones have been seen on the battlefield. Its
motives might be not only ideological or economic. It may also be
attracted by the vacuum: If the Turks, Saudis, and Emiratis are there,
perhaps the Iranians simply feel that they need to be there too.

That same vacuum has drawn in the Russians as well, not on one side
but on both. The Russians’ attitude toward Sudan is entirely amoral,
and completely transactional. They buy gold from both sides and sell
weapons to both sides. Their mercenaries have worked with the RSF in
the past; they have also wanted, for many years, to build a naval base
on the Red Sea coast, and so now work with the SAF as well. Because
they are there, the Ukrainians are there too. When I told a Ukrainian
acquaintance that I would be traveling to Sudan, he turned pale and
told me to stay well away from Russian mercenaries, because they might
be targets for the Ukrainians. Their numbers are tiny and their
interests are narrow, but their presence reveals a lot about the war.
The Ukrainians hunting Russians in Sudan are drawn not by any interest
in the conflict, but by the anarchy itself.

Turkish, Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Russian, Iranian, and
Ukrainian interests intersect and overlap on this final layer of
cellophane, helping make Sudan, like Yemen and Libya, a place where
antagonists from around the planet fund violent proxy wars, at the
expense of the people who live there. Sudan’s neighbors, including
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, and the Central
African Republic, also get drawn into the conflict, either by the
middle powers or through links of their own. The Chinese hover in the
background, looking for business deals. Sudan’s strategic location on
the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes,
attracts everyone too. Meanwhile, the countries that might once have
banded together to stop the fighting have lost interest or capacity.
The institutions that might once have helped broker a cease-fire are
too weak, and can’t or won’t help. “We live in a very interesting,
many people call it, new world order,” Hamdok, the former Sudanese
prime minister, told me. “The world we got to know—the consensus, the
Pax Americana, the post–Second World War consensus—is just no more.”

Imade two trips to Sudan this year, to both sides of the front line.
Both times I was escorted by people who wanted to present their view
of the war, explain why it had started, and show me the atrocities
committed by the other side. In Khartoum and Port Sudan, I traveled
with a SAF information officer, as well as two other American women.
Because there are hardly any foreigners in Sudan right now, let alone
any American women, we attracted attention, hope, and some annoyance.

Several people stopped us on the street to tell us, with pride, that
they had previously worked for the UN, the U.S., or a foreign embassy
before they all vanished. One woman approached us, told us she was a
Christian, and then drifted away, disappointed, when she learned we
were not Christian aid workers. “I have a message for Washington,” a
man standing in the courtyard of al-Nau Hospital declared. I turned on
my recorder, and he spoke into it: “Save Sudan; we are in need for the
medicine.”

Others already knew that medicine, like other forms of aid, might no
longer be coming. At a communal kitchen in a Khartoum suburb, a local
volunteer told us that his team had been serving a very simple bean
stew five days a week. Because of American funding cuts—probably a few
pennies’ worth of funding cuts, piddling amounts of money that had
once trickled down to this half-ruined side street—they were down to
three days a week. He said they would be soliciting on social media
for more funds, and he hoped to find enough for two more weekly meals
soon. He was not alone: This spring, more than 1,700 of the communal
kitchens run by volunteers in Sudan closed down entirely, affecting
nearly 3 million people, thanks either directly to USAID cuts or to
the chaos created by mass U.S.-government layoffs and canceled
contracts.

Still others wanted to make clear how grateful they were for the tiny
amounts of help they had received, so much so that I felt ashamed. At
another Omdurman medical facility, the Al-Buluk pediatric hospital, a
young physician, Ahmed Khojali, told me that he still had some
packages of Plumpy’Nut, a special nutritional supplement. The American
government in theory still sends supplies of Plumpy’Nut to severely
malnourished children around the world, but distribution has been
interrupted. Khojali took us to see the hospital’s malnutrition unit.
About two dozen new patients were arriving every week this spring; we
saw a ward full of them, emaciated children with closed faces, lying
beside their exhausted mothers, most of whom did not want to be
interviewed or photographed. When the children first arrive,
Plumpy’Nut is one of the few things they can eat. Khojali knew that
some Americans wanted to cut aid because it is wasteful. “We didn’t
waste it; we just use it,” the doctor said.

