Sudan: is this an even more geopolitical conflict than Ukraine or Gaza?

Back in the 1990s, at a time of considerable optimism for the liberal international order, commentators used to distinguish between ‘wars of interest’ and ‘wars of choice’. The theory was that with the Cold War having come to an end, wars within states – between different ethnic groups or differing religions or regions vying for autonomy or outright independence – would become more frequent than international wars between the great powers pursuing their geopolitical rivalries. As the internal or local conflicts did not threaten to bring down the entire global order or to drag in other major powers, there was no urgent imperative for the Western democracies to deal with them. They could wait for the contending parties to get tired, or run out of money and weapons and come to the negotiating table. In the meantime, the humanitarian crisis often went on and on, claiming for instance over five million lives in the past quarter century in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or over one million Afghan lives in the civil war that broke out after the collapse of the Communist regime of Babrak Kamal in 1978. International humanitarian aid and the setting up of ever more refugee camps beyond the conflict zones provided succour of sorts where they could. It was not pretty, but as long as local conflicts could be kept local, the rest of the region and the global economy could get on with normal business. From time to time, the Western democracies rallied themselves into action. Sending in a poorly resourced and inadequately trained UN peacekeeping force (and hoping for the best) was usually the default option. Somalia, Mali, Cambodia and the DRC are ample testimony to this. But occasionally, Europe and the United States decided to take on the intervention role themselves to put a stop to ethnic cleansing and other gross human rights abuses. New legal standards, like the Responsibility to Protect or the mandate of taking war criminals to the International Criminal Court under the Rome Statutes, approved in 2002, facilitated these humanitarian coalitions. They met with mixed success and where those successes were notched up, as in Kosovo or Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurds in northern Iraq against Saddam Hussein, they only pointed to the failures elsewhere, as in Rwanda in 1994 or Syria in 2011. Of course, the Western democracies could reply that they could not sort out all the problems of a turbulent world and that it is better to act somewhere, sometime, than nowhere and never. And they could console themselves with the thought that, success or failure, no new threats would come their way and the impact on their own security would be minimal.

But the advent of the 21st century has made it more difficult to sort conflicts into ‘need to act’ or ‘don’t need to act’ categories. Or ‘wars of necessity’ versus ‘wars of choice’. In truth,  it was always a shaky distinction as conflicts rarely stay locked up within narrow national borders and human suffering generates its own form of geopolitics. Refugees and illegal migrants, for instance, are a much more important factor in US and European domestic politics and relations among allies these days. Globalisation, better transport routes and better communications, particularly mobile phones and social media, mean that migrants are able to travel much greater distances to their target countries, with Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis and Eritreans now filling up the makeshift camps in Calais together with Sudanese who constitute no less than 60% of the small boat passengers trying to get across the English Channel. Indeed, the worse the humanitarian crisis and the more prolonged it is, the greater the global geopolitical fallout is likely to be. This means that the West will have to pay more attention in the future to conflicts beyond its immediate vicinity than just a few decades previously when it could ignore them or at least content itself with tackling the symptoms rather than the root causes. What has changed is that the intense rivalry between the democracies and the authoritarian states means that Russia, China and Iran are no longer happy to stay on the sidelines but are more likely to interfere in conflicts to increase their influence, back who they think is likely to be the winner, and leverage their support for economic or strategic gain. Also, the medium-sized powers of the globe are no longer content to stand aside and wait for their great power patrons to take charge. With greater economic wealth and fuelled by modern, high-tech armies and air forces they have geopolitical aspirations of their own, and are ready to take matters into their own hands. So, Turkey has intervened in Syria, northern Iraq and Libya. It has also equipped and guided its ally, Azerbaijan, to push Armenia out of Nagorno Karabakh. Eritrea has occupied part of northern Tigray province in Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have sent their air forces into Yemen while Egypt and Qatar have also intervened in Libya, but this time on the side of General Haftar and the eastern Libyan authority in Benghazi (as has Russia). Acting on behalf of their client factions and their own interests, rather than the good and the long-term needs of the conflict countries themselves, these middle-sized powers rarely make the situation more stable and less violent. Given the number of regional conflicts around the globe today and the greater activism, mainly for bad, of the non-Western world, it is worrying that Europe and North America seem only able to focus on Gaza and Ukraine underestimating the geopolitical risks that these supposedly ‘second tier’ conflicts are generating. And even here, Ukrainian officials from President Zelensky downward often complain that since the Hamas attack on Israel last October their own war with Russia has slid down the agenda in Washington and the major European capitals, especially as Gaza and its catastrophic humanitarian crisis resonates more with their citizens and at the ballot box – and not only among Muslims – than Ukraine. So, negligence and the inability to focus on more than one conflict at a time will now extract a higher price.

