A Lesser-Known Conflict: Sudan

This article is part of a series dedicated to placing a spotlight on ongoing conflicts and events around the globe that do not receive the same degree of attention as others. The latest article in the series, on the conflict in Myanmar, can be accessed here.

Humanitarian crises and civil wars in developing countries, especially in places such as Africa, tend to be looped together into the abstract notion of a “tragic conflict.” By this, I mean a conflict that has neither beginning nor end and seems to only come into the news cycle when yet another massacre, famine, or genocide takes place. While this way of looking at conflicts in the developing world can help attract charitable donations from sympathetic observers, and perhaps spur wealthier nations into funding some form of aid, it can also create an overly simplified view of a country’s history and current situation. 

This phenomenon has recently become particularly relevant in Sudan. Sudan is one of the few countries in Africa whose domestic affairs have become the subject of major Western media attention in the past few decades. Specifically, the nation received a significant amount of media coverage during the Darfur Genocide, which lasted from 2003 to 2005 and resulted in the deaths of approximately 200,000 members of non-Arab ethnic groups in Sudan’s Darfur Region at the hands of militias collectively known as the Janjaweed. Nations and international organizations across the world were quick to condemn the violence, with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell specifically labeling the attacks on Darfuris a genocide in 2004. The conflict attracted the attention of numerous celebrities, including George Clooney, JK Rowling, and Angelina Jolie, and inspired the creation of numerous movies and documentaries. 

While these efforts certainly helped to raise funds for humanitarian aid and overall public awareness of the genocide, the conflict in Darfur—and in Sudan at large—is far from over, and stands to grow worse as time goes on. Currently, Sudan is engaged in a civil war between the government-aligned Sudanese Armed forces, who have pledged their support to general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, an armed group that consists mostly of members of Janjaweed militias and led by Janjaweed leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, also called Hemedti. Conservative estimates of the death toll place the number at roughly 62,000, although mass malnutrition and destruction of key infrastructure, such as hospitals, could lead to a massive increase in death toll as the war continues.

While some major news sources have covered the war, coverage has been fairly fragmented, and quite infrequent compared to the way the Darfur Genocide was covered two decades earlier. Part of this is simply because the war in Sudan has been overshadowed by the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which have been equally—if not more—as bloody as the war in Sudan. Part of it, however, is also because the conflict is immensely complicated: given that one side is led by a brutal military junta and the other by the remnants of genocidal militias, it is difficult to cover the conflict as a simple “good/bad” fight in the same way Darfur could be covered. Besides that, the international actors that have invested the most resources in the conflict, such as the United Arab Emirates, are also countries that tend to receive less scrutiny in mainstream news sources.

Context: Sudan’s Geography and Early History

To better understand how Sudan has gotten to the state it is in today, it is necessary to provide some context on the country’s geographic situation and long history. The country is trisected by the Nile River and its tributaries, the Blue and White Nile Rivers. This waterway has provided a passage through the otherwise difficult to traverse Sahara for millennia, and the fertile lands along its riverbank have been the site of countless states and kingdoms throughout history. Because of its geography, the area that is modern-day Sudan has historically been a crossroads between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean-bordering nations of northern Africa. Ancient Egypt, for instance, traded extensively with the Nubian kingdoms located in modern-day Sudan for goods that could only be found south of the Nile. At times, the Nubian rulers, such as those of the Kingdom of Kush, even ruled over Egypt itself. 

In the 4th century AD, the Kingdom of Kush collapsed, leaving a group of smaller states in its wake. These smaller states, most notably the kingdoms of Alodia and Makuria, persisted for around a millennium afterwards, converting to Christianity shortly after emerging and remaining independent amidst the Muslim conquest of North Africa. Eventually, however, these states declined, and Arab nomads from the north began settling in the region. This period of decline was completed by the quick conquest by an ethnic group known as the Funj at the turn of the 16th century. The Funj leadership in Sudan eventually converted to Islam, which, combined with increasing settlement of Muslim Arabs, led to an increasing displacement of Coptic Christianity in the area. The Funj Sultanate persisted for three centuries, but was eventually itself conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century. 

Ottoman rule—or, more specifically, Egyptian rule, for Ottoman Egypt was a de facto independent state—gradually expanded further southwards over the course of the 19th century, with the empire’s sphere of control in Sudan roughly reaching the country’s borders before the independence of South Sudan in 2011. It is important to note that while the northern areas of Sudan had been gradually Arabized and Islamicized over the preceding centuries, the southernmost areas of the region were mostly populated by followers of African traditional religions who had more similarities with ethnic groups found in modern Kenya and Uganda than Arabic-speaking peoples to the north. The differences between the country’s northern and southern regions would become immensely relevant over the course of the next two centuries.