But not all of the comments concerned American aid. In Khartoum,
Darfur, and everywhere exiled Sudanese now gather—Abu Dhabi, London,
N’Djamena, Washington—I spoke with ambassadors, experts, diplomats,
and politicians who repeatedly asked not just about American
humanitarians, but also about the Americans who would come from the
White House to negotiate, knock heads together, and find a way to end
the war. They wanted Americans who would galvanize the rest of the
international community, rope in the UN, bring some peacekeepers, make
something happen: the Jimmy Carter–at–Camp David or the Richard
Holbrooke–at-Dayton model of big-league, American-led, problem-solving
diplomacy, which once played a role in Sudan too, during both
Democratic and Republican administrations.

After the Roman empire stopped functioning, many people went on
deferring to the distant emperor, acting as if he still mattered; in
Sudan, I found similar nostalgia for the interest and engagement that
once came from Washington. When I first met Colonel Hassan Ibrahim,
the Sudanese army’s media liaison in Khartoum, he introduced himself
with an earnest speech, described his country’s conflict as a
“forgotten war,” and spent several days helping us find ways around
the army’s strict rules so that Americans could learn the truth about
Sudan, and so that the truth would inspire American action. Volker
Perthes, a former UN official, assured me that Americans “do have
clout if they want to use it.” A Middle Eastern ambassador in Port
Sudan thought I was joking when I suggested that the U.S. might no
longer care that much about Africa. That was beyond his imagination,
and beyond the imagination of many other people who still believe that
someday, somehow, American diplomats are going to come back and make a
difference.

Admittedly, the speed of the shift is bewildering. Not that long ago,
Sudan did inspire American compassion. Starting in the 1980s, the
conflict between the mostly Muslim northern Sudan and the mostly
Christian south provoked the interest and engagement of American
evangelicals. Franklin Graham’s charity, Samaritan’s Purse, along with
World Vision and other Christian charities, had strong links to
Sudanese churches and, at different times, southern rebels. They still
do: Samaritan’s Purse maintains its own aircraft and its own
aid-distribution network in Sudan.

In the 2000s, American churches, synagogues, and secular groups were
also angered and engaged by the Bashir regime’s use of the Janjaweed,
the precursors of the RSF, to ethnically cleanse the Darfur region of
non-Arab tribes. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in
Washington, projected dramatic photographs from Darfur onto its
exterior walls in 2006. A photography exhibition also traveled to
several universities. At different times, George Clooney, Angelina
Jolie, Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle, and Keira Knightley visited Sudan,
raising awareness and money.

These campaigns made an impact. George W. Bush had deep links to the
faith-based charities that worked in Sudan, and arrived in office
determined to help. The Obama administration believed in America’s
“responsibility to protect,” to help vulnerable groups avoid slaughter
and genocide. Both invested real diplomatic and political effort in
Sudan, largely because Americans wanted them to. Melissa Zelikoff, who
was part of Joe Biden’s National Security Council, told me that when
she began working on Sudan for the State Department, in the 2010s, “we
had a 25-person special-envoy office. We had teams working on every
region, on every issue, thinking through negotiating tactics and
approaches.” Alexander Laskaris, a former State Department diplomat
who worked in Africa for decades, most recently as ambassador to Chad,
calls this effort “a remarkable expression of the compassion of the
American people acting through their civil-society organizations on
government.” I asked him what that effort had produced, given that
violence has continued. “We saved a lot of lives,” Laskaris told me.
“A lot of lives.”

Americans also helped end the north-south civil war, one of the
longest-running in Africa. In 2011, more than 99 percent of South
Sudanese voted for independence in a referendum that had international
backing. A wave of American support for South Sudan—diplomatic,
political, humanitarian—followed. Now, only 14 years later, the scale
and ambition of that aid are almost inconceivable. Kate Almquist
Knopf, a former U.S. official who spent nearly two decades as an
Africa expert at USAID and then the Department of Defense, sounded
almost nostalgic when she told me that South Sudan, which is again
experiencing political violence, “squandered a moment that will never
come again.” Regardless of who is president, she said, “neither party
is ever likely to be willing to do that again for a country in
Africa.”