Sudan is the epitome of the new regional conflicts where local and international dynamics increasingly intersect and humanitarian crises both exacerbate and are exacerbated by geopolitical rivalries and tensions. To start with the bold facts. Sudan, Africa’s third largest country, has been at war since April 2023. Its capital, Khartoum, has been razed to the ground in continuous fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under another Sudanese army general, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti. These two military leaders used to be allies in the Sudanese military government that launched a coup against its civilian counterpart in 2021 following the toppling of the former dictatorship of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. But they have since quarrelled and are fighting it out for control over the whole country. In just over a year the fighting has spread to 14 out of Sudan’s 18 provinces. This is not so much a civil war, as most of Sudan’s population is stuck helplessly on the sidelines, getting caught up in the violence where it is not being deliberately targeted, as in the province of Darfur. This past week, a team of fact finders, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council last October, and under the leadership of Mohamed Chande Othman, produced its first report on the impact of the war on Sudanese civilians. It accused both sides of war crimes and atrocities, including rape and summary executions as well as the persecution of minority groups, but also pointed the finger at the Rapid Support Forces for forcing women into slavery and recruiting child soldiers. It pointed to the risk of famine, especially In Darfur where the provincial capital, El Fasher, is being besieged by the Rapid Support Forces and cut off from outside relief. A recent peace conference in Geneva, hosted by Switzerland, the US and Saudi Arabia, did little to bring about a ceasefire as the two warring sides stayed away; but it did exert useful pressure to ease the humanitarian crisis by getting aid back into Sudan. The World Food Programme of the UN transported 1,500 metric tonnes of food, sufficient to feed 150,000 people. Last week, a new crossing was opened into northern Sudan from Chad at Adre. Yet all this is a drop in the ocean given Sudan’s spiralling humanitarian crisis. And the little that does get in is often raided by the military factions to feed their own forces or retained by the Sudan Armed Forces to prevent it from reaching areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces.

Around 150,000 civilians have lost their lives thus far. Ten million people have been forced to leave their homes. Some Western NGOs calculate that 2.5mn Sudanese could die of famine by the end of the year, making this one of the worst famines in Africa since Ethiopia in the early 1980s. Of course, if the fighting drags on into 2025 and beyond, this grim figure could be even higher. For the third time in just 20 years, the UN has declared a full-blown famine. Already, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have fled over the borders adding to the scores of refugee camps from conflicts in Ethiopia, the DRC, Somalia and the Sahel that already crisscross the African continent. In Sudan itself, the humanitarian situation has been compounded by the damage to hospitals and health facilities, as much as 80% in areas where the fighting has been most intense. There are also big makeshift camps inside Sudan itself, such as the ones at Gedaref in the east and Zamzam near El Fasher where the rainy season and dire sanitary conditions are leading to outbreaks of cholera.

Despite a year and a half of war, there is no end yet in sight for the suffering of the Sudanese people as neither side seems likely to prevail just yet. The Rapid Support Forces do seem to be gaining an advantage. They control most of Khartoum and this has forced the Sudan Armed Forces to relocate to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. The RSF have captured most of Darfur and are now advancing in the southeast in Sennar state, a move that has displaced a further 700,000 people. As the Rapid Support Forces push south, they are coming up against local militias on the border with South Sudan such as the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in South Kordofan. This militia is also engaged against the Rapid Support Forces in Blue Nile, near Ethiopia, turning the war into a confusing three-way conflict, which makes it harder for either the SAF or the RSF to gain control of broad swathes of the territory. As neither side can prevail by itself, the SAF and RSF have been turning to outside powers to enter the fray on their side, either by sending finance and weapons or by intervening directly themselves – albeit as discreetly as possible. Here’s where the geopolitics comes in. The Economist has described Sudan as “a chaos machine”, which does not seem an exaggeration given the regional shockwaves that the collapse of the country, at the strategic heart of Africa and the Middle East, and its future as a perpetual failed state, would bring. The country has seven vulnerable neighbours and an 800km coastline along the Red Sea, a vital waterway for global trade, easily disrupted as the recent Houthi attacks on commercial shipping have demonstrated. At one point Arabia is only 30km away from Africa across the Red Sea. When a state like Sudan in a strategic region collapses, it sucks in foreign interference, which as noted previously only makes the situation worse and then in turn exports the instability to its neighbours. So, Sudan could quickly destabilise Chad, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Sahel and countries further afield in the Horn of Africa and Eastern Africa. As Sudanese refugees head towards Europe and the main interferers and interveners come from the Gulf and Middle East, the war could impact on three separate continents.

