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EXPERT COMMENT

As world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly, now is the time to put the focus back on Sudan and build international support for ending the war.

Nearly two and a half years after fighting erupted in Sudan, the brutal conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fatah Al Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), threatens to fragment the country. 

Yet Sudan still receives insufficient high-level diplomatic attention, global action and media coverage – despite enduring the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with 14 million people displaced. 

Aside from the humanitarian catastrophe, there are multiple reasons why Western governments should give higher priority to resolving the Sudan conflict. These include the threat to Red Sea security posed by plans for a Russian naval base, the growing Iranian presence in Port Sudan, and the risk that Sudan – which hosted Osama bin Laden in the 1990s – could once again become a haven for terrorist groups and a source of increased irregular migration to Europe. 

The Sudan war is also a wider regional crisis, which is destabilizing the country’s immediate neighbours and risks creating an axis of instability linking the Sahel with the turbulent Horn of Africa and wider Middle East.   

But more is at stake than realpolitik. Sudan’s war is not just a struggle for power and wealth between the warring parties and their regional backers. It is also a counter-revolutionary war seeking to bury the achievements of the peaceful Sudanese revolution of 2018-19 and block the path to a genuine democratic transformation. 

The war is deeply rooted in Sudan’s long history of internal conflicts, including the militarization of politics and the economy, three decades of Islamist rule and a culture of impunity – factors which led Burhan and Hemedti to conduct a coup in October 2021, terminating the democratic transition and sowing the seeds of the current war. 

Click here to continue reading the full version of this Expert Comment on the Chatham House website.