Around the same time Ottoman Egypt spread southwards from their original Sudanese possessions, the scramble for Africa led to the conquest of vast swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa by European powers. Many European nations, most notably the British, soon set their eyes on Sudan as a potential area of conquest. At the same time, in the 1880s, a movement led by a man claiming to be the Mahdi (a messianic figure in Islamic theology) freed Sudan from Egyptian rule and initiated a brutal war between Sudan and its neighbors. The British eventually triumphed over the Sudanese, establishing joint rule between itself and the Egyptians in Sudan at the end of the 19th century. British-Egyptian rule over Sudan lasted for another 50 years, until the newly-independent Egyptian government of Muhammad Naguib, who was part-Sudanese, pressured the British into giving up control of Sudan in the 1950s. 

Modern Sudan and the Lead-Up to the Current Conflict

Almost immediately after Sudan’s path to independence began, a civil war broke out between the Arab-dominated government and forces seeking to establish autonomy or even independence for South Sudan. The civil war caused massive destruction of infrastructure across southern Sudan and destabilized the entire country, resulting in multiple coups d’état. In 1972, the civil war ended after almost two decades of fighting, and southern Sudan was granted a degree of autonomy.

Around a decade after the first civil war ended, however, tensions began brewing again. Growing Islamic fundamentalism in the north continued to increase the divide between the north and the south, and rebel groups in the south soon began revolting again in 1983. While peace negotiations held by the newly-established civilian government in the late 1980s showed some promise, they eventually fell apart. Shortly afterwards, in 1989, the three-year experiment with civilian rule in Sudan ended, and a military regime led by Colonel Omar al-Bashir seized power. Bashir’s regime pursued an increasingly aggressive strategy towards both the civil war and domestic governance, imposing Islamic law on the south and torturing and executing countless dissidents.

Around the same time the civil war began winding down and negotiations between northern and southern forces began, non-Arab groups in the Darfur region began agitating for more rights and resources from the central government. Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, aided and abetted by the government, began the aforementioned genocide, and it was not until massive international pressure was applied that a peace agreement was reached in 2006, with a UN peacekeeping force being established in 2007. By that point, however, most of the deaths in the genocide had already occurred.

Meanwhile, in 2005, the government and southern forces signed a peace agreement, agreeing to cease hostilities and hold a referendum on South Sudanese independence. In total, the war, which had lasted over two decades, had led to the deaths of around two million people, mostly from malnutrition and disease rather than direct violence. In 2011, the referendum on South Sudanese independence was held, and South Sudan became an independent nation that year.

In northern Sudan, following South Sudanese independence, tensions were gradually rising due to increasing prices and dissatisfaction with al-Bashir’s nearly three-decade-long period of rule. Following massive protests that were brutally suppressed, al-Bashir was finally ousted in a 2019 coup. While the new military regime initially promised a transition to democracy and joint civilian-military rule, another coup in 2021 established sole military rule yet again. 

The Course of the Civil War

Following the 2021 coup, tensions between Sudanese Armed Forces leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of Sudan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council, and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (or Hemedti), deputy leader of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, began to grow, reaching a breaking point in 2023. The Sudanese Armed Forces, under the command of al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, former Janjaweed militias led by Hemedti, began fighting each other in the nation’s capital, Khartoum, beginning the current civil war in full.

As the war dragged on, the Rapid Support Forces (“RSF”) gradually gained territory across the country, particularly in Khartoum and the western regions of the country, such as Darfur. When the RSF took control of Gezira state, located in the central part of the country, they massacred at least hundreds of people in towns across the state. Under RSF rule, citizens of Gezira state were prohibited from fleeing and faced disease outbreaks and malnutrition. When the Sudanese army recaptured Gezira in January, they engaged in further mass killings, mainly ethnically-targeted reprisals against groups they accused of collaborating with the RSF. 

In Darfur, following the capture of El Geineina, the capital of West Darfur state, the RSF massacred thousands of civilians, mostly from non-Arab ethnic groups such as the Massalit, in what Human Rights Watch described as an act of ethnic cleansing. As a result of these frequent massacres at the hands of a force that is, in large part, made up of the remnants of a genocidal militia, many have scrutinized the large amount of support the United Arab Emirates has provided to the RSF. Just a few weeks ago, the Sudanese government decided to bring a case before the International Court of Justice accusing the RSF of committing genocide. The UAE is not the only foreign entity involved in the war, however. The Wagner Group, the Russian private military company aligned with Vladimir Putin’s government, has also provided the RSF with military, economic, and political support.

While the war had been in an effective stalemate for most of the past year or so, the past few months have seen some significant developments. The Sudanese government has made some gains in eastern states, and, perhaps most notably, in Khartoum. Just two weeks ago, the Sudanese Armed Forces captured the presidential palace, along with large swathes of central Khartoum. While the RSF controls large portions of the area around Khartoum and multiple states in the country’s west, however, it remains uncertain whether or not the end of the war is soon at hand. Indeed, if the international community continues to neglect Sudan, existing violence and ethnic tensions could easily spiral out of control.