At least 12 million people have been displaced, uprooted and terrorized; some estimates put the figure at around 15 million higher. This is a third of the Sudanese population, most of whom are untraceable and inaccessible to aid organizations. At least two million people are on the brink of starvation. At least 150,000 Sudanese have been killed since April 2023 and the outbreak of the latest civil war – roughly double the estimated number of deaths in Gaza.
A number of foreign players have armed and financed the latest attack – and the UAE has been identified as one of the RSF’s main backers.
The images of the looting of El Fasher reaching the outside world are gruesome. Some of the worst massacres and rapes have come from selfies taken by the RSF militia looters themselves.
Graphic accounts have been given by some of the 70,000 refugees who reached the Tawila rescue center. “There are still at least 70,000 people in El Fasher,” Dora Oigu said on a podcast from the camp. “But we just don’t know what happened to about 200,000 others.” She said 460 patients, doctors, nurses and staff had been killed at the hospital on the refugee route out of the city. Footage was filmed of RSF guerrillas bulldozing mass graves and trying to hide bodies – the lake of blood could be seen from space.
RSF leader Hemedti, left, and SAF General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan
Delivered
Civil wars and military coups have been endemic throughout Sudan’s short history. Since independence from British-Egyptian control in 1956, there have been about 20 military coups. The last was in 2021, ending a brief period of civilian rule after famously brutal Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashar was thrown out in 2019 after 20 years. The 2021 coup almost inevitably led to a massive rift between the two main military groups and their charismatic leaders in April 2023. Thus began the current war, with a massive bombardment of the capital Khartoum.
The two groups are the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, 65, and the RSF led by his former brother-in-arms Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa, 50-ish, known as ‘Hemedti’.
Dark ties between RSF and Gulf
At this stage of the war each commands about 100,000 fighters, but both groups are less cohesive armies than strange coalitions of various clans and factions with highly questionable loyalties, often pursuing their own, usually ruthless, agenda. They each have their international backing: the SAF has the backing of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with Egypt always sensitive to the security of its southern border, the Upper Nile, the Red Sea and its ports.
darker and more controversial is the support for Hemedti and the RSF. It has been reported that the UAE has supplied modern weapons. In the past, the UAE has rejected the charge – but several agencies, including the CIA, portray the Emirates as Hemedti’s main arms master. The UAE has claimed it must fight “Islamists” and Muslim Brotherhood offshoots in Sudan – although it has provided little evidence of their presence. Caches have been identified entering Somalia via Puntland, as the center of Port Sudan is now the SAF headquarters.
Earlier this year, boxes of ammunition from Bulgaria were discovered at a roadblock in northern Darfur – which the UN later found had been paid for by the UAE.
More recently, the UAE has attempted to withdraw from overt support of the RSF. Last week, Anwar Gargash, an adviser to President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi, told a conference there “the UAE has been clear, there is no military solution”. He said the war had “caused indescribable destruction and violence. This war must stop now.”
Hemedti has a complicated history with both the UAE and Darfur. It comes from nomadic Arab camel herders. He became an enforcer for the ruthless dictator Bashar, particularly among the brutal guerrillas known as the Janjaweed who were responsible for massacres in Darfur in 2003. Janjaweed elements form a core of the RSF.
In 2015, Hemedti deployed Janjaweed fighters to provide a force to fight for the UAE against the Houthi following their coup in Yemen. Ironically, the Sudanese cohort was commanded by General Burhan, now Hemedti’s arch-rival.
At the heart of Sudan’s current crisis lies an information wasteland. Entire areas and encampments of distressed and starving people are inaccessible to journalists and aid organizations. Sudan, Africa’s third largest country, is a strategic crossroads along the Nile, connecting the Red Sea to Central and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet it has virtually escaped serious international attention. A group calling itself the Quad – Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the US – has opened tentative talks. The last were abandoned in mid-October, and then came the atrocities of El Fasher.
