The geopolitical underpinnings of Sudan's collapse

The world's biggest humanitarian crisis involves the UAE, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and more

The ongoing civil war in Sudan has killed more than 10,000 civilians and displaced eight million people so far. It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now, and it’s not particularly close.

In the spring of 2023, two military organizations — the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — had a falling out and began contesting control of the country. Fighting started in the capital city of Khartoum with undisciplined shelling from both sides and spread from there around the country. As the RSF seized SAF outposts in the western region of Darfur, it reignited that region’s ethnic conflicts, and RSF personnel have been involved in massacres and atrocities against Darfur’s non-Arab populations.

Outside of the historical resonances of that particular aspect of the conflict, there has been enormously destructive urban warfare. The total death count is hotly disputed, but a mid-January Reuters article noted that one UN report estimates that 12,000 people had been killed across the country. Another report claims that 15,000 died just in the city of El Geneina — the Sudanese Red Crescent tallied approximately 2,000 bodies in the street before they stopped counting. Despite the lack of clarity on the exact number killed, a Human Rights Watch report on the sack of that city reveals unambiguous evidence of genocidal intent:

During their campaign, RSF fighters and allied militias used derogatory racial slurs against Massalits and people from other non-Arab ethnic groups. They told them to leave, that the land was no longer theirs, and that it would be “cleaned” and become “the land of the Arabs.” Ahmad, 41, a Massalit man, recalled, in an interview with Human Rights Watch, forces telling fleeing civilians: “No Massalit people will live here!” and “No Nuba will live here!” and “No slaves will live here!”

While determining the specific number remains difficult, the death toll is clearly growing.

Both sides have obstructed aid in an effort to starve their enemies. They have confiscated supplies to maximize control, they have bombed hospitals and infrastructure. El Fasher, the only city in Darfur that is not yet under RSF control, holds over 800,000 people and is now completely besieged and cut off from the outside world. Heavy weapons are in use as the RSF attempts to take the city, but SAF forces (now augmented by non-Arab militias who have historically fought against the central state) are holding out. UN and US officials fear a massacre.

I think the world’s major media outlets have done a decent job of covering this conflict in the face of both logistical difficulties and audience disinterest.

At root, the two sides are fighting over power and money more than ideas, making it hard for outsiders to identify a strong rooting interest or to define one faction as the bad guys. To the extent anyone on the outside cares about this, it’s as a proxy for arguing about Israel, which I don’t really want to do. But one point that I think has not broken through to the general public is that the war in Sudan does, in fact, have a substantial international element and is connected to the larger global machinations of Russia, Iran, and America’s allies in the United Arab Emirates.

Your mileage may vary on the exact metaphysics of complicity. But the biggest humanitarian disaster in the world merits some of your attention, especially because I think it’s plausible that the US will soon find itself under pressure to become more involved.

The rise of the RSF

It is hard to know how much background to provide in articles, especially when writing about a subject like Sudan that’s not generally discussed much in the United States.

But I do think the historical context matters here. Throughout its history as a state, Sudan has featured autocratic military regimes, poverty, extractive institutions, and many different secessionist movements. But in 1986, the country had rare democratic elections, bringing to power Sadiq al-Mahdi who, among other things, tried to negotiate a settlement to a long-running military conflict with non-Muslim groups in the southern part of the country. For his trouble he was overthrown in a 1989 coup led by General Omar al-Bashir, who set himself up as president with Hassan al-Turabi as prime minister. They created an Islamist, anti-western regime that backed Saddam Hussein diplomatically during the first Gulf War. Osama bin Laden and Abu Nidal both lived in Khartoum for a while in the 1990s. You may recall that the US bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was said to be a cover for some kind of nefarious al-Qaeda activities. This turns out to have been BS and it really was a pharmaceutical plant. But al-Qaeda was genuinely operating in Sudan for a while, though the Sudanese kicked bin Laden out eventually because they were trying to get off the US sanctions list so they could develop some oil fields.

By 2003, though, not only was Bashir fighting the war in the south, he was also facing a rebellion in Darfur, the western part of the country. The population there is largely Muslim, but many of them are from non-Arab ethnic groups, and the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit rebels got support from Sudan’s neighbors in Chad, Eritrea, and Gaddafi-era Libya, which made them a serious threat. Given the precariousness of the central government’s position at this point, Bashir began to recruit local allies in Darfur — the Janjaweed militias — based in nearby Arabic-speaking nomadic tribes. The Janjaweed were organized outside the mainline structure of the Sudanese military, in part to provide the government in Khartoum with deniability around atrocities.

This slaughter and ethnic cleansing did attract global attention and outrage. And in 2005, the Sudanese government signed a peace deal that, after a five-year transition period, led to South Sudan becoming an independent state.