Attention dwindled from the 2011 peak, slowly at first and then very
fast. Independent South Sudan descended into internal ethnic conflict
and failed to thrive. Backers became disillusioned. Few newspapers
could pay for continued coverage—meaning hardly any reporters from
places like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and the story slipped out
of the headlines. Maybe photographs from foreign wars became too
familiar. Maybe Americans became indifferent. Social media brought a
deluge of misinformation, about Sudan and everywhere else, producing a
culture of cynicism and sneering. Compassion became unfashionable.

American politics changed too. The first Trump administration dropped
the “responsibility to protect” idea immediately—and when it did, so
did everyone else. Nor was Donald Trump’s State Department especially
interested in the Sudanese democratic revolution of 2019. Instead of
promoting a government that offered the first real possibility for
peace and reconciliation in decades, Trump’s team was mostly
interested in persuading Sudan to sign the Abraham Accords and
recognize Israel, which the civilian government agreed to do, in
January 2021, in exchange for the removal of Sudan from a list of
countries that promote terrorism. As part of that deal, the
administration did belatedly allocate funds to aid the transitional
government, but the money was suspended again 10 months later, after
the coup, mostly unspent.

Even after Biden took office, American popular and political attention
focused first on Afghanistan and then on Ukraine and Gaza; it never
returned to Sudan. After the 2021 coup, U.S. diplomats—working with
the British, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the UN—did try to bring
back the 2019 power-sharing arrangement, a negotiation that certainly
never got any high-level, Camp David–style attention and mostly
excluded the civilians who had led the revolt against Bashir. The
group left discussions of security-sector reform to the very end, and
ignored reports of military movement around Khartoum. “No need to
panic,” one senior U.S. official told colleagues, only hours before
the widely anticipated war broke out.

No American diplomats have returned since then, with one exception. In
February 2024, the Biden administration finally appointed an envoy to
Sudan, former Representative Tom Perriello, who, without much internal
support or presidential attention, did spend one day in Port Sudan
(the most that post-Benghazi security rules would allow) and launched
a new format for weekly negotiations. Eight months after Trump’s
reelection, the Trump administration had not appointed a replacement
envoy, nor indeed any senior officials with deep experience in Africa
at all.

Until this year, the U.S. nevertheless remained the largest donor to
Sudan, not only providing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid but
also supporting the logistics for UN and other aid operations inside
and outside the country, and for Sudanese refugees around the world.
In Sudan, the U.S. still had the clout to insist on some aid getting
to both sides of the conflict, even if that meant dealing with the RSF
over the objections of the SAF. “The one thing that still remained of
U.S. soft power was USAID,” Perriello told me. “I do think we were
mitigating the worst famine on Earth.”

But that scale of support was made possible by the dedication of a
previous generation, especially of older congressional members and
staffers who still remembered the former U.S. role in Sudan, even if
they rarely spoke to constituents about it. Now Washington is run by
people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to aid policies that had
bipartisan acceptance only a few years ago. In February of this year,
I spoke with one USAID official who had been directly responsible for
humanitarian aid to Sudanese refugees outside Sudan. She told me that
although she had known that the Trump administration would make cuts,
she had not anticipated the catastrophic impact of Elon Musk’s assault
on USAID and other aid programs, or the new administration’s utter
lack of interest in how these unplanned cuts would reverberate across
Africa. At the time we talked, she had been cut off from her email and
from the systems she needed to process payments, unable to communicate
with people on the ground. Theoretically, emergency food supplies of
the sort she managed were supposed to be preserved, but all of the
support around the delivery of food and money—the contracts with
trucking and security companies; the institutions that gather health
statistics, anticipate famine, help farmers—had been cut, along with
their personnel. This affected everybody: the UN, other charities,
even grassroots groups like the Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms.

I asked her how much the American contribution mattered. She started
to answer, and then she started to cry. “We do so much, and it’s all
being taken away, without a moment’s notice,” she said after she had
recovered. “There is no transition planning. There is no handover of
this assistance. The U.S. has been the largest donor to Sudan since
forever, and to Sudanese refugees for so long. And it’s just a
disaster.”

