Battlefield gains by Sudan’s ruthless paramilitary rattle regional powers

As Sudanese paramilitaries have borne down on his home region of Kordofan, a former military officer has watched in horror as fighting engulfed the people and places he loved.

Two brothers were killed, caught up in the conflict. Of his sister’s three sons, he said by phone from exile in Europe, one was dead, another was wounded and unable to walk. A third was in jail.

“Yesterday I lost my uncle in a drone attack at a market near my village,” the officer said, requesting anonymity, adding that the threat to Sudan’s future had drawn him into supporting from afar an army from which he once defected. “If I counted what I have lost, it is so much.”

In the weeks since securing one of their biggest victories of the civil war, seizing the western city of El Fasher, battlefield momentum has swung behind the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in its calamitous two-and-a-half-year conflict against the Sudanese army and allied militia.

After consolidating control of El Fasher and the surrounding region of Darfur — slaughtering men, raping women and holding unknown numbers for ransom — the RSF is now pushing east and south into Kordofan in an offensive set to compound what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.

Fierce fighting at the garrison town of Babanusa, on the way to the army-held city of El Obeid in central Sudan, augurs another bloody showdown. Some 250 miles further north-east is Khartoum, the capital.

“El Obeid is a huge mercantile capital, for cattle and agriculture,” said Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst. “For the RSF it is not only strategic because it’s on the way to Khartoum, but also because there is a lot of looting potential,” she added, explaining that RSF fighters are mostly remunerated in war booty.

Yet even as the RSF presses its advantage militarily, the atrocities it has committed have added not just to global scrutiny of the paramilitaries themselves but of the United Arab Emirates, whose alleged shipments of sophisticated weaponry helped the RSF regroup after being routed earlier this year. 

Abu Dhabi strenuously denies backing the militia, which is led by renegade general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti.

On the diplomatic front, Sudanese Armed Forces leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has appeared to gain some ground, capitalising on the horrors inflicted on non-Arab Sudanese caught in the path of the RSF, which has previously been accused by the US of genocide.

Yale University’s humanitarian research lab said that sources on the ground estimated the RSF had massacred some 10,000 people within three days of capturing El Fasher in late October.

“The biggest mistake the RSF has made is what it committed in El Fasher,” the ex-officer from Kordofan said. “They committed crimes and filmed them and sent it to social media. Everybody now knows what is going on.”

The RSF advance has also spooked neighbouring Egypt, which has provided political, intelligence and some logistical backing to the army since the onset of the war, according to regional officials and analysts.

Other regional powers have also been alarmed at the army’s inability to contain the RSF and may choose to weigh in more heavily now, according to analysts.

Turkey has previously provided weaponry including drones. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have both supported the army, which has, along with allied Islamist brigades, received backing in the past from Iran.

“The fall of El Fasher has spooked some of the powers on the sidelines who were not fully invested,” said Cameron Hudson, a Sudan expert who served previously on the National Security Council in Washington.

US-led peace efforts through the Quad — which also consists of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — have intensified and President Donald Trump appeared to support recent entreaties from Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman to help stop the conflict.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio chastised foreign powers for arming the RSF, in what was widely perceived as a veiled warning to the UAE, a close American ally.

The Quad had in September proposed a three-month humanitarian truce, to be followed by a permanent ceasefire and transition to civilian rule.

But while the RSF’s Hemeti appeared to endorse the truce last week, announcing a unilateral ceasefire that has yet to take hold, army chief Burhan rejected it.

He said the proposals sidelined the military — which Washington has also accused of atrocities — while leaving the RSF in place, and argued that the negotiations were unfairly influenced by the UAE, which disputes this.

Endorsing the ceasefire, Ibrahim el-Mirghani, a minister in the RSF-aligned parallel government — which has been eager to regain international credibility after the El Fasher massacres — said “every drop of Sudanese blood spilled after today shall fall upon the responsibility of those parties rejecting peace”.

However, RSF attacks have continued north of El Obeid, according to the army and Sudanese media. And the Sudan Doctors Network said on Wednesday that RSF fighters had attacked a mine alongside an allied rebel group, abducting 150 young men and children.

With the dry season under way, making it easier for both sides to move men and manage supply lines, the war could yet enter a more deadly phase, even if most analysts believe it is unwinnable.

For the ex-military officer from Kordofan, peace with the RSF was impossible. Even if he had misgivings about the army, the alternative was worse.

“No one can accept Hemeti as part of a peace in Sudan,” he said. “When we have destroyed this militia, then we will sit down and try to forget and forgive each other and try to build our country with peace, democracy and the rule of law.”

Cartography by Aditi Bhandari