Less than five years into its halting journey toward democracy, Sudan is spiraling toward protracted civil war. On April 15, fighting erupted between the country’s two main security organs, the army and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been jockeying for power ever since they jointly overthrew longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The hostilities have been most intense in the capital city, Khartoum, but violence has broken out in at least eight of Sudan’s 13 states. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and regional powers are lining up behind the main belligerents, promising to replenish their war stocks and enabling them to continue tearing the country apart.
At the root of the conflict is the fragmentation of Sudan’s security apparatus. Two rival centers of power have emerged since the country’s 2018–19 revolution and the military coup that followed: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Both men have exploited the instability of the country’s now derailed democratic transition—first sidelining the civilian transitional government in October 2021 and then resisting international pressure to resolve their differences and hand power to a new civilian administration last month.
Now their rivalry has pitched the country into chaos and is threatening to reignite long-simmering conflicts in Darfur and elsewhere that could spread to Sudan’s neighbors. But Sudan doesn’t have to go the way of Libya or Syria. The best chance of extinguishing the conflict lies in a unified front: if Western and regional powers come together with Sudanese civil society groups to push for a permanent cease-fire and eventually a civilian-led transition to democracy, they may still be able to halt Sudan’s slide into civil war. But time is of the essence. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the odds of escalation—and the slimmer the chance of putting the country back on a peaceful path to democratization.
DEADLY RIVALS
The seeds of the current conflict were planted long before Sudan’s 2018–19 revolution. After seizing power in a military coup in 1989, Bashir sought to prevent his own reign from being derailed in a similar manner. So his regime created numerous security organs whose mandates overlapped with the SAF, including Islamist militias that were deployed to fight separatists in southern Sudan in the 1990s. When a rebellion erupted in Darfur in 2003, Bashir followed the same strategy and relied on militias drawn from Arab tribes in the region, known as the Janjaweed, to put down the rebels instead of the SAF.
After the Darfur conflict abated, Bashir rebranded the Janjaweed as the RSF, incorporating its fighters into a more regularized paramilitary force in 2013 under the authority of the National Intelligence and Security Service. In 2017, Sudan’s rubber-stamp parliament passed an act placing the RSF under Bashir’s direct command, putting it on equal institutional footing with the SAF, even though its fighters for the most part lacked formal military training.
The rivalry between these agencies only intensified after that. Sudan’s top military brass regarded the RSF as untrained and ill disciplined, and they looked down on Hemedti, who did not graduate from high school, let alone attend a military academy. Meanwhile, the lower ranks of the SAF despised their RSF counterparts because they received higher salaries and better equipment, while RSF soldiers resented being seen as an illegitimate and inferior force.
The rivalry had a tribal dimension, as well. Although the SAF and the RSF both recruited from all of Sudan’s main ethnic communities, Bashir packed the top ranks of the SAF with a handful of Arab tribes from the north of the country while recruiting RSF leaders mostly from among the Arabs of Darfur—from Hemedti’s Rizeigat tribe and especially from his Mahariya clan.
But for all his efforts to pit the SAF and the RSF against each other, Bashir could not stop them from uniting to oust him amid a deepening economic crisis and escalating street protests in April 2019. Initially, the leaders of both military organs professed their commitment to a democratic transition (although many rightly doubted their sincerity). In August 2019, they negotiated an agreement with the civilian coalition that led the uprising. Under the deal, Burhan would serve as interim head of state for 21 months before ceding power to a civilian government. Soon after the agreement was signed, Hemedti pushed Burhan to create a new role for him, that of deputy president. On October 25, 2021, however, just before the handoff was to take place, Burhan, Hemedti, and the leaders of several former rebel groups that had been incorporated into the government during the transition launched a counterrevolutionary coup to sideline the country’s civilian leaders. Since then, the relationship between Hemedti and Burhan has deteriorated and the rivalry between their forces has escalated.
Both men have forged important alliances. Hemedti has cultivated the United Arab Emirates as a patron by sending RSF forces to fight alongside Emirati and Saudi troops in Yemen. (The SAF also has troops in Yemen, but they are largely stationed on the border with Saudi Arabia in order to prevent the war from traveling north.) He has also cozied up to Russia, leading a delegation to Moscow the week that Russian forces began their invasion of Ukraine and expanding his existing partnership with the Wagner Group, the powerful Russian paramilitary organization. The RSF has even positioned itself as an ally of the European Union in its fight against migration from the Horn of Africa, playing the role of border guards for Europe. Meanwhile, Burhan has deepened the SAF’s already close ties with Egypt. Even before the Sudanese uprising, senior SAF leaders regularly trained and attended military colleges in Egypt. Burhan has continued to hold regular joint military exercises with Egypt and traveled repeatedly to Cairo. Top Egyptian officials, including Intelligence Chief Abbas Kamel, have visited Khartoum since Burhan took office.
Both Sudanese generals have also lined up powerful domestic allies, seemingly in anticipation of today’s conflict. Burhan has cultivated the Islamists who were once a key part of Bashir’s support base, orchestrating the release of erstwhile political elites jailed in the aftermath of the uprising, and more nefariously, undermining efforts to reform the civil service and recover assets stolen by members of the previous regime. For his part, Hemedti has doled out resources to rural farmers across Sudan to drum up popular support. In short, Burhan and Hemedti both have resources and backing that could enable them to fight long into the future.
SHOOTING INSTEAD OF TALKING
Sudan’s sudden collapse into violence partly reflects the failure of Western and regional powers to defuse tensions between the SAF and the RSF. After the October 2021 coup by Burhan and Hemedti, Sudanese protesters took to the streets in large numbers to demand a return to civilian rule, prompting Western powers to push the two leaders to go back to the negotiating table and hash out a new transitional accord. By December 2022, the generals and civilian politicians had drawn up a new framework agreement that would put Sudan back on the path to elections.