In the past decade, refugees have slowly disappeared from American
public debate, except when they figure as unwelcome immigrants, or as
fodder for far-right memes. But they have not disappeared from the
world. On the contrary, their numbers are growing. The wars of the
1990s produced a steady population of about 40 million refugees and
displaced people. But in 2011, the numbers began to rise. In 2024, the
Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, at the UN, counted 123
million people around the world who were refugees, displaced, or
seeking asylum.

The larger numbers reflect a deeper problem. If there are more
refugees because there are more conflicts, it is also the case that
there are more conflicts because international consensus has weakened.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, an era of multiple peacekeeping
missions, the Chinese were inclined to neutrality and the Russians
were interested in cooperation. Americans, together with their
European allies, enjoyed a degree of power and influence over
international relations that they utterly failed to appreciate at the
time.

That era is now over. The United States used UN resolutions to justify
the invasion of Iraq, which helped delegitimize the UN and its
procedures in the eyes of the rest of the world. Russia and China grew
richer and more assertive. Now both of those countries and their
network of allies—from Cuba to Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe—mock or
undermine the language of human rights altogether. So does the MAGA
wing of the American Republican Party. Meanwhile the humanitarian
agencies of the UN, never models of functionality, became so
“bureaucratized,” in the words of Alex Rondos, a former European Union
special representative for the Horn of Africa, that officials “refused
to take risks, even to prevent deaths.”

The UN Security Council became contentious, then dysfunctional.
Independent UN negotiators lost their backing and clout. Finally, the
Russian invasion of Ukraine pitted one security-council member
directly against three others for the first time since the Cold War,
ending, perhaps forever, any role for the UN Security Council as a
serious place to debate matters of war and peace.

Thanks to this shift, the UN has not launched a completely new
peacekeeping mission since 2014—and even that one, to the Central
African Republic, was possible, as Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees
International put it to me, only because it concerned a country “no
major power really cared that much about, strategically.” The
international negotiators and UN envoys who might have once persuaded
all of the players to seek peace in Sudan have faded into the
background. The UN was slow to react to the civilian revolution in
2019. Only after an unforgivably long time, in January 2021, did the
UN secretary-general, António Guterres, appoint a diplomat, Volker
Perthes, to head the grandly named UN Integrated Transition Assistance
Mission in Sudan. But after the military coup overthrew that
government, Perthes told me, “we didn’t have any transition to
assist.” He stayed involved, and tried to negotiate the return of the
prime minister and to mediate between the two armies. But the Sudanese
military accused him of partiality because he insisted on speaking to
both sides, and finally declared him persona non grata.

The UN’s relationship with Sudan never recovered. Guterres
periodically issues declarations (“We must do more—and do more now—to
help the people of Sudan out of this nightmare”), but he hasn’t been
to Sudan himself. His envoy to Sudan, a former Algerian foreign
minister, is widely criticized for perceived bias, because the UN, in
practice, treats the SAF as the legitimate government. UN staff in
Sudan repeatedly point to the bureaucratic obstacles all combatants
create to hamper the distribution of aid. In a briefing to the UN
Security Council, Christopher Lockyear, the head of Doctors Without
Borders, said that the “delivery of humanitarian assistance in Sudan
remains exceedingly and, in some cases, deliberately complex.” He also
warned that both sides were using aid, and aid agencies, as a source
of legitimacy. One former UN diplomat told me, more bluntly, that the
Sudanese army was “using starvation as a weapon of war.”

That kind of criticism comes from real frustration. But it doesn’t
build warm feelings. The Sudanese army’s finance minister, Gibril
Ibrahim, told me that the “international community” is largely
irrelevant, and that “mainly Gulf countries” are providing help for
victims of the conflict. Though this was untrue—as of last year,
hundreds of millions of American dollars were still flowing to
Sudan—the comment was revealing. In practice, Sudan’s leaders, on all
sides of the conflict, have already turned away from the U.S., the UN,
and international aid and international law, because in their world,
these things mean nothing.