During the transition phase, the tempo of fighting in Darfur slowed dramatically, and Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). South Sudan became formally independent in 2011, which led to a precipitous decline in Sudanese oil revenue and the unraveling of Bashir’s patronage networks. The Janjaweed were reorganized as the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary organization that helped put down domestic unrest as the political situation deteriorated.

Meanwhile, across the Red Sea in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were prosecuting a war (with American support) against Iran-aligned Houthi forces.

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are rich but their militaries aren’t very large, so starting in 2015, they began paying the RSF to operate in Yemen as, essentially, a mercenary army. This experience really leveled-up the RSF in terms of its capabilities and connections. The RSF’s chief, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (who is usually referred to as Hemedti), gained control over a significant swathe of Sudan’s gold, along with the capacity to export it abroad for money. And this all set him up to be a major power player in the future of Sudanese politics.

From hope to misery

Over the winter of 2018-2019, Sudan saw the rise of a massive non-violent civil protest movement against Bashir and his dictatorship. The proximate cause was a reduction in government food subsidies that was probably, in the most technical sense, the correct policy. But the need to increase prices spoke to the economic mismanagement of the country, which in turn stemmed from Bashir using its natural resources to maintain an authoritarian system, the purpose of which was to help him funnel huge sums of money out of the country.

It was an inspiring movement that looked like it might set the stage for a real improvement in the state of the country. But in the spring of 2019, the country reached a breaking point.

On April 11, the Defense Minister, Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, announced that Bashir had been overthrown and that he was taking charge as head of state and ordered protesters to go home. But protests continued, demanding, among other things, that Bashir be handed over to the ICC. Auf himself then resigned, leading to a chaotic situation for several weeks as different members of a Transitional Military Council tried to secure control over the country, while protesters demanded real democracy. On July 5, an agreement was reached between leaders of the SAF, civilian leaders, and RSF head Hemedti to set up a political transition. But this transition triad suffered from incredible internal instability. Civilians wanted a less-corrupt regime with fewer resources siphoned off to the security services, but the security services themselves wanted impunity for past bad acts and the ability to continue to be corrupt. The RSF was set up outside the mainline Sudanese Armed Forces as a coup-proofing measure (read Erica deBruin’s book for much more on this), but this was not a priority for civilian leaders, who wanted the RSF folded into the SAF.

There were plenty of tensions and ups-and-downs and backs-and-forths and rounds of protests, but eventually, in October of 2021, Hemedti and General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan (who emerged as the leader of the SAF) came together and overthrew the civilian government. That created a very tenuous situation. By all accounts Hemedti and al-Burham did not like each other personally, neither was accustomed to taking orders from the other, and the institutions they ran were specifically set up to be non-cooperative to maintain Bashir’s power. They jockeyed for position, and tensions kept rising. Then in mid-April of 2023, leaders from both sides sat down with mediators from the US and Britain to try to work things out, and they appeared to be close to deal when fighting broke out in what seems to have been an attempted coup by the RSF.

The course of war

Normally, a coup either succeeds or fails, but the dire luck of the people of Sudan was to have a coup that was just successful enough to start a civil war. It’s a bit of an unusual civil war, though, because it’s not really a fight between two distinct ethnic or ideological camps. The RSF and the SAF are just two different ethnically Arab military organizations that were both part of the Bashir regime. Because this was a coup, the fighting started in the capital and its immediate environs rather than with a secession or someone raising an army out in the provinces.

The RSF did not quite manage to seize Khartoum or nearby Omdurman, but wasn’t driven out either. They then moved into Darfur in the west, which is both the RSF’s region of origin and also home to their biggest enemies — the non-Arab rebel groups and militias. This map from January is the most detailed one that I can find.

But two big things have changed since then. One is that the RSF has successfully besieged El Fasher, taking the areas north and east of the city from the non-Arab militias, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA). The second is that SLA/SAF cooperation against the common enemy seems to have improved, which has at least slowed down the RSF’s ability to seize the final major city in Darfur.

To the extent that there has been international attention on the situation, most of it has focused on the situation in Darfur — burning villages, looming famine — in part because that has a specific ethnic cleansing angle and in part because there is a legacy of humanitarian interest in Darfur. There is also, rightly, intense interest in the specific situation in El Fasher because it is likely to become extremely deadly. As Mutasim Ali explains, as awful as the sack of El Geneina was, civilians were able to escape because “there was a walkable distance to Adre refugee camp in Eastern Chad. In El Fasher, there’s no possible way that people can flee to Chad.” The only touch of Gaza whataboutism that I am going to engage in over the course of this piece is to note that while Chad admitting Massalit refugees arguably does accelerate ethnic cleansing, nobody seems to think it would be better for civilians to be trapped in an urban combat zone and dying.

