Sudan's Civil War Since April 2023

El Fasher, North Darfur. Friday, the nineteenth of September, twenty twenty-five. Midday prayers. Men kneeling shoulder to shoulder inside a mosque, in a city that has been surrounded for more than two years. And then a missile comes through the roof. Seventy-five people killed, according to the reporting that day.

During prayers.

During prayers. And here's the detail I can't get past. That siege had been running since the thirteenth of April, twenty twenty-three. Two days before the war officially started.

Hang on. Before? How does a siege start before the war does?

Hold that question. It's the whole story, and I'll give you the answer at the end. Sudan, April twenty twenty-three. Two men. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, the actual national army. And Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, everyone calls him Hemedti, who runs a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, the R.S.F. And they were not enemies. They were partners.

Partners how? Like, politely tolerating each other?

Like they overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir together in twenty nineteen. And then they overthrew the civilian government together too.

Two coup partners. So what actually broke them up?

A merger. The transition plan said the R.S.F. had to fold into the regular army. Which sounds like paperwork...

But it isn't paperwork.

It's the question of who ends up holding the guns. And the gold mines. And the country. Hemedti wanted to keep his own command. Burhan wanted him absorbed. On the fifteenth of April, twenty twenty-three, the argument became artillery in the middle of Khartoum. A capital city of millions.

And Hemedti's men were already inside that capital, right? That's the bit I never understood.

That's the fatal detail. After twenty nineteen, Burhan himself let the R.S.F. spread through residential Khartoum. He put the fire inside the house.

Brilliant.

And the R.S.F. didn't come from nowhere. They grew out of the Janjaweed, the militias behind the Darfur atrocities of the two thousands. The Council on Foreign Relations describes the R.S.F. as widely accused of genocide, mass killings and sexual violence against non-Arab ethnic groups. And Amnesty International, in a report this July, documented R.S.F. fighters using a word as they attacked non-Arab civilians in North Darfur. Falangay. It means slavery. Servitude.

So this isn't just two generals falling out. There's an ethnic campaign riding on top of it.

Both things are true at once. And to be fair to no one... the army is also accused of indiscriminate air strikes on populated areas. Amnesty's line was blunt. The war in Sudan is a war on civilians.

Okay. Three and a half years in. Who's winning?

Nobody. That's the shape of it. The army took Khartoum back in May twenty twenty-five. The R.S.F. took El Fasher in October twenty twenty-five, which triggered a massacre and emptied the city. Analysts at C.S.I.S. put it simply. The country is now split roughly in two. Army in the east, R.S.F. in the west.

Split like... two actual countries?

Nearly. The R.S.F. set up its own civil administration in December twenty twenty-four, then declared a rival government in April twenty twenty-five, run out of Nyala in South Darfur. Two capitals. One passport.

That's a partition happening in real time, and I've seen maybe four headlines about it.

Which is why we're here. So, what's new. Through late September the army's been pushing into North Kordofan, the belt between east and west. On the seventeenth it said it had retaken eleven areas. On the twenty-fifth, the town of Sodari. That's the army's own claim, reported by Sudan Tribune, with video from allied fighters.

And the R.S.F. says?

Hasn't matched it. But look at what the army says it's shooting down. On the twenty-seventh of September, a long-range drone over North Kordofan. Military sources said about eight Chinese-made F.H. ninety-five drones intercepted in ten days.

Wait. A militia with long-range strike drones? Somebody is paying for those.

That's the uncomfortable centre of this war. Outside money, outside weapons, both sides. At the U.N. on the twenty-fourth of September, the African Union and the United States co-chaired a first-ever joint meeting of the two rival diplomatic groupings trying to fix this. One of their three demands? An arms embargo.

Is a deal actually close, or is that conference-room noise?

Washington proposed a ninety-day humanitarian truce, aid corridors, then talks on a permanent ceasefire and a civilian-led transition. Reuters reported the army-led government accepted... conditionally. The condition being that the R.S.F. withdraw from every city it has held since May eleventh, twenty twenty-three.

That's everything they've won. They'll never sign that.

That's the deadlock in one sentence. And here's how hard the pressure's got. On the twenty-second of September, Reuters reported Burhan still hadn't received a visa to attend the General Assembly, with sources saying American approval was tied to progress on that ceasefire.

They're using a visa as leverage on a head of state.

Reportedly. His U.N. ambassador asked the Secretary-General to step in.

And meanwhile. The people.

In May this year the I.P.C., the U.N.-backed hunger monitor, found nearly nineteen and a half million Sudanese facing acute hunger. More than forty percent of the population. Fourteen areas still at risk of famine. Families eating leaves. Animal feed. And about nine point six million people displaced inside their own country. More than a million out of El Fasher alone.

Nineteen million. That's not a crisis. That's a country.

Largest displacement and hunger emergency on earth right now. And the least funded.

So answer me. Why did that siege last two and a half years?

Because neither general needed it to end. Sieges are cheap. Starvation does the work for you.

Then what stops it? Honestly.

Not a signature in New York. It stops when the outside suppliers decide the war isn't worth funding anymore. Because right now this war is cheap for everyone except the people inside it.

And they never got a vote.

They never did. Two men fell out over a merger... and thirty million people are still kneeling in the rubble of the argument.