We crossed over the border into Sudan near the Chadian city of Adré, a
place literally built on shifting sand. Devoid of trees, grass, and
water, Adré now hosts more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees. I visited
its main camp—a real one, not a converted school—which looks from the
outside like a fortified prison. The border itself is now a noisy
no-man’s-land, crowded with transport trucks, tiny wagons, cars,
pickup trucks, camels, and donkeys. If gold or weapons were wrapped in
someone’s blanket or hidden beneath the seats of a van, no one would
know. I encountered no customs officials or formal border posts as I
crossed into Sudan from Chad, because there isn’t a proper government
on the Sudanese side.

The RSF maintains order in West Darfur (or does for the moment). Men
with machine guns patrol the markets. Pickup trucks carrying more
soldiers park in front of the dilapidated local administration
buildings. But the men who control the city can’t provide much else.
One might call West Darfur a libertarian paradise: There is no income
tax, no government, no regulations—but also not many roads, hospitals,
or schools.

I traveled from Adré to El Geneina, a city in West Darfur, with an
escort who had been assigned to us by the RSF. He was studying in
Dubai and wore sneakers and neat khakis instead of a jalabiya and
turban. But he got us through every one of the dozens of checkpoints
we encountered by calling out greetings to the men with guns, offering
an embrace, and sometimes stopping to chat, perhaps about relatives or
mutual friends. On the last day of our trip, he told me that he hoped
someday to go to California, to learn about California, and then to
come home and make Darfur more like California.

Others also told us they aspired to the things that the liberal world
used to stand for. Among them was Al Tigani Karshoum, the current
governor of West Darfur, who had formerly served as the deputy to the
previous governor, Khamis Abakar. The two men were appointed in the
years following a government agreement to broker peace and share
power. Abakar was a member of the Masalit tribe, which before the war
was the largest ethnic group in El Geneina. Karshoum’s links are to
the Masalit’s Arabic-speaking rivals, the tribes that comprised the
bulk of the Janjaweed and now the RSF.

The competition between the Masalit and the Arabs is old, although it
wasn’t always lethal. The Masalit, along with other tribes, were
farmers; the Arabs were nomads, camel herders. Although they think of
themselves as ethnically different, they coexisted and even
intermarried in Darfur for decades, until climate change dried up the
land and made the arable parts scarce. Following a major drought and
famine in 1984–85, everyone began to buy weapons. “A herd of a
thousand camels represents more than a million dollars on the hoof,”
the historian Alex de Waal wrote in 2004. “Only the most naive
herd-owner would not buy automatic rifles.” This conflict was then
accelerated by the Bashir government in Khartoum, which gave the
nomads more weapons and empowered them, as the Janjaweed, to repress
their neighbors.

The current civil war has reignited and amplified this old rivalry,
along with many other Sudanese rivalries, as it enabled both sides to
acquire sophisticated weapons from around the world. Governor Abakar
and the Masalit sided with the Sudanese Armed Forces, which had tanks
and airplanes. The RSF and the nomadic Arabs brought in drones,
howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers, and other weapons from abroad.
They used their arsenal to unleash a wave of violence on the Masalit
neighborhoods of El Geneina, according to a UN report, killing 10,000
to 15,000 people. Abakar himself was kidnapped and then murdered.

Under a tent outside the sprawling refugee camp in Adré, Darassalam, a
teacher and headmistress of a school, told me that Arab soldiers had
come to her neighborhood in El Geneina and ordered her to go to Chad.
They told her they wanted to “clean the town of black skins.” The RSF,
which she called the Janjaweed, killed people in front of her. “I saw
raped women and men in front of me, beaten people in front of me.” In
2023, other Masalit exiles told Reuters they had seen Karshoum himself
riding in pickup trucks, giving orders to sack houses. As a result of
these and other accounts, which he denies, Karshoum is under EU
sanctions.

Karshoum told me a different story. He claimed, as did several others,
that the Masalit and the SAF began the conflict. He expressed anguish
about what had happened in El Geneina. After the murder of Abakar, he
had been too distraught to continue his duties, he told me. Abakar, he
said, was “my friend.” A council of elders, including several dozen
tribal and religious leaders, came to his house and asked him to stay
on. At first, he told me, he refused. Finally he agreed.