To get the major parties to sign, however, the agreement left unsaid how many of its most sensitive objectives would be achieved. Most notably, it called for the RSF to be integrated into the SAF but did not specify a timetable. Burhan made clear that he expected the process to be completed in two years, whereas Hemedti advocated a ten-year process. Western and international powers put pressure on all sides to sign the agreement by April 1, so that they could form a new government in time for the four-year anniversary of Bashir’s ouster on April 11. That deadline came and went. With both sides dug in and external pressure mounting, Burhan and Hemedti began building up troops in anticipation of a conflict that finally broke out on the morning of April 15.
Unless the fighting is contained, there is now a very real chance that what began in Khartoum could engulf the rest of the country. The vacuum in the capital has already restarted old conflicts in West Darfur, where Arab tribes—some affiliated with the RSF—have begun to attack civilians, and the latter have started arming themselves. Separately, secessionist movements in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states might return in earnest while the central government is at war with itself. And there is also a risk that elements of the SAF that are still loyal to Bashir’s old Islamist regime will split off and form their own insurgency. In the worst-case scenario, Sudan could turn into a failed state, splintering into multiple de facto countries with ill-defined borders, displacing millions of people and potentially igniting campaigns of ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Although a domestic power struggle is driving the conflict, large-scale regional escalation is also possible. Unfortunately, regional powers have already been drawn into the conflict. Egypt has sent weapons to SAF, and the Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar, another client of the UAE, has restocked the RSF. The traditional population centers of Hemedti’s Rizeigat tribe span the border between Sudan and Chad, and the larger Baggara confederation that includes the Rizeigat inhabits lands as far west as Niger in the Sahel. Governments and militant leaders throughout this region could be goaded into entering the conflict. And finally, Sudan could become a battleground in the simmering confrontation between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Renaissance Dam. If regional actors become deeply involved, it will become much more difficult to contain the conflict, since more any potential settlement will have to satisfy multiple parties.
Although it is difficult to predict the degree to which the conflict will regionalize, one thing is clear: the longer that fighting between Burhan and Hemedti drags on, the higher the likelihood that other groups beyond of the SAF and the RSF will jump into the fray. As these two belligerents begin to run low on supplies, they will become more willing to make deals that mortgage Sudan’s future, doling out gold mines, fertile agricultural land, and Red Sea concessions, among other resources, in exchange for support.
OUT OF THE GENERALS’ HANDS
But it is not too late to prevent conflagration. There are steps that domestic and international players can take to limit the human toll and end the fighting before it spreads. First and foremost, Western and regional powers need to resist the temptation to back a particular side and work together to contain and ultimately end the conflict. The United States and France, in particular, must use their leverage over Sudan’s neighbors—Egypt and Ethiopia for the former, and Chad for the latter—to prevent them from interfering further in the conflict.
In addition, the international community needs to push for a lasting cease-fire. A break from hostilities would allow for the creation of badly needed humanitarian corridors, enabling aid to stream in and civilians to stream out. Humanitarian agencies must immediately be given the funding—and flexibility—to mount a large-scale response and save lives. To be sure, this task is proving difficult. Multiple cease-fires have already been brokered and then violated, each one only briefly attenuating the fighting. Even though both generals have incentives to make good on their commitments, it is becoming increasingly clear that their subordinates do not: reports abound of ill-disciplined RSF soldiers taking cease-fires as opportunities to loot and, more disturbing, of Bashir-era Islamists within the SAF using these lulls in the fighting to gain the upper hand against the RSF.
At the same time, Sudan’s domestic civil society must try to prevent the conflict between the SAF and the RSF from evolving into to a multiparty, ethnically tinged civil war. High ethnic tensions and a surfeit of arms after decades of civil strife increase the risk that this conflict will become fused with long-standing ones on Sudan’s periphery, an outcome that could take an enormous—and unacceptable—human toll. To prevent such an outcome, tribal and Sufi leaders should be encouraged to play their traditional roles as mediators and as voices for reason.
Once a permanent cease-fire is in place, Sudanese civil society, Western countries, and regional powers should mount a unified push for a transition to civilian rule. But they will need to fundamentally rethink what a transition process should look like, since it has become clear that the framework agreement of December 2022 and the initial constitutional document of August 2019 were insufficient. Although both arrangements promised an eventual handoff to civilian leaders, they privileged armed actors during negotiations and in the initial phases of the transition, relegating civilian politicians and groups to the status of junior partner status during these critical phases.
The past four years have shown that it is foolish to assume that armed actors will willingly cede power. Although domestic civil society groups advocated for a genuinely civilian-led transition, foreign powers subordinated the goal of a democratic transition to the ostensible objective of short-term stability by negotiating with—and thus legitimatizing—the generals. This time around, civil society groups and grassroots movements should steer the transition process from the outset. And as long as civilians are at the helm, Sudan’s international partners should avoid imposing arbitrary deadlines on negotiators. Buses in Sudan leave the station when they are full, not according to any prescribed timetable.
Once a civilian-led government is finally in place, it will need to reform the security sector—integrating the RSF and other parastatal militias into a unified national army that is answerable to elected leaders—in order to avoid a rerun of the present conflict. None of this will be easy, and all of it will require Sudan’s international partners to put their differences aside and present a unified front. The alternative, however, is a long and bloody war.
Mai Hassan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ahmed Kodouda is an aid worker who was based in Sudan until March 2023.