That all being said, it’s worth reiterating that the political stakes of the war are more in the fighting around Khartoum and Omdurman. The RSF had the capital region besieged at the end of last year, but in February the SAF opened a corridor into Omdurman, and in March, they retook the national TV and radio station. The RSF still controls the Republican Palace, but it’s being shelled by the SAF. Which is all just to say that the RSF’s effort to establish itself as the government of Sudan seems to have stalled out and may even be reversing — in part because the international situation may not be in their favor.

The eyes of the world

There’s a lot of talk about the crisis in Sudan being a “forgotten conflict,” but it’s not as if Americans were previously tuned in to this iteration of Sudanese unrest. The countries that have been paying attention from the beginning are the United Arab Emirates, who have deep links to the RSF and have been providing them with extensive support over American objections. I tend to put Sudan in the “Sub-Saharan Africa” bucket of my brain and the UAE in the “Middle East” bucket, but it’s really all one region, and in particular, Sudan is relevant to the Emirates’ tussling with the Houthis over control of Red Sea shipping lanes. The UAE would love to see a closely aligned force dominating Sudan.

Conversely, a lot of the SAF’s recent gains seem to have come thanks to an influx of Iranian drones.

But we also have to look on the other side of the map. In recent years, the countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have all witnessed military coups. The United States, in the post-Cold War era, has generally limited defense cooperation with coup regimes and otherwise tries to penalize coups in hopes of discouraging them. These days, though, great power competition is back, and so rather than being forced to return to civilian government, those three countries have formed a Russia-backed Alliance of Sahel States that are now relying on the Wagner Group rather than US special forces to help them contain Islamist insurgencies. Just last month, US troops formally agreed to leave Niger. American troops are also scheduled to leave Chad, which is between Niger and Sudan, but we are trying to talk Chad’s government out of that.

For now, though, Wagner has been backing rebels in Chad, hoping to either help a pro-Russian rebellion succeed or else induce the central government to switch alliances. And, coming back to Sudan, Wagner has been supporting the RSF out of its bases in Chad, while small numbers of Ukrainian special forces have been operating in Sudan, fighting the RSF-aligned Wagner forces.

Fans of geopolitical alignment may note that UAE + Russia vs Iran + Ukraine does not seem like correctly aligned teams. And there are some indications that Russia may be switching sides. Back in February 2023, before the war broke out, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, met with both Hemedti and al-Burham in Sudan to discuss plans to build a navy base on the Red Sea coast. Today the SAF is a lot closer to controlling the capital than the RSF is to controlling the Red Sea coast. In fact, the SAF has moved its base of operations to Port Sudan on the sea, so if you want a navy base, they’re the ones to talk to. Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, who speaks Arabic, went to Port Sudan at the end of April and pledged support for the SAF as the legitimate government of Sudan. Russia has also apparently started to supply the SAF with diesel, in part to help the SAF and in part because Russia is facing a lot of sanctions and needs markets for its refined petroleum products.

American involvement in all of this has been fairly tenuous.

We are, broadly speaking, strategic partners with the UAE, which is the main sponsor of the RSF. But America’s position has consistently been that this is bad and the UAE should stop pouring weapons into the country. Representative Ilhan Omar, who is perhaps more consistent than people think, has been pushing the US to halt weapons sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia over this, but she seems to have little support. If it emerges that Russia really has switched sides in this conflict and you get a pure Russia + Iran vs UAE alignment, I wonder if pressure won’t increase on the United States to back the RSF. That would be a tough look for the United States, given that they have committed the most spectacular atrocities of the war. But there’s no “good” side in this conflict, and special envoy Tom Perriello is not having any great success at ending it or negotiating a ceasefire. Alternatively, you could imagine the United States and other friendly states deciding they need to outbid Iran and Russia to become the preferred partners of the SAF. Either way, preventing the establishment of a Russian or Iranian base on the Red Sea seems like a hard geopolitical priority for the United States relative to the soft humanitarian interests that have dominated the very limited coverage.

I don’t want to end on a lame “only time will tell” note, but I also don’t want to fire off a flaming hot take about a distant region of the world that few of us have much detailed knowledge of.

I do think it is interesting, though, how selective and partial the world’s attention can be, especially in a conflict where there really are forward and backward linkages to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and to the larger question of an emerging second Cold War. The White House this week is announcing tariffs on Chinese solar panels and electric cars that represent a clear choice to prioritize strategic competition over short-term emissions cuts, which I think is very sensible. But that just goes to show how much a resurgence of great power competition can reshape every area of policy it touches, once attention focuses on it. So far, Russia’s growing influence in Africa doesn’t seem to be something people care very much about, but I wonder how long that will last.