I don’t know whether what Karshoum told me was true. But he wanted me
to understand that he had real civil-society support, that he himself
was a civilian, and that he wanted to build a civilian government, one
that represented all the ethnic groups in the region. He told me that
there should be an independent investigation into the events that
unfolded in the spring of 2023 (although the UN has already conducted
one). He assured me that the Masalit were returning home to Sudan, and
encouraged me to come and witness a local meeting of Masalit and other
tribes, due to take place in another town a few hours’ drive away.

The event didn’t happen, or maybe I wasn’t wanted; the reason for the
canceled invitation was never clear. But I did meet the reconciliation
committee that supported Karshoum. About a dozen of the committee
members gathered in a single bare room and introduced themselves, each
one naming his tribe or clan, including a man who introduced himself
as a Masalit. We also met Abdulbaqi Ali Hussein Ahmed, a lawyer and
the chairman of the local constituent assembly. Solemnly, he showed me
the old council chamber, with its worn tiles, watermarked walls, and
shuttered windows, and promised it would someday be used again, by all
of the ethnic groups in the region.

Outside Sudan, the RSF also wants to be seen as a force for democracy,
not as a rapacious militia engaged in ethnic cleansing. This past
spring, together with allied militias, a group of RSF leaders
announced plans to form a Government of Peace and Unity, and to issue
passports and currency. All of these efforts evoke a lot of scorn. In
Adré, Asaad Bahr Al-Din, the brother of the sultan of the Masalit,
told us that although some Masalit might return to El Geneina to trade
or collect belongings, few were returning for good. “There is
discrimination,” he told us. “No freedom.” Perceived enemies of the
RSF were still intimidated, sometimes beaten, even just for looking
insufficiently sad upon hearing the news of RSF battlefield defeats.
In Port Sudan, I asked the finance minister, a Darfuri himself, what
he thought of the RSF’s Government of Peace and Unity, and he
dismissed it immediately. “They know nothing about democracy.
Actually, they have been used by others to talk about democracy.”

I heard the use of the word democracy differently. Think back, again,
to the decades that followed the sack of Rome. Long after the empire
was too weak to exert real power, Latin remained the language of
scholarship, of the Church, of universal communication. In much of the
world, the terms democracy and civil society now function in the same
way: They signify that the user aspires to something better—to
legitimacy, to statehood. Warlords can rule by brute force for a time,
but eventually they want recognition, acceptance, maybe statehood and
UN membership.

The path to all of those things still runs through international law,
even in a world where international law is scorned, dismissed, and
ignored by the countries that invented it.

One day toward the end of our stay in El Geneina, we planned to leave
early to travel to Zalingei, another town about 100 miles to the east,
and to return the same day. The desert road between the two cities is
one of the best in Darfur, which simply means that most of it is
paved. Even so, the route requires a detour across a dried riverbed to
avoid a bombed-out bridge, passes through more than a dozen RSF
checkpoints, and runs through a region without cellphone connection
and only loose RSF control. A daytime drive was said to be safe, but
everyone advised us to get home before dark: Not only are there no
taxes and no government regulations in Darfur, but there are also no
highway police, no rescue services. No one will come help you if
anything goes wrong.

The day went badly. We lost time in the morning, waiting for
permission from the RSF to leave the city by car. We arrived very late
for an appointment at a hospital, and the physicians we had planned to
meet had left for lunch. We were even later for our next meeting, and
squeezed the one after that into just a few minutes. Then, right after
we finally got back into the car and prepared to head out of the city,
our driver, who had come with us from Chad and wasn’t very
communicative, abruptly announced that he was out of gas. There are no
gas stations in Zalingei, so we went to a street market and filled the
tank out of big plastic containers. By the time this tedious operation
was concluded, it was late afternoon.

We headed out of town. Then, just as the sun was setting, the day
devolved into a scene from a bad movie. The car started shaking, then
slowed down. We had a flat tire. We got out of the car to change it.
The spare tire was broken. Our guide, who had been relaxed and chatty
throughout the previous difficulties, suddenly changed his tone. He
barked orders at the driver, telling him to keep moving, despite the
flat tire: We had to get to a checkpoint. It wasn’t safe to be stuck
in the middle of the desert in the dark.

Just then, we saw a car approaching in the distance—unusual for this
time of day. Our driver, our translator, and our guide stayed tense
and silent, waiting to see who it would be. The car was a pickup
truck; the passengers were men in flowing robes and turbans, carrying
AK-47s, some riding in the cabin, some standing in the back.

