No one can say they didn’t know what would happen. By the time El Fasher fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in October 2025, it had been subject to an 18-month siege, its population reduced to eating animal feed. There had been repeated warnings, multiple famine declarations, a UN Security Council resolution calling for an end to the RSF’s blockade, and sustained media alerts of an impending massacre. It was clear what would happen once the RSF, a militia contesting control of the Sudanese state, took the city. The group emerged from the Janjaweed militias that razed the region of Darfur in 2003. Between April and June 2023, the RSF had already ethnically cleansed one non-Arab group from West Darfur, killing up to 15,000 people. In April 2025, the RSF then seized Zamzam, a camp for internally displaced persons on the outskirts of El Fasher, and repeated the playbook: massacring more than 1,000 civilians, raping women and children, and destroying health services.
A communications blackout meant that much of what occurred during the RSF’s final assault on El Fasher last year remains uncertain. In mid-November, British MPs were privately briefed that a low estimate for the final death toll is 60,000 people killed over three weeks. Other experts have used satellite imagery to suggest that the number could be as high as 150,000, which would make El Fasher the single deadliest massacre this century. Human rights investigators have not been able to access the city, so these numbers remain projections. Much of what we do know has been gleaned from videos recorded by smiling RSF fighters. In one video, the RSF stalk through the Saudi Maternity Hospital, shooting patients. In another, one RSF officer, Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, known as Abu Lulu, is perched in front of an emaciated prisoner, lying prone on the ground, his legs blown off. The cameraman pans right to a heap of bodies lying on the banks of an earthen berm, with dozens of smouldering vehicles just beyond them. Abu Lulu then engages the prisoner in conversation, and as he begs for his life, other fighters strip the possessions from corpses. Abu Lulu then shoots the prisoner, before striding off in search of another victim. In another video, he tells a captive: “I will never have mercy. Our job is only killing.”
The “never again” bromides of liberal internationalism invoked after the Rwandan genocide, and propagated by Samantha Power in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), strike a particularly hollow note today. She was head of the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) under the Biden administration when the Sudanese civil war began in April 2023. While Power was photographed at the Chad-Sudan border, next to displaced Sudanese people, the US administration let the conflict unfold, making only occasional calls for a ceasefire. This involved half-heartedly investing in a ceasefire agreement signed in Saudi Arabia to which neither side adhered. Trump’s administration is no better. After El Fasher fell, in November 2025, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, visited Washington and urged Trump to get involved in Sudan. Trump then announced that “there’s a place on Earth called Sudan, and it’s horrible what’s happening”.
America’s latest initiative has also been unsuccessful. As part of the Quad – a grouping of the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – it proposed a three-month truce, to enable humanitarian aid to enter Sudan, followed by a transitional process leading to a civilian-led government. The Sudanese army, smarting after the loss of El Fasher, rejected the proposal. They claimed that the UAE’s involvement is biased, and that the proposal aims to eliminate the army. While the RSF responded by declaring a unilateral ceasefire, this was merely a rhetorical ploy; it proceeded to attack the Sudanese army in the Kordofan region.
The US’s diplomatic dreams have run up against the hard limits of its own geopolitical priorities. The RSF assault on El Fasher was only possible because of weapons – including British-made targeting systems – supplied by the UAE. Without real pressure on the Emirates, the war will continue. Yet Trump is not willing to criticise his allies in the Gulf, let alone sanction them. The UAE is a key trading partner, and as one of the lead signatory of the Abraham Accords with Israel, a central plank of the US’s strategic plan for the Middle East. Sudanese deaths, from this perspective, are the price to be paid.
Photo by Alex Majoli/ Magnum Photos
To understand how we got here, one must go back to 1983, and the beginning of the last Sudanese civil war. A rebel movement had risen up in the south, in what is now the state of South Sudan, in protest against the region’s marginalisation by the northern riparian cities that had dominated the country since its independence from the UK in 1956. The Sudanese elite in Khartoum, the country’s capital, decided to conduct a counter-insurgency on the cheap, outsourcing the conflict to militias that looted in lieu of being paid wages. Hunger was used as a weapon, as Khartoum restricted humanitarian access to vast swathes of the south. For the capital’s politicians, those who died in the peripheries simply didn’t count.
