Inside Sudan’s perpetual war

[John Ashworth]

Inside Sudan’s perpetual war

As rival forces fight for control of Sudan, its people sink further into crisis

By Joshua Craze
New Statesman
4 February 2026

No one can say they didn’t know what would happen. By the time El
Fasher fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in October 2025, it had
been subject to an 18-month siege, its population reduced to eating
animal feed. There had been repeated warnings, multiple famine
declarations, a UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to
the RSF’s blockade, and sustained media alerts of an impending
massacre. It was clear what would happen once the RSF, a militia
contesting control of the Sudanese state, took the city. The group
emerged from the Janjaweed militias that razed the region of Darfur in
2003. Between April and June 2023, the RSF had already ethnically
cleansed one non-Arab group from West Darfur, killing up to 15,000
people. In April 2025, the RSF then seized Zamzam, a camp for
internally displaced persons on the outskirts of El Fasher, and
repeated the playbook: massacring more than 1,000 civilians, raping
women and children, and destroying health services.

A communications blackout meant that much of what occurred during the
RSF’s final assault on El Fasher last year remains uncertain. In
mid-November, British MPs were privately briefed that a low estimate
for the final death toll is 60,000 people killed over three weeks.
Other experts have used satellite imagery to suggest that the number
could be as high as 150,000, which would make El Fasher the single
deadliest massacre this century. Human rights investigators have not
been able to access the city, so these numbers remain projections.
Much of what we do know has been gleaned from videos recorded by
smiling RSF fighters. In one video, the RSF stalk through the Saudi
Maternity Hospital, shooting patients. In another, one RSF officer,
Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, known as Abu Lulu, is perched in front of an
emaciated prisoner, lying prone on the ground, his legs blown off. The
cameraman pans right to a heap of bodies lying on the banks of an
earthen berm, with dozens of smouldering vehicles just beyond them.
Abu Lulu then engages the prisoner in conversation, and as he begs for
his life, other fighters strip the possessions from corpses. Abu Lulu
then shoots the prisoner, before striding off in search of another
victim. In another video, he tells a captive: “I will never have
mercy. Our job is only killing.”

The “never again” bromides of liberal internationalism invoked after
the Rwandan genocide, and propagated by Samantha Power in A Problem
from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), strike a
particularly hollow note today. She was head of the United States
Agency for International Development (Usaid) under the Biden
administration when the Sudanese civil war began in April 2023. While
Power was photographed at the Chad-Sudan border, next to displaced
Sudanese people, the US administration let the conflict unfold, making
only occasional calls for a ceasefire. This involved half-heartedly
investing in a ceasefire agreement signed in Saudi Arabia to which
neither side adhered. Trump’s administration is no better. After El
Fasher fell, in November 2025, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler
of Saudi Arabia, visited Washington and urged Trump to get involved in
Sudan. Trump then announced that “there’s a place on Earth called
Sudan, and it’s horrible what’s happening”.

America’s latest initiative has also been unsuccessful. As part of the
Quad – a grouping of the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates – it proposed a three-month truce, to enable humanitarian aid
to enter Sudan, followed by a transitional process leading to a
civilian-led government. The Sudanese army, smarting after the loss of
El Fasher, rejected the proposal. They claimed that the UAE’s
involvement is biased, and that the proposal aims to eliminate the
army. While the RSF responded by declaring a unilateral ceasefire,
this was merely a rhetorical ploy; it proceeded to attack the Sudanese
army in the Kordofan region.

The US’s diplomatic dreams have run up against the hard limits of its
own geopolitical priorities. The RSF assault on El Fasher was only
possible because of weapons – including British-made targeting systems
– supplied by the UAE. Without real pressure on the Emirates, the war
will continue. Yet Trump is not willing to criticise his allies in the
Gulf, let alone sanction them. The UAE is a key trading partner, and
as one of the lead signatory of the Abraham Accords with Israel, a
central plank of the US’s strategic plan for the Middle East. Sudanese
deaths, from this perspective, are the price to be paid.

To understand how we got here, one must go back to 1983, and the
beginning of the last Sudanese civil war. A rebel movement had risen
up in the south, in what is now the state of South Sudan, in protest
against the region’s marginalisation by the northern riparian cities
that had dominated the country since its independence from the UK in
1956. The Sudanese elite in Khartoum, the country’s capital, decided
to conduct a counter-insurgency on the cheap, outsourcing the conflict
to militias that looted in lieu of being paid wages. Hunger was used
as a weapon, as Khartoum restricted humanitarian access to vast
swathes of the south. For the capital’s politicians, those who died in
the peripheries simply didn’t count.

In 1989, Omar al-Bashir, an ambitious brigadier general, took power in
a coup d’état. The war was not going well, and Sudan was in an
economic crisis. Yet Bashir forged an enduring form of rule, the
lineaments of which are still with us today. He let the country’s
rivalrous security services build up their own economic empires by
selling off the state to his cronies.

By the early 2000s, the Sudanese civil war had entered an uneasy
stalemate. Bashir’s undoing would begin not in southern Sudan, but in
New York. Osama bin Laden had resided in Khartoum during the 1990s,
and the US had designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism, claiming
the country had harboured members of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. Bashir worried he might soon be in America’s
crosshairs. An unlikely lobby also emerged in Washington, uniting
secular advocates of liberal state-building with Evangelical senators
who framed the war as a civilisational struggle between Islamist
forces in the north and Christians seeking self-determination in the
south – a narrative far simpler than the reality. The US pressured
Bashir into an agreement with the rebels, granting them control of a
regional southern government and the promise of a referendum on
secession.

The US had promised to lift sanctions and remove Sudan from the list
of state sponsors of terrorism. Yet in 2003, another war broke out in
Sudan, this time in Darfur. The region’s non-Arab communities rebelled
in response to long-standing marginalisation. Rather than deploy the
regular army, the government armed and empowered local Arab groups,
who coalesced into the Janjaweed militias. A widespread campaign of
ethnic cleansing followed, which left approximately 200,000 dead,
though this only counts the most violent period (from 2003 to 2005),
and in reality, the conflict has never stopped. The Save Darfur
campaign, which commodified grief and sold it to the American public,
meant sanctions on Sudan remained in place.

Khartoum’s expedient counter-insurgency proved costly for Bashir,
empowering militia leaders who soon demanded status, resources and
influence. Bashir also feared a coup d’état from within the ranks of
the military high command. He solved both problems in 2013 by creating
the RSF under the command of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The RSF became Bashir’s praetorian guard and, from the outset, was
deployed to crush demonstrations in Khartoum. It also built a vast
economic empire of its own, exporting mercenaries to fight in Yemen
and controlling migrant routes to the north. Most importantly, the RSF
seized control of Darfur’s gold mines.

South Sudan’s secession in 2011 imperilled Bashir’s long-term control
of the country. In one fell swoop Sudan was deprived of 75 per cent of
its oil. Bashir desperately tried to reorientate the economy towards
gold. While he dreamed of mines under the control of the central bank,
artisanal gold mining proved much harder to manage than the oil
sector. The RSF took over the most lucrative mines in Darfur. The
country’s shift to gold mining weakened the state’s control of
resource extraction, just as it enabled the RSF’s rise.

No one in Khartoum welcomed Hemedti’s proximity to Bashir. In Darfur,
Hemedti had preached a variant of Arab supremacism to justify the mass
displacement of non-Arab groups. In Khartoum, he was viewed as a
foreign interloper: an uncouth nomad from the peripheries with no
place in the political elite.

Gold was unable to solve Bashir’s problems. In 2018, an economic
crisis prompted Bashir to cut wheat and fuel subsidies, leading to
protests in rural areas, which soon spread to Sudan’s cities. The
demonstrations were joyful occasions. People would chant in
solidarity: kol al-balad Darfur (“the whole country is Darfur”). For a
moment, it felt like the discrimination and violence of Bashir’s
regime would be undone and a new social contract formed. On 11 April
2019, Bashir was removed by the military. For a couple of days,
graffiti praising the army was sprayed on to the capital’s walls. It
didn’t last long. The army wanted to preserve power, not hand it over
to the civilians. On 30 June, tens of thousands of people protested in
Khartoum against the junta that had come to power.

Under international pressure, a transitional government was formed,
which saw civilian politicians uneasily sharing power with the new
head of a sovereign council, the commander-in-chief of the Sudanese
army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, Hemedti. The civilian
side of the government was led by a UN economist, Abdalla Hamdok.
Rather than implement the protesters’ progressive ideas on housing and
food, Hamdok favoured economic austerity and the elimination of
subsidies, policies designed to win the favour of the International
Monetary Fund. Hamdok lost the support of the public.

Nevertheless, the prospect of civilian government rattled Al-Burhan
and Hemedti. On 25 October 2021, just a few hours after assuring the
US special envoy that there would be no coup attempt, the two men
pushed the civilians out of power. The idea that they could rule Sudan
with an iron hand was ludicrous. Neither side had any real social
base. The army had lost the religious support that had allowed Bashir
to rule during the 1990s and was unpopular due to its role in
repressing the revolution. Hemedti had never been successful in his
efforts to diversify the RSF outside of its Darfuri roots.

When I visited Khartoum in October 2022, a year after the coup and six
months before the current conflict broke out, the regime was flailing.
The coup leaders struggled to find a viable civilian face to front the
junta, and protests continued. In some ways, the coup had restored an
older opposition: once again, it was the people vs the military.

The proximate trigger for today’s conflict was an internationally
backed “framework agreement” that forced the RSF and the Sudanese army
into negotiations over the shape and structure of the country’s
military. Al-Burhan wanted the RSF disarmed: a non-starter for the
militia. Both sides began recruiting extensively and it became clear
Al-Burhan and Hemedti would soon turn against each other.

Initially, the RSF took control of much of Khartoum, and soon seized
some of Sudan’s breadbasket states. The very traits that made the RSF
an effective militia became its undoing as a political organisation.
In Jazira state, it pillaged everything from hospitals to grain
exchanges, setting up checkpoints to tax the residents it didn’t kill.
In every city it captured, the pattern was the same: loot, rape,
steal. The brutality proved a recruitment boon for the Sudanese army,
which stoked – often justified – fears of extreme violence to raise
militias to fight the RSF.

By February 2025, the conflict had swung the other way, as the army
pushed the RSF out of Khartoum and the breadbasket states. Partly,
this was thanks to new weaponry. The Sudanese army had appealed to a
variety of regional powers for support. Egypt has supplied
intelligence and targeting equipment, while Qatar, wary of its Emirati
rival, has given the army funds and drones, as has Turkey, which has
become a haven for Sudan’s resurgent Islamists. Recently, I sat by the
side of the Nile in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, with a member of the
Sudanese intelligence agency. He told me that he had worried that with
Bashir’s fall, the Islamists had lost their chance to take power. “But
now, with this war, we can regain popular support.”

Sudan has become increasingly fragmented internally. The two
belligerent sides are, in reality, coalitions of militia forces that
have intensified ethnic differences among the country’s diverse groups
as a means of recruitment. In truth, more unites the two sides than
separates them. Both are relics of Bashir’s system of military rule.
Both have blocked humanitarian aid and used hunger as a weapon of war,
and both have committed war crimes.

Both sides have also profited by exporting gold to the Emirates, with
annual exports almost doubling since the war began. Animal exports to
the Gulf have also soared. Most of Sudan’s livestock comes from
Darfur, but is exported via Port Sudan, which is under the control of
the army. The two sides have collaborated in this sale of the
country’s assets.

The country has become the world’s worst displacement crisis and the
world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Only six years ago, people took to
the streets of Khartoum chanting “kol al-balad Darfur”. Now the whole
country has become Darfur, in the worst possible way: the Janjaweed’s
violent campaigns of the early 2000s have becoming a living nightmare
for the entire country.

Both of Sudan’s previous civil wars lasted over 20 years, and both
ended the same way: in a negotiated settlement between rebels and the
government. The geopolitical coordinates of the current conflict,
however, are markedly different. There is no longer – if there ever
was – sufficient international coherence to bring about an end to the
Sudanese civil war. Sudan has become a battleground for a range of
imperial interests. The Emirates are expanding their control of much
of the Horn of Africa and the strategically vital Red Sea coast by
purchasing the loyalty of a suite of countries, including Ethiopia,
Kenya, South Sudan, and eastern Libya, all of which have supported the
RSF. The UAE has bankrolled the RSF as a crucial part of this regional
strategy. Such is the importance of the Emirates to the US strategy in
the region, though, that its own grand plans will receive no rebuke
from the White House or from Downing Street, which also sees the UAE
as a crucial trading partner. The other traditionally powerful Western
actors in Sudan, including Norway and France, have been almost
entirely sidelined by the Gulf’s involvement in the conflict. The idea
of the RSF taking control of Sudan is a red line for its most powerful
neighbour, Egypt, which supports the Sudanese army, as do Qatar and
Saudi Arabia.

Diplomats concerned with the conflict like to say that these players
need to realise their interests are better served by a prosperous,
democratic Sudan. But it is not clear that is the case. A fractured,
divided Sudan, perpetually at war, is easier to control than a united
polity. The geopolitical winds have shifted, and it may no longer be
possible to put Sudan back together again.

https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2026/02/inside-sudans-perpetual-war

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