Sudanese civil war

The war began on 15 April 2023 when fighting erupted in Khartoum between units of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), quickly spreading to engulf the capital and much of the country ^[1]. The Battle of Khartoum marked the violent collapse of a power-sharing arrangement that had been visibly deteriorating for months. The proximate trigger was a dispute over the terms and timeline for integrating the RSF into the regular military — a process mandated by the Framework Agreement of December 2022, which was itself intended to restore a path toward civilian government after the October 2021 coup. The two generals who had jointly conducted that coup, SAF commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), could not agree on how, or whether, that integration would take place on terms acceptable to both.

The structural origins of the conflict lie in the peculiar way Sudan's security sector was built up under former president Omar al-Bashir, who ruled from 1989 until his overthrow in 2019. Bashir had deliberately cultivated the RSF — evolved from the Janjaweed militias deployed in Darfur in the early 2000s — as a counterweight to the regular army, ensuring that no single institution could threaten his grip on power ^[1]. By the time of Bashir's removal, the RSF had grown into a parallel military force of considerable size, with its own command structure, logistics, and revenue streams. This deliberately fractured institutional architecture left Sudan with two armed power centers whose interests were structurally incompatible once a common patron was gone.

The economic dimension of the rivalry reinforced its military character. The RSF under Hemedti had accumulated substantial independent wealth, most notably through control of artisanal gold mining operations in Darfur and Jebel Amer, which allowed the force to finance its own expansion without dependence on the state budget ^[1]. This financial autonomy meant that integration into the SAF would not merely be an organizational change but an effective dispossession — surrendering independent revenue, procurement authority, and command prerogatives that Hemedti had spent years consolidating. For the SAF's senior officer corps, conversely, absorbing a paramilitary of that size on terms that preserved its existing leadership represented an unacceptable dilution of institutional authority.

The political transition process provided the immediate arena in which these tensions became irresolvable. Following the 2021 coup, sustained civilian protest and international pressure produced the Framework Agreement, which outlined a two-year transition back to elected government and required the RSF's integration into unified national forces within that period ^[1]. Civilian pro-democracy factions and international mediators, including the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, pushed for a final political agreement through early 2023. Negotiations over the integration timeline — with the SAF insisting on a two-year window and the RSF demanding a decade or more — became the focal point of mutual suspicion. Both sides used the negotiating period to reposition forces and stockpile equipment, making the eventual outbreak of fighting a product of calculated preparation as much as sudden breakdown ^[1].

Regional and transnational factors added further pressure. The RSF had cultivated ties with the United Arab Emirates and had deployed fighters to Libya and Yemen, giving Hemedti international connections and a degree of external legitimacy independent of Khartoum ^[1]. Sudan's neighbors — Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya — each had their own interests in the conflict's outcome, creating a geopolitical environment in which external actors had both incentive and capacity to sustain their preferred faction. This wider regional entanglement meant that what began as a contest between two generals over the terms of a military merger rapidly drew in armed auxiliaries and outside sponsors, foreclosing the quick resolution that either side may initially have anticipated.

No formal ceasefire or peace settlement has yet been reached between the warring parties in Khartoum, and the conflict that erupted in April 2023 remains active as of this writing. Negotiations brokered in Jeddah under Saudi and American mediation produced a series of humanitarian pauses but no durable cessation of hostilities. The absence of a concluded agreement makes any assessment of consequences necessarily provisional; nonetheless, the war has already produced effects of a scale and character that are unlikely to be reversed by any eventual settlement^[1].

The humanitarian catastrophe the conflict has generated is among the most severe produced by any war in the contemporary era. By mid-2024, Sudan had become the site of the world's largest internal displacement crisis, with well over eight million people uprooted from their homes^[1]. The capital and its twin city — contested in the Battle of Omdurman and across the wider metropolitan area — were largely depopulated of their civilian populations. El Fasher in North Darfur and other provincial cities absorbed waves of displaced persons while themselves coming under sustained military pressure. The destruction of medical infrastructure, the interruption of agricultural supply chains, and the blockage of humanitarian corridors produced acute food insecurity across much of the country, with famine conditions declared in certain localities^[1]. The fall of Wad Madani to the Rapid Support Forces in late 2023 dealt a further blow to relief operations and accelerated displacement into neighboring states.

The geopolitical consequences for the surrounding region are already substantial. Egypt, Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, and Libya each share borders with Sudan and have been affected by refugee flows, weapons proliferation, or the activation of pre-existing proxy interests^[1]. Chad in particular has received hundreds of thousands of refugees, straining a state whose own stability is fragile. The conflict has drawn in external actors at varying levels of engagement, with the United Arab Emirates accused by the SAF-aligned government of supplying the RSF, a charge that, if accurate, would represent a significant external driver of the war's duration and intensity. The wider Horn of Africa, already under stress from the aftermath of the Tigray conflict and instability in the Sahel, faces additional destabilization from the fragmentation of Sudanese state authority.

Politically, the war has effectively destroyed the transitional governance framework that followed the 2019 removal of Omar al-Bashir. The civilian-led transitional government that many Sudanese and international actors had hoped would guide the country toward elections was displaced by the October 2021 military coup; the April 2023 outbreak of fighting between the two generals who had co-managed that coup represented the final collapse of any shared military stewardship^[1]. The RSF's proclaimed Government of Peace and Unity, headquartered outside Khartoum, has sought but not achieved broad international recognition. Sudan's membership in regional bodies has been suspended or complicated, and the state apparatus itself — courts, ministries, the central bank — has been split or paralyzed.

What the war has most conspicuously failed to resolve is the structural problem that preceded it: the question of how Sudan's competing military, paramilitary, and civilian political forces might be integrated into a legitimate and accountable state. The RSF's origins as the Janjaweed militia implicated in atrocities in Darfur, and the SAF's own history of political intervention and repression, mean that neither principal belligerent commands the civic trust that a postwar reconstruction would require^[1]. Violence in Darfur, including attacks on non-Arab communities that international observers have characterized in terms of ethnic cleansing or genocide, has reopened wounds that the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (2011) failed to heal^[1]. Any future political settlement will inherit not only physical devastation but a population whose experience of organized violence has further corroded the foundations of inter-communal coexistence that a functioning Sudanese state would need to rest upon.