In 1989, Omar al-Bashir, an ambitious brigadier general, took power in a coup d’état. The war was not going well, and Sudan was in an economic crisis. Yet Bashir forged an enduring form of rule, the lineaments of which are still with us today. He let the country’s rivalrous security services build up their own economic empires by selling off the state to his cronies.
By the early 2000s, the Sudanese civil war had entered an uneasy stalemate. Bashir’s undoing would begin not in southern Sudan, but in New York. Osama bin Laden had resided in Khartoum during the 1990s, and the US had designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism, claiming the country had harboured members of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Bashir worried he might soon be in America’s crosshairs. An unlikely lobby also emerged in Washington, uniting secular advocates of liberal state-building with Evangelical senators who framed the war as a civilisational struggle between Islamist forces in the north and Christians seeking self-determination in the south – a narrative far simpler than the reality. The US pressured Bashir into an agreement with the rebels, granting them control of a regional southern government and the promise of a referendum on secession.
The US had promised to lift sanctions and remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Yet in 2003, another war broke out in Sudan, this time in Darfur. The region’s non-Arab communities rebelled in response to long-standing marginalisation. Rather than deploy the regular army, the government armed and empowered local Arab groups, who coalesced into the Janjaweed militias. A widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing followed, which left approximately 200,000 dead, though this only counts the most violent period (from 2003 to 2005), and in reality, the conflict has never stopped. The Save Darfur campaign, which commodified grief and sold it to the American public, meant sanctions on Sudan remained in place.
Khartoum’s expedient counter-insurgency proved costly for Bashir, empowering militia leaders who soon demanded status, resources and influence. Bashir also feared a coup d’état from within the ranks of the military high command. He solved both problems in 2013 by creating the RSF under the command of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The RSF became Bashir’s praetorian guard and, from the outset, was deployed to crush demonstrations in Khartoum. It also built a vast economic empire of its own, exporting mercenaries to fight in Yemen and controlling migrant routes to the north. Most importantly, the RSF seized control of Darfur’s gold mines.
South Sudan’s secession in 2011 imperilled Bashir’s long-term control of the country. In one fell swoop Sudan was deprived of 75 per cent of its oil. Bashir desperately tried to reorientate the economy towards gold. While he dreamed of mines under the control of the central bank, artisanal gold mining proved much harder to manage than the oil sector. The RSF took over the most lucrative mines in Darfur. The country’s shift to gold mining weakened the state’s control of resource extraction, just as it enabled the RSF’s rise.
No one in Khartoum welcomed Hemedti’s proximity to Bashir. In Darfur, Hemedti had preached a variant of Arab supremacism to justify the mass displacement of non-Arab groups. In Khartoum, he was viewed as a foreign interloper: an uncouth nomad from the peripheries with no place in the political elite.
Gold was unable to solve Bashir’s problems. In 2018, an economic crisis prompted Bashir to cut wheat and fuel subsidies, leading to protests in rural areas, which soon spread to Sudan’s cities. The demonstrations were joyful occasions. People would chant in solidarity: kol al-balad Darfur (“the whole country is Darfur”). For a moment, it felt like the discrimination and violence of Bashir’s regime would be undone and a new social contract formed. On 11 April 2019, Bashir was removed by the military. For a couple of days, graffiti praising the army was sprayed on to the capital’s walls. It didn’t last long. The army wanted to preserve power, not hand it over to the civilians. On 30 June, tens of thousands of people protested in Khartoum against the junta that had come to power.
Under international pressure, a transitional government was formed, which saw civilian politicians uneasily sharing power with the new head of a sovereign council, the commander-in-chief of the Sudanese army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, Hemedti. The civilian side of the government was led by a UN economist, Abdalla Hamdok. Rather than implement the protesters’ progressive ideas on housing and food, Hamdok favoured economic austerity and the elimination of subsidies, policies designed to win the favour of the International Monetary Fund. Hamdok lost the support of the public.
Nevertheless, the prospect of civilian government rattled Al-Burhan and Hemedti. On 25 October 2021, just a few hours after assuring the US special envoy that there would be no coup attempt, the two men pushed the civilians out of power. The idea that they could rule Sudan with an iron hand was ludicrous. Neither side had any real social base. The army had lost the religious support that had allowed Bashir to rule during the 1990s and was unpopular due to its role in repressing the revolution. Hemedti had never been successful in his efforts to diversify the RSF outside of its Darfuri roots.
