Alberto Fernandez, vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), spoke to an August 19 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Sudan’s tragic history began shortly after its independence in 1956. The first Sudanese Civil War continued through 1972 with only a “brief interim period of peace” before the second Sudanese Civil War began. The latter resulted in “the death of more than two million people” and continued until 2005. “Ranked second in world history for the number of coups” that have racked its government, “war and political instability” account for Sudan’s current crisis.
The first civil war was a conflict between “the northern, mostly Muslim, Arabic-speaking Sudanese against the Christian [and] Animist, English- and Arabic-speaking” South Sudanese. It was during the second civil war in the 1980s that the “regime started to recruit tribesmen to fight for them.” These tribesmen, who were “rewarded for robbery looting, mayhem, murder, whatever,” became the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The RSF comprises militias whose leaders are mostly Darfuri Arabs. Established under the regime of dictator Omar al-Bashir, a former general who came to power in a 1989 coup, the RSF was recruited to fight under the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The difference between the two forces is that the SAF is “more like white-collar criminals as opposed to the blue-collar banditry, the street thugs of the RSF.” Although it was Bashir’s effort to “coup-proof his armed forces,” ironically, he was removed in a coup some three decades later. In 2019, the SAF and the RSF joined forces in the coup to oust Bashir and “shared power with the civilian interim government,” albeit “incompetently.”
In 2021, the civilian interim government was overthrown in another coup. “The inherent struggle” between the RSF and the SAF “was turbocharged by the removal of the civilian component.” By 2023, the power struggle between the two rivals erupted into all-out war. The conflict, which uprooted the population, was fought mainly in the capital of Khartoum and destroyed the commerce and industry centered there. The result of the looting and destruction was that “many people starved to death,” tens of thousands died, and some nine million were displaced.
“And the Islamists of Sudan are the big supporters of the military from day one when the war started. Meanwhile, the RSF, led ... Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, they’re not deeply ideological. They have a root, which is tribal, which is Arab. They have certain views of others. There is a kind of inherent sense where they look down on people who are not like themselves.
“So they highlight the nobility of the desert horseman, the raider. But they’re not deeply ideological and they’re certainly not religiously ideological. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them secular because I think that’s a meaning that is a very loaded meaning in the Arab world. But the army has this very clear Islamist, hardcore Islamist political dimension. But the RSF is not. There’s no doubt about that.”
Each side has its patrons and allies. The RSF is supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Libya’s General Haftar’s military, and Russians from the former Wagner Group. The SAF is also supported by Russians as well as by Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar. “The countries most involved in stoking the war have done the least to help the humanitarian situation in Sudan.”
The reasons regional actors are involved in Sudan’s internal civil war are varied and complicated, but “basically, both sides are maneuvering politically and maneuvering diplomatically while keeping the war going.” Egypt, for example, although opposed to political Islam, has been convinced by the SAF that, should it win, it will not be an Islamist regime, but a military one. The SAF also convinced Egyptian President el-Sisi that the RSF is closer to Ethiopia, a rival for Egypt’s source of water from the Nile.
The Sudanese people are paying the price for “an African crisis that is also a Middle Eastern crisis and which is a global humanitarian crisis.”
Monies funding each side in the war are split between sources. The SAF owns “corporations, factories, industries,” which form a “commercial empire,” while the RSF was able to take over gold mines in western Sudan. Although countries allied with each side also provide funding, both the SAF and the RSF are “basically corrupt business empires feeding off of Sudan.”
There is also a religious dimension to the ongoing conflict, Bashir aligned himself with political Islam, “and Sudan became, under Bashir, the longest lasting [Sunni] Islamist regime that we’ve seen in contemporary history.” The regime ousted secular generals and “Islamized the army,” with the SAF “still intimately tied at various levels with the Islamist political project in Sudan.” Although the RSF is made up of Arabs who are tribally rooted, they are “not religiously ideological.”
Part of the reason regional actors lend support is ideological, with those “opposed to Islamist regimes” holding the army to blame for Sudan’s ills. The RSF, while “bloody and brutal, are not particularly ideological. They’re transactional.” Although the RSF realizes it cannot govern without a “civilian component,” the SAF has had its army generals “running Sudan for much of its history” and considers itself “the de facto government of Sudan.” Patrons have their own reasons for being involved in their chosen side, “but certainly the biggest one over everything else is the concern of another Islamist regime coming to power in Sudan that could be a pole of instability in the region.”
The U.S. recently sent its envoy to Geneva, but “it’s been a bit of diplomatic minuet or diplomatic political theater” unfolding because “both sides are clearly committed to military victory” and looking for “more weapons, more men, more money to continue the fight.” The humanitarian crisis continues to displace refugees, even though the U.S. has “traditionally been the largest humanitarian donor to Sudan.” Yet mounting global catastrophes have produced “a kind of crisis fatigue.” It is the Sudanese people who are paying the price for “an African crisis that is also a Middle Eastern crisis and which is a global humanitarian crisis.”
