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The fighting, triggered apparently by disputes over how to integrate the RSF into the military, has even involved airstrikes against rival targets and has impacted dense urban areas, leading to the deaths of more than 180 people, according to a U.N. official, with the toll expected to rise. It has also claimed the lives of three Sudanese people working for the U.N.’s World Food Program, while there were reports Monday evening of assaults on Western diplomats.
The two feuding generals have cast a long shadow over Sudanese politics. They both built their careers waging a brutal counterinsurgency against an uprising in the country’s western Darfur region that began in 2003; the atrocities carried out against the rebellion are seen as acts of genocide. Hamdan, known universally as Hemedti, came to the fore as the leader of a notorious pro-government Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which later morphed into the RSF.
After being part of the military establishment that decided in 2019 to oust long-ruling dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Burhan and Hemedti would later collaborate in bringing down a fragile civilian-led government in 2021. All the while, their soldiers intimidated and brutalized Sudanese pro-democracy activists and dissidents and a constellation of foreign powers cultivated both as assets in their own regional games.
Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies, the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”
Burhan and Hemedti were supposed to be stewards of a political transition back toward democracy, but they appear to have for their own reasons balked on that process. “The failure to form a government and the deterioration of the economic and security situation in the country, prompted the various military and civilian parties to sign a framework agreement in December 2022, which was widely accepted by civilians and important and influential parties from the international and regional communities,” explained a story in Asharq Al-Awsat, an influential Arabic-language daily.
Instead, unable to come to terms with the forging of an apolitical army, the two leaders came to blows. Boswell said that “this war is already dashing any hopes for the quick restoration of civilian rule,” and added that it “risks sucking in many outside actors and spilling across Sudan’s borders if not arrested soon.”
“Now, fighting could turn into a protracted conflict, with many fearing that the war could drag in regional patrons and neighbors such as Chad, Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the end, nobody knows if the RSF or army will vanquish the other, but their quest could upend the region,” wrote Mat Nashed in New Lines magazine.
While it may ripple across borders, the chaos in Sudan also is fueled, in part, by outside players. The interim regime dominated by Burhan and Hemedti has been propped up by billions of dollars in Emirati and Saudi financing. Egypt has stepped up its support of Burhan’s forces, while Russia, and in particular the influential Wagner Group mercenaries, has developed apparent ties and contacts with Hemedti’s forces. Sudanese fighters, particularly from Darfur, have ended up on the front lines of both the Saudi- and Emirati-led war effort in Yemen, as well as the conflict in Libya, where a thicket of regional powers, including the UAE, Qatar, Libya and Russia, were all involved.
Various regional powers eye Sudan’s Red Sea coast including Russia, which has a potential deal in place to set up a naval base in Sudan that would give Moscow a path into the Indian Ocean. So, too, the UAE, which “hopes to protect its long-term strategic interests in Sudan, including the ability to project military and economic power into Yemen and the Horn of Africa from ports and other installations there,” noted a policy brief from the Soufan Center, a global security think tank. “In December 2022, coinciding with the Sudan framework agreement, the UAE and Sudan signed a $6 billion agreement for two UAE firms to build a new port on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.”
Hemedti’s RSF reportedly control the bulk of Sudan’s lucrative gold mines, which has given him an apparent independent line of financing fueled by an illicit trade of smuggled ore that analysts say winds its way through the UAE and into Russian hands. Western analysts fear the expanding footprint of Wagner, which has cultivated ties with coup-plotting regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, and carried out counterinsurgency operations in the Central African Republic. French officials, in particular, have warned of the Kremlin’s growing clout in the restive Sahel.
“In the post Ukraine invasion-world, Hemedti’s more obvious relationship with Russian mercenary group Wagner has put him in the cross-hairs of international machinations across the Sahel,” wrote Kholood Khair, a Khartoum-based analyst. “For Cairo, the prospect of eliminating Hemedti is too good an opportunity to pass up, and the timing is right with western attention coalescing around halting the domino effect of former French colonies turning their backs on Paris in favor of Moscow.”
Egypt, which has in recent years supported Saudi and Emirati regional initiatives, is a more conspicuous supporter of Burhan, who Cairo sees as a bulwark of stability and a potential ally in geopolitical squabbles with Ethiopia over the construction of a major dam on the Nile. On Monday, there were reports of Hemedti’s forces detaining a contingent of Egyptian soldiers deployed in Sudan, a move that risks further expanding the arc of the conflict.
A host of foreign governments, including the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, urged a cessation in hostilities. But both generals have vowed to crush the other and show little sign of backing down. “Western nations have little leverage right now. Sudan has been largely isolated since Hemedti and Burhan seized power in a coup in 2021 that ended a short-lived civilian government,” my colleagues explained. “The debt-laden Horn of Africa nation desperately needs tens of billions of dollars to shore up its moribund economy, but deals are unlikely as long as the two men remain in power and fighting each other. Sudan’s economy tanked after the oil-rich south gained independence in 2011, and hyperinflation fed frequent street protests.”
Bashir’s ouster led to Sudan, Africa’s third-largest nation, coming somewhat out of the cold. The U.S. State Department removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, while both Burhan and Hemedti carried out tours of various world capitals. But Khair and other figures in Sudanese civil society argue that, in the current desperate context, neither military ruler should be backed as a figure to stabilize the situation.
“All the activists and civilians have been saying the whole time, do not trust these two. They are killers; they have been killing for 30 years,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Khartoum resident and former journalist, told my colleagues. “This is who the international community has been placating.”