Issue No. 125

After Three Years of War, What Is Left of Sudan?

Yesterday, 15 April, marked three years of brutal, grinding warfare between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Wholly neglected by a fading international community, many grim landmarks have been passed; another genocide in Darfur, the weaponisation of rape and starvation, another famine, or the desecration of Khartoum, El Fasher, and other major cities. And with no ceasefire or settlement in sight, the war has continued to swell, drawing in each neighbouring African country as tussling Middle Eastern powers grapple for the upper hand-- leaving Sudan in tatters. 

Since war erupted in April 2023 between the former allies and two security organs of the state, the war has continued to metastasise, leaving no Sudanese community unspared. Though no stranger to conflict-- Sudan has endured cycles of coup and war since its independence in 1956-- this regionalised conflict has brought home the peripheral violence to its Riverain core, devastating much of Khartoum and other Nile Valley cities. Beyond the tangible damage, the conflict has left indelible scars on Sudan's political settlement and society as well. Sudan, like Gaza, Ukraine and Tigray, is one of the epicentres of the breakdown of international humanitarian law, and a stark example of how little mass atrocities now rank in the priorities of an adrift, multipolar world. 

Though oft-repeated, the scale of the war remains staggering, with Sudan hosting both the world's largest displacement crisis, with roughly 14 million still displaced and the largest hunger crisis--19 million are facing acute food insecurity. The death toll is unknown, but is believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, with as many as 60,000 alone killed in the RSF's genocidal overrunning of El Fasher. The progeny of the Janjaweed that rampaged across Darfur two decades prior has returned to form, now armed with foreign weapons and high-spec drones that continue to strike far beyond the frontline. 

As the momentum of the conflict has waxed and waned, spurred by Gulf patronage and weapons, both the RSF and the Sudanese army have continued to reject any prospect of mediation. Across the three years, a rough Libya-style bifurcation of Sudan has emerged, with the current centre of the bloody impasse the Kordofans. The military government holds Khartoum, much of the country's centre, and the east, including Port Sudan, where it was based for the first two years of the conflict. The RSF, meanwhile, holds Darfur, the peripheral western region of Sudan, and with El Fasher having now fallen to the paramilitaries, the paramilitaries' hold over Sudan's western border has been cemented, allowing it greater access to guns, supplies, and fighters from its transnational war networks across Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, and beyond. This emerging geography reflects a broader fragmentation of sovereignty itself across militarised zones of extraction and control.

In turn, the RSF has established the fig-leaf 'Government of Peace and Unity', a rival claim to the state backed by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N). In Khartoum, meanwhile, Kamal Idris may nominally head up the government as prime minister, but the power centres remain elsewhere, namely a fractious alliance of Islamists and Bashir-era military officials, overlaid with support from Riyadh and Cairo —both of whom are well-known for their opposition to the Islamist factions in turn. Throughout the country, however, the Sudanese state has been hollowed out, replaced by ad hoc, militarised and competing governance enclaves, each embedded in its own networks of support.

And three years into the war, Sudan's internationalised conflict has become a vicious Gordian Knot of proxy violence; the fulcrum of intra-Gulf competition that is grappling over the future of the Red Sea Arena. Driven by overlapping and distinct interests ranging from access to its coastline to the role of political Islamism to agricultural land, two rough blocs have formed behind the Sudan's principal belligerents. One side is the RSF, backed by the UAE, with a host of neighbouring African states facilitating arms flows and support underwritten by Emirati patronage, including South Sudan, Chad, and increasingly Ethiopia. On the other hand is the Sudanese army, supported by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with Eritrea arming and training pro-government militias as well. Pre-war Iran, Russia, Qatar, Turkiye, and others too have engaged in the conflict through arms and advisors, structuring its internal political economy and prolonging the duration.

It may be too early to gauge the full reverberations of the conflagration in the Middle East, but it is highly unlikely to be positive for the quagmire of geopolitical interests in Sudan and broader competition for the region. Before the war, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi's deteriorated geostrategic relationship had descended into open acrimony, reverberating across the broader Red Sea Arena, particularly in Yemen and Somalia. Arms have continued to flow into Sudan despite the upending of the Middle East's regional order, and when-- or if-- the dust settles, such intra-Gulf competition for the region will likely renew with fervour. Throughout the country, the costs of food and everyday goods were already high, even before the Strait of Hormuz was partially shuttered, which is likely to compound the twin economic and humanitarian crises consuming Sudan. The war, though, is notably exposing fissures within the Sudanese army, particularly between the Islamist bloc with linkages to Tehran and the military command, which relies on Saudi patronage, and has thus condemned Iran's targeting of the Gulf's commercial infrastructure. Such fractures illustrate further that neither side is wholly coherent, but rather coalitions held together by external dependencies and internal rivalries. 

This week, at the third anniversary, internationals and elements of Sudan's grimly divided civil society gathered in Berlin to raise awareness and spur another fundraising drive. Some new pledges were made, but much of it represented a mere recycling of funds, while the question of the ceasefire lies beyond the assembled parties. Indeed, all understand that peace in Sudan runs through Doha, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi, but a fractured diplomatic corps has prioritised these relationships over the Sudanese people.

Since the start of the war, the intermittent mediation efforts in Jeddah and elsewhere have repeatedly failed, with the belligerents and their foreign patrons maintaining their zero-sum line, believing that victory on the battlefield remains possible-- and preferable to political accommodation of the other. Today, the latest—and main—mediation effort is led by the Quad, comprising the US alongside the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. But while a peace roadmap was agreed in September 2025, hostilities have persisted in Sudan, and the army has outright refused to discuss a freezing of the frontlines. Moreover, the US's haphazard, transactional foreign policy appears unlikely to compel these Arab powers with vested interests to exert sufficient pressure on their Sudanese allies, even before Washington voided much of its influence through its adventurism in Iran. Such pressure is crucial, as neither the RSF nor the Sudanese military coalition is interested in making peace, with the transnational war economy-- fuelled by gum arabic, gold, weapons, and livestock-- still booming. 

Meanwhile, millions of Sudanese are facing acute hunger and famine, with the worst-case scenarios of famine only staved off in parts of the country by the localised responses by the Sudanese-led Emergence Response Rooms (ERRs), and foreign aid. The ingenuity of the ERRs-- many tragically born from the neighbourhood committees of the thwarted Sudanese revolution-- has been one of the few bright spots of the conflict. Even so, funding has dwindled, and aid is still struggling to reach those in the most acute danger —such as Dilling and parts of Darfur and Kordofan. And tens of thousands still perished in Darfur under siege from the RSF, and the broader generational impacts of hunger, malnutrition, and disease will be felt for decades to come. 

Some reconstruction work is underway in Khartoum and other cities in the Nile Valley, but two years of intense urban combat have wrought immense damage. The once-proud city at the confluence of the Nile waters is a shell of its former self, with basic services still haphazard and its economy gutted. Much of the capital —including the contents of Sudan's prized national museums —was stripped of anything of value and carted off to Sahelian markets. And whilst several million people have returned to Khartoum since the army retook the city in March 2025, civilians are picking through the rubble of their lives as they face peril from government-aligned Islamist paramilitary groups like the Popular Defence Forces (PDF).

The war in Sudan, too, is amplifying the breakdown of the broader Horn of Africa's regional order, with insecurity and polarisation spilling over into each of its neighbours. Though fears of war between Addis and Asmara may have abated for the time being, any renewed violence would no doubt intersect with the war in Sudan, forging one vast conflict system reaching from Darfur to the Bab al-Mandab. In recent months, Ethiopia, in particular, has been playing an increasing role in the conflict, seemingly at the behest of its Emirati patrons by facilitating arms and training for the RSF through the western Benishangul-Gumuz region. In turn, the Sudan conflict is also refracting across pre-existing political strains within the Horn of Africa and beyond, such as the rift between Ethiopia and Egypt over Nile waters. And from beyond the Red Sea, their Gulf patrons-- immured from the breakdown of the nation-state-- have been all too happy to facilitate more weapons and more money to such myopic aims. Sudan is thus best understood not as an isolated civil war, but as part of a wider Red Sea conflict ecology in which local, regional, and global rivalries are mutually reinforcing.

For some weeks, reports have abounded that a ceasefire could be agreed upon by the Sudanese army and the RSF, though its scope is unclear. But even if a ceasefire comes about, fundamental questions about the nature of the Sudanese state and the current conflict remain unanswered. Principally among them, what is the role of the army and the RSF in any post-conflict political dispensation? More fundamentally, Sudan's history suggests that wars are rarely discrete interruptions, but recurring phases in a longer cycle of contested state formation, in which each settlement reconfigures rather than resolves the underlying struggle over sovereignty.

On the third anniversary of the war, Sudan's trajectory remains grim, with violence and impunity for its perpetrators unabated. There is no sign of exhaustion, quite the opposite, as the conflict continues to expand and adapt, sustained by transnational war economies and the external patronage networks from the Gulf. And tragically for the people of Sudan, the degenerating state of the Middle East is likely to only further amplify such dynamics and competition, with the disregard for international humanitarian law all too apparent on both sides of the Red Sea. And left unchecked, the war is now fragmenting further still, pulling in each of its neighbours as the fulcrum of a degenerating regional order. The first three years of war shattered Sudan's political and social fabric, but the next months may bring the entire Horn with it.

The Horn Edition Team