Scenes from South Hospital, El Fasher, North Darfur, where several people have been injured during the conflict in Sudan. The IKEA Foundation has donated €5 million to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to provide urgent medical care and supplies to the affected people. Copyright: Doctors Without Borders/Ali Shukur
Doctors Without Borders/Ali Shukur
The extraordinary violence of the fighting has shocked seasoned hands, such as Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, who wrote this month: “Over the forty years I have studied Sudan and worked in the country, I have seen how genocidal slaughter has become a normalized strategy on the battlefield.”
The scale of the carnage is difficult to gauge from satellite images alone, said Dan Watson, senior strategic analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Neither side can win outright and he says they are “in a murderous stalemate.” One of the main limitations is that fighters find it difficult to get fuel for their trucks – so armored vehicles and howitzers are few and far between. They must attack the south to get to fuel pipelines from oil-rich South Sudan. They are also plundering north to get fuel from the triangle where the borders of Chad, Libya and Sudan meet. That’s where the shadowy link with Khalifa Haftar, warlord of Benghazi in eastern Libya, comes into play.
“The RSF has used up a lot of battlefield momentum” after the plunder of El Fasher and its region, said Michael Jones, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. Some new forms of weaponry have reached them: “Numerous reports suggest that RSF has received mortars, rockets, howitzers, loitering munitions, including quadcopters, and Chinese-made long-range drones.”
Gold rush: how precious metals finance war
An important feature of the RSF’s financing and of Sudan’s strategic position is gold. Gold represents about half of all Sudan’s export revenues. Hemedti himself is an important figure in the gold trade from Darfur. Most mining in Sudan, especially in the west, is described as “artisanal” – using low-tech methods, panning, picks and shovels, and dubious means such as cyanide.
A mutiny among the Janjaweed forces about 20 years ago allowed Hemedti to move to Darfur to defeat them and take over a large artisanal gold mine in Jebel Amir. Hemedti’s own company Al-Gunaid became the largest exporter of Sudan’s gold. The gold trading network of both the RSF and the SAF is a spider’s web. One tracks north to Egypt. The RSF trail runs through Chad and Khalifa Haftar. However, most of the gold route leads to the Gulf, where trade is conducted in or through Dubai in the UAE.
An important feature of the RSF’s financing and of Sudan’s strategic position is gold
The road to peace in Sudan is as difficult as ever, says Sir William Patey, who has extensive experience as a diplomat and ambassador in the Gulf, the Arab world and Sudan. “It will be very difficult to maintain peace – given the nature of the conflict.” The RSF consists of nomadic Arabs. They prey on more sedentary African groups of farmers spread across Darfur with extortion, violence and expulsion; and this will probably remain so.
Outside influences matter – “we have to ask why outsiders support such genocidal maniacs as the RSF,” says Patey. “Anything can happen in this uncontrolled space,” concludes Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6. “We can see the resurgence of Isis and the extremists. Where there are strategic minerals, you always see the Chinese moving in.”
For Sir Mo Ibrahim, a philanthropist of Sudanese descent – although he tells me he is “just a concerned African” – a ceasefire is the urgent priority. “The ceasefire is fundamental, and then we have to get the aid in – but that is very difficult.” There is a lack of fuel for aid convoys and on average only two of every ten trucks reach their destination. It is difficult to find drivers for help; they are threatened and two drivers were recently murdered.
The big players must be involved, argues Pasquale Ferrara, former Italian ambassador to Libya and Algeria. It is not clear whether US President Donald Trump sees breaking Sudan’s cycle of war and carnage as part of his road map to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Almost everyone I interviewed feared that things were likely to get much worse in Sudan. The battle between the RSF and the SAF is far from having a local – and a regional, probably global – impact. “Maybe we’re all waking up to it far too late,” says Dearlove.
“The problem is that we have so many weapons in Sudan now,” Ferrara says. “We have two armies with us. And there is no security whatsoever.”
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