The truck slowed down. Our guide smiled widely and held out his arms.
He called out a name. One of the passengers, wearing a
robin’s-egg-blue jalabiya and a camouflage turban, jumped off the
truck and rushed to embrace him. It was his brother-in-law.

We were rescued. The brother-in-law and his comrades had a Starlink
dish mounted on the hood of their pickup truck, so we had Wi-Fi. They
gave us their functional spare tire, and escorted us back to El
Geneina in the dark. In a lawless world—in a place run by militias,
clans, and families—you are perfectly safe as long as your relatives
are the ones in charge.

Acouple of days after we left Khartoum, the Sudanese army recaptured
the presidential palace, the symbolic seat of power in the capital.
Soldiers filmed themselves shouting triumphant slogans and waving
rifles in front of broken windows. Sudanese military officials posted
reams of praise on social media. In Port Sudan, several people
predicted confidently that the war would soon end, perhaps as early as
April, because the Sudanese army would now quickly reconquer the rest
of the country.

That same day, Colonel Ibrahim, the earnest military-liaison officer
who’d helped us because he didn’t want Sudan to become a “forgotten
war,” was killed in a drone strike, together with a team of Sudanese
television journalists. The RSF must have targeted them, to spoil what
would have been newsworthy film and photographs. Over tea that evening
in the garden of our hotel in Port Sudan, a senior Sudanese-military
officer, the scion of a family with a long tradition in the government
and army, told us in confidence that he disagreed with the official
optimism. The war would not end soon. His own family, whose members
found themselves on different sides of the conflict, bitterly divided,
were still “electing by their legs” to leave the country, traveling to
Egypt, or Abu Dhabi, or beyond.

Some weeks later, the RSF began using drones to hit Port Sudan,
including the hotel with the garden where we’d had tea. The
Sudanese-military leaders accused the Emiratis of coordinating the
strike, and finally cut all ties with Abu Dhabi. The UN suspended
flights into Port Sudan. Some of the diplomats who remained in Port
Sudan also, I was told, began to contemplate leaving.

But not everyone will leave. Nor will everyone succumb to the nihilism
and greed that drive the war, or to the despair that has followed so
much destruction.

On one of my visits to al-Nau Hospital, in Omdurman, I met Momen wd
Zaineb. We had arranged to meet in the hospital courtyard, but
conversation proved almost impossible. Wd Zaineb was surrounded by a
large crowd of mostly elderly people, all waving small bits of paper.
These were prescriptions for medications that aren’t available at
al-Nau, which has a dedicated staff of emergency doctors and a free
pharmacy but limited supplies, especially of medications for chronic
diseases. Wd Zaineb raises money on Facebook to pay for the
medications, periodically asking his 125,000 followers to donate.
Social media has also helped make his long, curly black hair and
wire-rimmed glasses into a kind of trademark. When he is at the
hospital, he is deluged by people who recognize him, people who want
to be cured.

Wd Zaineb’s local prominence also has deeper roots, in the
revolutionary movement that led to the end of the Bashir regime, and
in the community of Sudanese who use the language of transparency,
democracy, and power-sharing not to appeal to some foreign ideal or to
win outside recognition, but because they believe this is the only way
to achieve peace in Sudan. “We have abundant resources,” he told me.
“But we suffer from massive mismanagement and even greater corruption;
that’s why our people live in these tragic conditions. Our country is
a paradise, but there are those who want to live in that paradise
alone, to rule it, and to own all its wealth.”

As a result of these beliefs, wd Zaineb has spent a lot of his life in
hiding. He hid first from the Bashir regime. After the coup, he hid
from the military dictatorship. On the first day of the war, he
nevertheless went immediately to al-Nau, which was then in the middle
of the conflict zone, to see what he could do to help injured
civilians. Together with dozens and eventually hundreds of other
activists across the country, on both sides of the conflict, wd Zaineb
helped build the Emergency Response Rooms, raising money, at first
from diaspora Sudanese, to provide people with the communal kitchens I
saw all over the country, along with medical care and other help. The
Emergency Response Rooms, known as the ERR movement—sooner or later,
every Sudanese group becomes known by its acronym—eventually built
shared fundraising platforms that are capable of raising money around
the world and distributing aid around the country. “We did all of this
on our own,” wd Zaineb told me, “as revolutionaries, without any
support from the government.” That kind of independence generates
hostility from both the RSF and the Sudanese military, who have
repressed ERR volunteers. Alsanosi Adam, a member of the ERR
communications team, based in Kenya, advised me to be careful meeting
volunteers on the ground, because the interaction might attract
unwanted attention from the authorities.

