US begins push to end war between two ‘bad actors’ in Sudan
Rival mediation efforts have failed to bridge gap between the warring generals
By David Pilling and Gioia Shah
From left, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, and the de facto President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan © FT montage; Reuters/AFP/Getty Images
A newly appointed US special envoy to Sudan will seek to persuade foreign powers to adopt a united approach to ending a conflict between two generals whose struggle for supremacy has driven 8mn civilians from their homes and killed thousands.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said Tom Perriello, a former special envoy to the Great Lakes region, would aim “to drive engagement with partners in Africa and the Middle East to stop this senseless conflict”, a reference to the fractured process in which rival mediation efforts in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Bahrain and elsewhere have failed to bridge the gap between the two warring sides.
The US appointment on Monday follows months of accusations by Sudanese citizens that the outside world has forgotten the civil war, which erupted 10 months ago between factions led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the de facto president, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti, a former camel trader who leads the Rapid Support Forces.
“You cannot leave a population of 45mn suffering from the madness of two crazy generals,” said Amjed Farid, former special adviser to the ousted civilian administration led by Abdalla Hamdok. “This is a war between two bad actors, both of whom lack legitimacy to run the country.”
The fighting has killed at least 13,000 people, unleashed a torrent of alleged war crimes and created one of Africa’s worst refugee crises in recent decades.
Of the 8mn displaced, nearly 2mn people have fled the country, among them Muzan Alneel, an activist now living in Uganda. Shortly after the fighting started last April, her family hired a bus to escape from Khartoum, scene of some of the heaviest fighting between Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces and Hemeti’s RSF, a breakaway paramilitary group.
“Air strikes started on the first day and Khartoum is not that big so by default the whole capital is a war zone,” she said.
She initially travelled some 800km to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. “We arrived the day Port Sudan was announced as the new administrative capital. That’s the level of privilege we have — we take the capital with us,” Alneel said, contrasting her middle-class position with that of millions of poorer Sudanese who have sought refuge in the countryside or fled to camps in neighbouring countries, including Chad and South Sudan.
Ahmed Soliman, an expert on Sudan at the UK’s Chatham House think-tank, said “middle powers” had filled the void left by western countries. The United Arab Emirates, which fears the SAF is allied with the Islamists who ran the country for decades under dictator Omar al-Bashir, is backing Hemeti, he said.
An independent panel of experts that compiled a report for the UN said there was strong evidence the UAE was supplying arms in the guise of humanitarian supplies through Chad. The UAE has denied the claims.
Soliman said Egypt, Turkey and, more recently, Iran were supporting the SAF, which had enabled it to mount a counteroffensive after being on the back foot for months. Last week government forces re-entered Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city across the Nile.
Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a professor and human rights lawyer, who was in Omdurman when the SAF troops arrived, said they had gained control of virtually the whole city.
“We are seeing a much more aggressive, much more offensive SAF that is trying to gain back territory,” said Kholood Khair, director of Khartoum-based consultancy Confluence Advisory, who said Iranian support had been significant. “They are showing they are capable of winning battles, but they will need to do a lot more to shift the tide of the war.”
Burhan’s counteroffensive has, at least temporarily, put paid to suggestions that Hemeti was on the verge of winning the war outright. In December, after RSF troops took Wad Madani, a city south of Khartoum, Hemeti flew on an Emirati jet to meet African leaders from Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and other countries in what appeared to be an attempt to portray himself as Sudan’s leader in waiting.
Cameron Hudson, a Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic International Studies, said Washington had struggled to deal with a war in which victory for either side was regarded as unpalatable. Hemeti and Burhan had twice joined forces, once in 2019 to bring Bashir’s 30-year rule to an end and again in 2021 to overthrow a transitional civilian administration.
“The reason why our collective heads are buried in the sand is because there is no clear path forward,” Hudson said. The war, he added, was being fuelled by external forces vying for influence in the strategically important country.
Hudson said the UAE had calculated that Hemeti, who once led the notorious Janjaweed horseback militia accused of genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region, was a bulwark against Islamists. But he cautioned: “My personal assessment is that Sudan cannot be at peace ever as long as Hemeti is a factor.”
Soliman said neither the RSF, whose soldiers have been accused of gang rape and ethnic cleansing, nor the SAF, which has bombed civilians indiscriminately from the air, could be regarded as legitimate leaders.
Alan Boswell, project director for the Horn of Africa at Crisis Group, said there were no good outcomes to a war that had reignited ethnic violence, including in Darfur. “A ceasefire could become a de facto partition after which they’d have to try to put Sudan back together again,” he said.
Alneel doubted whether outside actors, including the new US envoy, could help bring lasting peace as long as the soldiers using her country as a “battlefield” remained in power.
The exiled activist feared that the international community was not thinking beyond “some sort of power-sharing agreement between elites with weapons and elites without weapons” — precisely the sort of arrangement that was ended in 2021 by the generals now fighting each other for control of the country.