By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Sudan Is Unraveling: Why War Is Likely to Once Again Tear the Country Apart

A subject we covered in 2002 and 2003 continues to flare up again. More recently, after destructive fighting, Sudan’s civil war has reached an uneasy stalemate. Since the beginning of 2025, the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied militias have made significant gains against the Rapid Support Forces, the powerful militia accused of genocide, as the two factions vie for control of the country. By late March, the SAF had recaptured the capital, Khartoum, reclaiming Sudan’s presidential palace and clearing most of the city of RSF fighters. Nevertheless, the SAF is unlikely to defeat the RSF outright: the militia continues to maintain strong control over approximately a quarter of the country’s territory, largely in the west. And the RSF, in turn, seems unlikely to be able to retake the ground it has lost in the eastern, northern, and central parts of the country and is now focusing its efforts on fortifying its hold over the vast Darfur region. Over the past few weeks, fighting began to ebb, but it is again intensifying in North Darfur’s provincial capital, El Fasher, the SAF’s last remaining stronghold in Sudan’s west.

Because the war’s frontlines seem mostly set, historical precedent suggests that now would be an ideal time for a cease-fire or even peace negotiations. In many previous African conflicts, a battlefield deadlock encouraged international actors to push for negotiations, as happened in 2005, when U.S.-backed talks ended the second Sudanese civil war after more than two decades of fighting between southern rebels and Khartoum. Indeed, it might even seem that de jure partitioning, akin to the 2011 secession of South Sudan, could be the least bad option. The Sudanese people certainly need a reprieve: the latest conflict has devastated the country, leaving as many as 150,000 Sudanese dead, nearly 13 million displaced, and up to 25 million facing severe food insecurity or famine.

 

Long Divisions

The current Sudanese civil war is far from a straightforward, two-sided conflict. It began as a brawl between two factions within the country’s security apparatus—the SAF, under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti. Burhan and Hemedti had allied to topple the civilian-led transitional government that had emerged after the long-standing Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir’s ouster in 2019, but then turned on each other in April 2023.

Over two years, their rupture has metastasized into a much bigger war involving numerous Sudanese groups and well-resourced foreign patrons such as Egypt, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. New militias have emerged to align with each faction, and older armed groups have thrown their lot in with either the SAF or the RSF. The older groups include major tribal and regional militias, such as the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), both based in the Darfur region and aligned with the SAF, as well as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), a longtime rebel force that has allied with the RSF.

But in the case of Sudan’s current civil war, any hope that negotiations, if they can be started, will result in lasting peace is illusory. The conflict has deepened existing ethnic and regional faultlines; the atrocities that the RSF, in particular, has perpetrated have made negotiations unpalatable for many of the SAF’s backers. Simultaneously, a wide variety of actors—including powerful foreign countries—have an interest in seeing the factions they have backed stay as powerful as possible. That makes crafting a peace settlement that generates a single government difficult.

History strongly suggests, however, that any kind of territorial fragmentation will also fail to bring stability. South Sudan’s secession did not dampen the conflict consuming the region; it merely displaced the fighting, as the rebel group that had fought Khartoum fragmented and its factions began to battle one another. If the warring sides continue to refuse a cease-fire or peace talks, that could yield a situation similar to what has occurred in Libya and Yemen: a de facto split in which Sudan remains intact in name only. Rival power centers will take hold in different parts of the country, and many of the groups that are fighting today, alongside new ones that will likely emerge, will continue to fight.

 

Neither the SAF nor RSF claims to be waging war for ideological reasons. Although the SAF’s leadership has branded its fight as a nonsectarian battle for the survival of the Sudanese state, Islamists have dominated its top officer corps for nearly four decades. After the Bashir regime armed Janjaweed militias to counter rebellions by non-Arab groups in Darfur, in 2013 it officially organized these militias into the RSF. Although the RSF’s constituent militias have credibly been accused of genocide, the RSF now appropriates the very claims of marginalization and disenfranchisement once voiced by the ethnic rebel groups it was originally tasked with eliminating.

In reality, however, one of the current war’s most important motivators is Sudan’s vast mineral and agricultural wealth. The country has huge gold reserves and the second-largest amount of arable land in Africa, and both domestic and foreign interests are struggling for control of these resources. In addition, smaller factions have lined up behind one side or the other to wage more localized power struggles or to secure personal wealth: the JEM’s leader, Gibril Ibrahim, for instance, has sided with the SAF, in part, to maintain his lucrative role as Sudan’s minister of finance.

On the surface, the fact that Sudan’s civil war is driven by material rather than ideological interests makes the prospect of a negotiated settlement appear more viable, even if hammering one out would be complex. If each important faction got something concrete that it wanted, one theory goes—if natural resource concessions or cabinet positions were distributed satisfactorily among the combatants—the fighting could stop. Hypothetically, a military stalemate could also induce the combatants to come to the table. The SAF has more troops and airpower. But the RSF’s forces are battle-hardened and skilled at insurgency tactics, giving them an advantage in urban warfare, as evidenced by their ability to hold Khartoum and other major cities for two years. Numerous rounds of talks have been attempted, including formal negotiations led by Saudi Arabia and the United States and secret talks facilitated by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. But each attempt has failed.

 

Outside In

Such efforts to resolve the Sudanese conflict misunderstood its dynamics. Although neither side can eliminate the other, both the SAF and the RSF have managed to make, and hold onto, territorial gains covering the parts of the country that their domestic and international constituencies consider the most important. Even as the fighting has begun to ebb, many of the war’s key players are unwilling to engage in a settlement that would end the stream of profits generated by their war machines.