But wd Zaineb wanted to meet, and eventually we arranged to do so a
second time, this time behind a water tank where petitioners couldn’t
immediately find him. I asked him to explain the connection between
this volunteer work and his political activism, and he told me that
they are the same thing. The war, he said, is run by people who want
to destroy, so he tries to do the opposite: to build. He pointed at
the huddle of people who were already gathering a few feet away,
waiting for him. “Him, he’s like my father. Her, she’s like my mother.
All these people need help, so I came to help. I stay here sometimes
for 10 hours a day.” There aren’t enough ambulances, so he and his
network of volunteers also help people get to the hospital after a
bombing raid, assist the families of the injured, even bury the dead.

The hospital authorities are wary of wd Zaineb—he’s not a physician;
medications can interact badly with one another. Their doctors and
nurses also do heroic work, providing emergency help to victims of the
war. Maybe his politics make them nervous too. Still, they tolerate wd
Zaineb standing in the courtyard. Without him, the small mob of sick
people would not have access to any medication at all.

Many others share his views. During that rushed, truncated day in
Zalingei, we did have one memorable meeting, with a group of students
and professionals—among them a physician, a teacher, and an
environmental engineer—who had, during the two years of war,
collectively created 45 Emergency Response Rooms in Central Darfur,
staffed by more than 800 volunteers. Many had lost their job when
universities, hospitals, and government offices were shelled or shut
down, but they still thought it important to “give something to the
community,” as one of them told me. Like wd Zaineb, they wanted to
build, they told me, not destroy.

Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to
“communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when
“people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it,
if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling
in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from
home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal
prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at
sundown.

It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of
the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same
kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more
democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer
reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the
roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the
community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal
activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign
influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James
Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they
want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because
their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to
want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing
that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.

On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time
it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the
characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a
completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing
except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the
Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the
flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.

But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected,
and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other
countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has
already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad,
Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and
transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As
old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new
structure. They are replaced by nothing.
________________________________

The Generals and the Politicians

Omar al-Bashir ran Sudan as a repressive Islamist regime for nearly 30
years, until April 2019, when—after a mass democratic uprising led to
several months of demonstrations and violent clashes in the streets—he
was removed by the military.

Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok ran the short-lived civilian government,
backed by the military, which was meant to be a transition to Sudan’s
democratic future.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed
Forces, or SAF. In 2021, he and his deputy, Lieutenant General Mohamed
Hamdan Dagalo (see below), carried out a military coup that removed
Prime Minister Hamdok. Burhan’s falling-out with Dagalo precipitated
the current civil war.

Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Hemedti
controls the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a mostly Darfurian militia
whose first members were Arabic-speaking nomads known as the
Janjaweed. On April 15, 2023, at the start of the civil war, the RSF
attacked the SAF head­quarters, the Khartoum airport, and the
presidential palace.

Khamis Abakar, the former governor of West Darfur. A member of the
Masalit, the largest ethnic group in that area before the war, Abakar
tried to broker peace between Masalit farmers and Arab nomads. When
the civil war broke out, Abakar and the Masalit sided with the SAF. In
June 2023, Abakar was kidnapped and murdered by RSF forces, though
they deny responsibility.

Al Tigani Karshoum, the former deputy to Abakar, who became governor
of West Darfur after Abakar’s murder. Karshoum has ties to the
Masalit’s Arabic-speaking rivals, the tribes that made up the bulk of
the Janjaweed and now the RSF. He is reported to have ordered the
sacking of Masalit houses after the civil war broke out, and is under
EU sanctions as a result.
________________________________

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/

END
______________________
John Ashworth

ashwor...@gmail.com

+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)

PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya