If Fighting in Sudan Does Not Stop Soon, This Will Become a MAJOR International Crisis
This could get really, really bad.
Over the weekend, fighting erupted in Khartoum and elsewhere in Sudan. Two rival generals are now vying for control of the state with a full blown civil war looming. This could get very bad, very quickly.
How did we get here?
A few weeks ago, my podcast guest Hala al-Karib predicted something like this would happen. The short story is that back in April 2018, brave protesters and civil society activists helped to oust the nearly 30 year dictatorship of Omar al Bashir. The military generals who removed Bashir soon entered into a power sharing agreement with civilian leaders. The plan was to transition to full civilian control of the government by November 2021. But one month before that deadline two military leaders mounted a coup and purged civilians from the government.
The military leadership soon came under heavy international pressure to return to civilian control; and by all accounts did a terrible job managing Sudan’s frail economy. This lead to the military leaders to enter yet another agreement for democratic transition back in late December.
Those two leaders? The head of the Sudanese Armed Forces General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and head of the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan.
Rather than prepare for a civilian transition, these two generals are now fighting each other for control of Sudan.
Why this will reverberate far beyond Sudan
Burhan and Hamdan are enmeshed in a tangled web of international and regional alliances. Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces grew out of the Janjaweed militia that was responsible for the worst abuses during the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s. More recently, the RSF have been something of a regional militia-for-hire, supporting Saudi Arabia’s goals in Yemen and the United Arab Emirates objectives in Libya. The RSF and Russia’s Wagner Group have also entered into various partnerships over the years.
Meanwhile the Sudanese Armed Forces have been backed by Egypt — and since the fighting erupted this weekend, there’s been some reports of Egyptian soldiers being captured by the RSF. All these entanglements suggest that key regional and international players will have incentive to try and tip the scales of this burgeoning civil war — potentially adding fuel to the fire and prolonging the fighting.
(Sudan is also an oil exporter. Not huge, but not minor, either. China gets about 5% of its oil from Sudan.)
A second key reason that this fighting will be calamitous for the people inside Sudan and reverberate internationally is that the United Nations and international humanitarian community more broadly simply cannot handle yet another major crisis in the Horn of Africa. Remember: this outbreak of fighting comes on the heels of an epic regional drought that is causing near-famine conditions in Somalia. Meanwhile, neighboring Ethiopia is far from recovered from a recent horrific civil war, centered around the very regions that border Sudan.
As the fighting grinds on, the humanitarian needs inside Sudan will be immense and it is not at all clear that the UN and humanitarian agencies have the capacity to deliver. People are going to seek to flee and Sudan is neither small nor isolated. It has a population of 45 million people (for reference, this is double the population of pre-war Syria) — a significant number of whom we can expect to soon be on the move, internally and across borders.
If this fighting does not stop soon, all signs are pointing to Sudan becoming a MAJOR international crisis.
I’ll be covering the unfolding crisis in Sudan — and its broader global implications — on Thursday’s episode of the podcast. If you are not already a follower/subscriber you can click this link to get Global Dispatches on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.