Early on, both sides sought external support to fund their war efforts. The United Arab Emirates has sustained the relationship it nurtured with the RSF from 2015 to 2019, when it hired RSF troops to serve as mercenaries in Yemen. To secure an export corridor for Sudanese goods, Abu Dhabi has sent cargo flights full of powerful weapons, drones, and armored vehicles to the RSF via its client state (and Sudan’s western neighbor), Chad. Egypt, meanwhile, seeks a sympathetic ally in Khartoum as it aims to secure influence over the Nile in the face of Ethiopia’s efforts to exercise power over the crucial waterway. To that end, Cairo has sent military aid to the SAF and has allegedly engaged in airstrikes against the RSF. Egypt also relies on Sudanese resources—often smuggled—to help prop up its flailing economy.

Other countries have backed one side or the other, too. Although Saudi Arabia has publicly positioned itself as a peacemaker, it has implicitly sided with the SAF during past rounds of negotiations, in part because of its regional competition with the United Arab Emirates. The SAF has also courted Russia, which wants to establish a military base on the Red Sea, and it recently secured drones from Iran and Turkey, two actors that also want greater influence over nearby shipping lanes.

For these international partners, an informal stalemate is not so different from a negotiated peace. As long as each coalition’s area of control remains largely set, the kinds of economic activities important to these patrons can proceed without the bother of negotiating a politically difficult resolution. And foreign backers can maintain lucrative supply lines without the burdens associated with doing business with a legitimate state (such as regulations and tariffs) or popular protests against resource extraction that benefits a small elite.

Sudanese Armed Forces fighters outside the presidential palace, Khartoum, Sudan, March 2025

 

Weak Bonds

Perhaps the greatest barriers to achieving a negotiated peace in Sudan, however, are internal. Each broad alliance is dangerously fragile, susceptible to infighting and splits. Given that neither the SAF nor the RSF have a rigid ethnic or sectarian identity, or a publicly professed ideological mission, little commands the loyalty of the smaller allied militias beyond the resources they are currently receiving. The war has already been marked by high-profile defections, such as that of Abu Aqla Kaykal and his Sudan Shield Forces. Kaykal initially aligned with the SAF and then defected to the RSF in mid-2023, proving instrumental to the militia’s capture of Sudan’s El Gezira state in the country’s fertile center. But when the SAF recaptured the region in late 2024, he again switched sides.

Challenging simplistic narratives that cast Sudan’s wars as disputes between Arabs and Africans, this conflict has transcended ethnic bonds, which makes each coalition less robust. In October 2024, for instance, as the SAF recaptured El Gezira, some SAF troops and associated militias attacked non-Arab ethnic groups. In retaliation and to protect other non-Arab groups, SLA and JEM forces in El Gezira clashed with SAF-aligned Arab militias, even though those two groups are officially allied with the SAF.

To the extent that the factions’ territorial control continues to shift on the margins, that could push further defections. The RSF’s recent retreat from central Sudan suggests that the militia may be willing to surrender that territory to focus on cementing its hold over Darfur. That would leave the two major Darfuri groups allied with the SAF—the SLA and the JEM—without any territory under their control, making defection tempting. These complex dynamics complicate peace talks, because it is often unclear what each side is really able to offer.

Even if some short-term truce could be reached, the large assortment of ethnic groups and ideological camps that have allied with each side means that restoring social cohesion will be even more difficult. Even before the civil war, the variety of interests at play in Sudan were complicated. After two years of war, faultlines have hardened, and divides have become more emotional.

 

Interest Race

The country’s de facto partition is already beginning. The map of territorial control in Sudan today suggests a bifurcated country, with the west—apart from El Fasher, North Darfur’s capital—largely under the RSF’s grasp, and the east, north, and center of the country held by the SAF. In February in Nairobi, the RSF and its partners signed a transitional constitutional agreement paving the way for the declaration of a parallel government over the large swaths of land they control.

A split may ostensibly seem an attractive outcome, but it is extremely unlikely to bring durable peace. Both the SAF and RSF coalitions are fragile: the newly formalized RSF alliance makes strange bedfellows of the staunchly secular SPLM-N and a variety of breakaway factions from Sufi religious orders for whom secularism is a political third rail. The SAF’s coalition includes both secular armed groups and Muslim Brotherhood–aligned Islamist militias, but its most important international patrons—Egypt and Saudi Arabia—are staunchly anti-Brotherhood. Furthermore, any new polities would not have contiguous ethnic boundaries. The project of governing heterogeneous regions would be tremendously complicated by Sudan’s weak or absent state institutions, especially in historically marginalized territories held by the RSF. And if the country split further, its two nascent polities—one landlocked—would be far less economically viable than if they remained united. Additionally, both the SAF and RSF are moving away from land battles and instead seek to destabilize their rivals’ territory with air or drone strikes, making the country as a whole increasingly ungovernable.

Paradoxically, the high degree of fragmentation that makes a unified government so hard to achieve in Sudan is the same thing that makes any solution that splits the country and establishes multiple governments unstable. At present, both broad alliances would be hard-pressed to identify a contiguous area of territory that they and their supporters would be satisfied to maintain and other zones that they are willing to cede. And given the many accusations of war crimes leveled against each side, neither alliance could boast a solid mandate to govern within the territory it controls.

Because the conflict is overwhelmingly driven by a struggle over regional power and resources, rather than any larger political vision for the country, it remains likely that alliances will keep shifting, militias will keep defecting, and breakaway groups will keep forming. Sadly, instead of either peace or partition, Sudan’s most likely future is more war.

 

 

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