• Fighting between military forces and militia groups has led to 10,000 killed and around 5 million displaced.
• War crimes including genocide have documented by the United Nations.
With the world’s attention diverted to the ongoing humanitarian crisis taking place in Gaza, the war in Sudan has escaped the notice of many in the west including the mainstream media who haven’t been regularly reporting on the situation.
Fighting began on the 15th of April when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group commanded by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo who is better known as Hemedti, fell out of favor with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and began attacking SAF military bases situated in the capital city of Khartoum.
In 2019, both Hemedti and General al-Burhan ousted Sudan’s military dictator Omar al-Bashir, subsequently ending his three decades of rule. The military agreed to share power with a caretaker government in order to transition to democracy, but to nobody’s surprise they reneged on their promise and seized power in a coup in late 2021 with the RSF’s help.
Once together in coalition, relations between the RSF and SAF eventually soured over a dispute to integrate the RSF into the military earlier this year. The RSF wanted integration to take place over 10 years whereas the SAF demanded the transition take 2 years.
But the fighting has taken a massive toll. 10,000 people (mostly civilians) have been killed with 5 million internally displaced and around 1.4 million people have become refugees.
In the countryside the RSF has taken up the task of engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Masalit ethnic group. Last month in November, the UN reported that over 800 Masalit were killed by the RSF in Darfur, a region in the west of Sudan. Meanwhile the SAF has continued bombing RSF targets in residential Khartoum. Scores of innocent civilians have died as a consequence.
As with any modern conflict, foreign actors have been heavily involved in Sudan. For instance, the US was a major player in the planned democratic transition before the 2021 coup derailed the process. Russia too has taken an interest in Sudan with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov making a diplomatic visit in February this year.
Being rich in valuable resources such as gold in addition to the strategic location of Port Sudan, a port city near the Red Sea, has made Sudan susceptible to the meddling’s of foreign powers. The US is especially desperate to gain more footholds in Africa to counteract the influence of China and Russia in the continent but also to position itself closer to Iran in the event of a war, which has become all the more possible given the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Sudan has been rocked by years of civil war since its independence in 1956 and efforts to curb instability and fighting have been fruitless. The violence grows while the world watches on.
