The devastating war continues to unfold in Sudan. On Oct. 26 the Rapid Support Forces, after placing the city under siege for 18 months, seized the capital of the North Darfur State al-Fashir, taking the last remaining positions of the Sudanese Armed Forces in the Darfur region. Under its brutal 18-month siege, the RSF prevented the entry of food and medicine, forcing the city’s 1.2 million people to survive on animal feed. Once the city was taken, the horrors have continued with widespread reports of the RSF raping women and children and executing civilians with impunity, including massacring nearly 500 patients in the Saudi Maternity Hospital.
The current civil war has been ongoing for two and a half years, producing a devastating impact on the Sudanese people, institutions, and infrastructure. Since 2023, 12 million Sudanese people have been internally displaced, making it the largest internally displaced population in the world. As the war has raged on, many mainstream media outlets and international organizations have reduced the dimension of this multifaceted proxy conflict with varying external competing interests to simply a humanitarian crisis that only involves two political forces within Sudan. So what is really going on?
Contextualizing the current war in Sudan
The war in Sudan has its roots in the long history of the country since it won its independence from British colonialism in 1956. By then, the country navigated the tumult of the Cold War that saw the rise and fall of both revolutionary and reactionary political movements, as well as complex relationships with international forces from Egypt and Libya to Israel and the Gulf monarchies. In 1989, Sudan fell under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, a regime that would last 30 years.
During this period, Sudan opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. Later in 1998, the United States bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant and lied to the world that the facility, which produced half of the essential medicines needed in the country, was manufacturing chemical weapons for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
In 2011, a dozen states in southern Sudan seceded to form the Republic of South Sudan and promptly established formal relations with the State of Israel. The secessionist forces in the south had for decades received Israeli military and political support. This support has continued through the South Sudanese Civil War of the 2010s, inflaming the ethnic violence that has defined that conflict.
In December 2018, mass protests rocked the country, and within months in early April 2019, the Bashir regime was toppled by a coalition of popular forces. As Liberation News reported in 2023, the basis of this revolutionary movement was the “network of over 5,000 Resistance Committees” that continued to maintain a constant state of mobilization through the post-Bashir period which saw right-wing forces form a transitional government.
By October 2021, the military took direct control of the country and escalated the repression of the mass and popular movements that toppled Bashir — a goal which united both the SAF and the RSF at the time. An April 2023 statement by the Sudanese Communist Party, released at the outset of hostilities, explains how “the two warring forces went far, conspiratorially, to consolidate their power,” including suppressing and killing revolutionaries “by various criminal means,” and displaying “no hesitation unleashing war on heavily populated cities without regard for the humanitarian cost.”
RSF, UAE, and the war today
Since the spring of 2023, the war has devastated the country. Tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced. From the beginning of this phase of the war, popular forces in Sudan have maintained that if it were not for the influx of arms — initially small arms and trucks, but more recently expanding to include heavier weaponry and, most destructively, drones — the RSF and SAF would not have been able to maintain hostilities beyond a couple of months.
The role of the United Arab Emirates in propping up the RSF has received increasingly intense scrutiny in international media, including major bourgeois papers like the Washington Post and from both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. High officials in the United Nations Security Council have also recently made public condemnations of the RSF’s siege and capture of al-Fashir.
The UAE has benefited tremendously from its support of the RSF. The western territories controlled by the RSF are rich in gold mines and operate a robust network of smugglers that has funneled much of this gold into Emirati markets and banks while the UAE provides drones, arms, and satellite communications equipment that have been essential to prolonging the conflict. Many analysts hoped that the SAF capture of Khartoum in the spring of 2025 would portend a ceasefire soon, but recent developments — in particular the siege and fall of al-Fashir — have dashed hopes for a near-term resolution of this brutal war.
This is not the first time the UAE has intervened in conflicts in North and East Africa. In 2011, the UAE participated in the bombing and overthrow of the Libyan state under Muammar Gaddafi and ultimately backed General Khalifa Haftar’s faction in the subsequent civil war. Since 2011, and in particular since 2014, the UAE has conducted hundreds of airstrikes and drone strikes in Libya killing thousands of people. The destruction of Libya also opened up a vacuum filled by arms and human trafficking across the region, including to and from Sudan.
The current stakes
The UAE is consequential, but not the sole international provocateur prolonging and extending the slaughter in Sudan. The SAF, for example, are backed in large part by regional, U.S. backed regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as states opposed to U.S. imperialism in other parts of the world like Russia and Iran. It is essential to understand these dynamics as a manifestation of the global system of imperialism.
In an increasingly multipolar world, Sudan has become a battleground for regional powers and international forces with both narrow, immediate interests and long-term geostrategic goals. The demands of the Sudanese people remain the same as they were when the Bashir regime was toppled five years ago: for a just peace and the freedom to pursue economic development and democratic processes.
The ongoing civil war has the greatest impact on Sudanese women, girls, children and the elderly. The recent massacre at the Saudi Maternity Hospital is one outcome of the war. As the war rages on, Sudanese women have played distinct and critical roles in social movements, political change, and revolutionary transformation. This consequently makes them a target of both warring parties.
In understanding the conflict, international organizations and social movements also have a role to demonstrate solidarity, but also inflict pressure on international institutions and complicit governments for prolonging the increasing crisis in Sudan. The unfinished tasks of the Sudanese people’s movement for a genuine civilian democracy demand it!
Feature image: A Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
