Since April 2023, Sudan has entered a brutal war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) fighting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), both hitting civilians across the country, manipulating and weaponizing pre-existing communal tensions. The power struggle between the two former allies, which removed the Al Bashir regime in 2019, was in the making since 2021, when they derailed the civilian-led transition. A key aspect of this rivalry tends to be neglected in the West and in media representation and revolves around the self-perception and performative narratives of both parties: SAF considers itself the bearer of the Sudanese state and its defender, identifying the RSF with a predatory rogue militia that needs to be eliminated. The RSF’ governance ambitions—which predate the war—are premised on a strong Arab pastoralist identity, a profitable extractive political economy, and powerful patrons, the United Arab Emirates first and foremost. While the two sides cooperated in the past, after more than three years of all-out war and intense violence within a zero-sum game logic between their elites, their reciprocal demonization and their transformation into existential enemies seems hard to reverse.
The victimization of civilians has been a consistent feature since the early days of the conflict, from both sides. The numbers of civilians affected by the conflict are staggering: as of July 2026, there are more than 33 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, over 12.7 million women and girls suffered from gender-based violence, 8.8 million internally displaced, and 5 million people face emergency or catastrophic hunger levels, with over 100,000 experiencing famine-like conditions.
Conflict is compounded by other crisis factors: the closure of the Hormuz Strait is increasing the price of fertilizers, desperately needed by Sudanese farmers during the current planting season. Funding shortcuts and the dismantling of the international humanitarian architecture inaugurated by the second U.S. Trump administration also weigh heavily on the fate of millions: suffice it to consider that due to extreme funding shortfalls, the World Food Programme has reduced its assistance from 5 million Sudanese to 3,5 million people, while simultaneously reducing rations. The conflict is shaped not just by military dynamics on the ground, but by the conflict’s increasingly complex transnational political economy. Only recently, both the European Union and the British government adopted sanctions on gold export industries—Sudan possessing one of Africa’s largest gold reserves—which are deemed to be supporting the war effort, as is the gum arabic industry, on both sides, and whose exploitation by both parties to the conflict makes the conflict financially sustainable.
Three dynamics are particularly worrisome for Sudanese civilians, but also for the Horn of Africa more broadly.
The first dynamic is the risk of a shift from the current regionalization of the conflict to the deterioration in one Horn of Africa conflict ecosystem, or an Africa mega-war. The 2023 war in Sudan is far from being “just” an intra-Sudanese affair. The two Sudanese sides not only benefit from the financial, military, logistical and political support of regional and extra-regional actors but also provide the ground for their proxy fights, in a typical Cold War modality, even in the Arab world. Sudan namely provides an unfortunate theater for geopolitical rivalries to play out: from the intra-Gulf one, between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to the current Ethiopia-Eritrea fallout; to the deteriorating relations between Egypt and Ethiopia since Cairo hosted Tigray fighters and SAF supported Cairo in the GERD dispute, leading Addis to stand with the RSF. On top of that, there are interest-driven regional states, such as Kenya with regard to trafficking Sudanese gold and Chad signing cooperation agreements with the UAE enabling the swift transfer of weapons to the RSF in Sudan.
Overall, a mix of motives accounts for regional and extra-regional states’ involvement in the conflict: material incentives (gold trafficking to name one), political incentives (SAF is a safer bet for Cairo Nile security concerns), ideological reasons (the Emirati anti-Islamist agenda driving their anti-SAF stance, among other aspects), infrastructural reasons (the Emirati wish to develop Port Sudan). The overlay of material and immaterial incentives, shaping fragmented external proxy agendas, together with the proliferation of state and non-state actors involved, a difficult aspect to tackle in negotiations. In addition to regional actors, the conflict has been amplified by the engagement of international state actors such as Russia and of international private non-state actors such as Colombian mercenaries fighting for RSF, as in the siege of El Fasher in North Darfur in 2025.
This leads to the second dynamic: the dearth of attempts at effective mediation for the management, if not resolution, of the conflict. For once, the involvement of so many regional players diminishes the chances of identifying an honest broker or one considered such by both parties to the conflict. The limited engagement of the African Union speaks volumes to the ongoing fragility of the regional organization whose mandate is first and foremost about maintaining and/or restoring peace on the continent. The two key financial patrons and backers of the Sudanese rivals, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, made only one attempt at mediation with the Jeddah Talks in 2023 and then broadened the format to include the U.S., Egypt, and the Quad, which last met in autumn 2025. In April 2026, the third Sudan conference in Berlin did widen participation to include the country’s civil society organizations and pledged US$1 billion in humanitarian aid, but fell short of charting a viable path for mediation.
Western actors and most mediators start from the assumption that the unitary nature of the Sudanese state must be preserved in any future agreement, despite the current de facto governance partition in two entities, one controlled by the RSF in the south-west, including most of Darfur and Kordofan, the other by SAF over the east and north. Frontlines continue to shift in Blue Nile and in the Abyei region, but overall demarcation lines have become geographically relatively stable and many increasingly openly speak about partition either as a de facto reality that risks entrenching or as a likely outcome. For the time being, in terms of wartime political order, sovereignty in Sudan is mostly segmented, as the two political actors exercise full sovereignty over distinct parts of the territory, rather than exercising limited sovereignty over the same part of the territory. Violence is particularly acute in contested areas, where fighting is not merely intended to win over the adversary but the local civilian population.
This leads us to the third and last dynamic: the victimization of civilians through blockades and sieges, especially by the RSF. This was the case with the capital of North Darfur, El Fasher, in 2025—when RSF slaughtered over 6,000 people, after an 18-month siege during which they denied civilians access to food, water, medical supplies and humanitarian assistance—and the ongoing 18-month siege of El Obeid. In the case of El Fasher, the ethnic dimension of the targeted population was visible, as the rhetoric deployed explicitly identified non-Arabs as the population to be eliminated, signaling intent, which led international experts to formulate the accusation of genocide. According to survivors’ reports, RSF fighters would explicitly ask: “Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all”; and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur.” The current siege of El Obeid seems less ethnically induced and more logistically driven.
El Obeid is the capital of North Kordofan, with a population of 500,000 and still under SAF control, which keeps control over an eastern corridor, while the RSF has encircled the city from north, west and south and, especially since June, has been hitting the city with heavy drone attacks, which are the hallmark of this siege. It sits between the RSF-Darfur, central states and the areas controlled by SAF in North Kordofan. Even more significantly, from El Obeid, a main road gets to Khartoum and Omdurman, the capital twin city, representing a key supply route for the army. Especially after having lost Khartoum, imposing their control over El Obeid would empower the RSF and severely damage prospects for the SAF to hold out. At the humanitarian level, residents have nowhere to flee; the city is undergoing a fuel and electricity crisis due to attacks, food prices have surged up to 300 percent, and water prices have doubled.
As was the case with El Fasher, the international community is made aware in real time of rapidly deteriorating humanitarian conditions, as well as of the military and political consequences should El Obeid fall under the control of the RSF, and yet, little political will, especially among those countries that could hold sway over key parties to the conflict, such as the U.S. and Egypt, is employed to prevent further atrocities.
Cover photo: Women and children queue to receive free food being distributed in al-Mohayra camp for displaced people, near the city of El-Obeid in the southern Kordofan region, on June 29, 2026. (Photo by AFP)
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