When I visited Khartoum in October 2022, a year after the coup and six months before the current conflict broke out, the regime was flailing. The coup leaders struggled to find a viable civilian face to front the junta, and protests continued. In some ways, the coup had restored an older opposition: once again, it was the people vs the military.
The proximate trigger for today’s conflict was an internationally backed “framework agreement” that forced the RSF and the Sudanese army into negotiations over the shape and structure of the country’s military. Al-Burhan wanted the RSF disarmed: a non-starter for the militia. Both sides began recruiting extensively and it became clear Al-Burhan and Hemedti would soon turn against each other.
Initially, the RSF took control of much of Khartoum, and soon seized some of Sudan’s breadbasket states. The very traits that made the RSF an effective militia became its undoing as a political organisation. In Jazira state, it pillaged everything from hospitals to grain exchanges, setting up checkpoints to tax the residents it didn’t kill. In every city it captured, the pattern was the same: loot, rape, steal. The brutality proved a recruitment boon for the Sudanese army, which stoked – often justified – fears of extreme violence to raise militias to fight the RSF.
By February 2025, the conflict had swung the other way, as the army pushed the RSF out of Khartoum and the breadbasket states. Partly, this was thanks to new weaponry. The Sudanese army had appealed to a variety of regional powers for support. Egypt has supplied intelligence and targeting equipment, while Qatar, wary of its Emirati rival, has given the army funds and drones, as has Turkey, which has become a haven for Sudan’s resurgent Islamists. Recently, I sat by the side of the Nile in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, with a member of the Sudanese intelligence agency. He told me that he had worried that with Bashir’s fall, the Islamists had lost their chance to take power. “But now, with this war, we can regain popular support.”
Sudan has become increasingly fragmented internally. The two belligerent sides are, in reality, coalitions of militia forces that have intensified ethnic differences among the country’s diverse groups as a means of recruitment. In truth, more unites the two sides than separates them. Both are relics of Bashir’s system of military rule. Both have blocked humanitarian aid and used hunger as a weapon of war, and both have committed war crimes.
Both sides have also profited by exporting gold to the Emirates, with annual exports almost doubling since the war began. Animal exports to the Gulf have also soared. Most of Sudan’s livestock comes from Darfur, but is exported via Port Sudan, which is under the control of the army. The two sides have collaborated in this sale of the country’s assets.
The country has become the world’s worst displacement crisis and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Only six years ago, people took to the streets of Khartoum chanting “kol al-balad Darfur”. Now the whole country has become Darfur, in the worst possible way: the Janjaweed’s violent campaigns of the early 2000s have becoming a living nightmare for the entire country.
Both of Sudan’s previous civil wars lasted over 20 years, and both ended the same way: in a negotiated settlement between rebels and the government. The geopolitical coordinates of the current conflict, however, are markedly different. There is no longer – if there ever was – sufficient international coherence to bring about an end to the Sudanese civil war. Sudan has become a battleground for a range of imperial interests. The Emirates are expanding their control of much of the Horn of Africa and the strategically vital Red Sea coast by purchasing the loyalty of a suite of countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, and eastern Libya, all of which have supported the RSF. The UAE has bankrolled the RSF as a crucial part of this regional strategy. Such is the importance of the Emirates to the US strategy in the region, though, that its own grand plans will receive no rebuke from the White House or from Downing Street, which also sees the UAE as a crucial trading partner. The other traditionally powerful Western actors in Sudan, including Norway and France, have been almost entirely sidelined by the Gulf’s involvement in the conflict. The idea of the RSF taking control of Sudan is a red line for its most powerful neighbour, Egypt, which supports the Sudanese army, as do Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Diplomats concerned with the conflict like to say that these players need to realise their interests are better served by a prosperous, democratic Sudan. But it is not clear that is the case. A fractured, divided Sudan, perpetually at war, is easier to control than a united polity. The geopolitical winds have shifted, and it may no longer be possible to put Sudan back together again.
[Further reading: Starmer’s doomed mission to Beijing]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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