Of course, disorder in any given place flourishes when the immediate region and the wider world are already in poor shape to act as policeman and act in unison. The US is only just rebuilding its relationship with Africa after decades of neglect, and largely on the back of African abstentions in the UN General Assembly in votes to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. In any case, the traditional US support for Israel and mobilisation of Arab-Americans and others to stop the suffering of the Gaza Palestinians make Gaza the overwhelming foreign policy issue in the US election campaign. Moreover, both Biden and Trump have prided themselves on being Presidents who have kept the US out of new wars. Despite supporting Ukraine, Biden has been extremely cautious about the type of weapons he has supplied to Kyiv, fearing at every turn an escalation with Russia or the US being sucked in directly. In Gaza, Biden would not even allow the US army engineers to set foot on the beach to distribute humanitarian aid. It had to be delivered from a US-built offshore pier instead. The days when US administrations were willing to put boots on the ground in places like Somalia or Lebanon seem far distant. Europeans also seem more preoccupied with the consequences of conflict, like refugees in Germany or rubber boats crossing the English Channel than with the root causes of the illegal migration flows. The United Nations Security Council has long been paralysed and unable to impose its norms and arms embargoes. The African Union made a promising start a decade or so ago in taking on a security and peacekeeping role. It intervened in Somalia to drive Al-Shabaab out of the capital, Mogadishu, and worked to set up its own standby force. Yet lately with multiple military coups in western Africa and endemic violence in the DRC, Nigeria, Libya, Ethiopia and now Sudan, it seems to have lost its way and capacity to overcome the resistance of entrenched local leaders. The failure of the international institutions and the insouciance of the Western democracies have allowed other, more adventurous players to step in. Like the UAE, which abandoned its Saudi ally in Yemen early on, but has rediscovered its appetite for foreign intervention by assisting the Rapid Support Forces. In the view of some commentators, the RSF would be stopped in its tracks without the UAE lifeline, although Abu Dhabi has consistently denied its involvement. Why the UAE should want to get mixed up with Sudan is far from clear. Hemedti sent forces to Yemen to help the UAE so it could be payback for that, or for his support for another UAE client, General Hafter, in Libya. The RSF has extensive interests in minerals, mining and gold and these are mainly run out of shell companies in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But more importantly, the UAE seems to want to expand its regional influence by building a network of relationships across the African continent. It has trained the armies of eight African countries, including Ethiopia, and set up military bases in countries neighbouring Sudan, such as Chad, Eritrea, Egypt, Libya and government-controlled areas in Somalia. These moves are designed to counter radical Islam, perhaps bearing in mind that it was in Sudan that Osama bin Laden first built up his Al Qaeda organisation in the 1980s. By establishing these defence relationships, the UAE is able to mobilise troops from other countries to fight in Sudan alongside its RSF proxy. Chadians in particular given that the Chadian leader, Mahamat Idriss Déby, received most of his military aid from Abu Dhabi. But troops from Niger and the Central African Republic have reportedly been involved too. UAE involvement has certainly been instrumental in securing the RSF supply lines across the region and in facilitating the trips that Hemedti made to several African countries in December and January using a plane supplied by the UAE. Sudan’s abundance of natural resources and its plentiful agricultural land are attractive for a Gulf country that needs to import most of its food and non-oil minerals. Thus, the UAE has been busy building port facilities along Sudan’s Red Sea coast to improve its logistical supply lines and buying up farming land in the country.

Yet other regional powers have piled in too. For instance, Egypt, which has sided with the SAF and passed on Turkish drones to General al-Burhan and his commanders. The Turks have also been supplying small arms directly to the SAF through contracts with Turkish companies. Qatar is also never far behind when it comes to not leaving the field to its larger Gulf neighbours, the Emiratis and the Saudis, although Riyadh has tried to remain even-handed in order to boost its credentials as a peacemaker. Together with the US, the Saudis have hosted talks on a potential ceasefire before the process moved to Geneva. Qatar has bailed out the Sudanese Central Bank to support the currency and also concluded a deal to boost trade between the two countries. Yet the regional powers are not just trying to back their chosen side but also to undermine each other. For instance, seeing Egypt come in on the side of the SAF, the Emiratis have offered Cairo a large loan (reported to be $35bn), and it will be interesting to see if Egypt withdraws its support for General al-Burhan as a result. Russia has already flip-flopped, supporting the RSF at first and sending its Wagner mercenaries to train the RSF. However, Moscow’s ability to offer support may be limited by the situation in Ukraine. This past week, Russia recalled some of its Wagner fighters from central Africa because it needed them to reinforce its forces trying to push Ukrainian troops out of the Kursk Oblast. Of late, Moscow has swung more towards the SAF. It has long coveted a Red Sea naval base at Port Sudan and this area is still controlled by General Burhan. Meanwhile the SAF, which still sees itself as the legitimate government of Sudan, despite organising two military coups against civilian rule, realises that the tide is turning against it and is looking elsewhere for support. That has brought Iran into the frame, a country that hitherto has focused mainly on expanding its influence in the Middle East. Iran broke off diplomatic relations with Khartoum in 2016 but has recently restored them. It is said to be supplying weapons to the SAF but, as with so much of this covert activity, the situation is murky and difficult for outside analysts to pinpoint with precision. But official denials of involvement are taken seriously by no one. There have been reports in US media that, like Moscow, Tehran is also seeking a naval base on the Red Sea, which would be strategically significant given that its Houthi allies are nearby on the opposite coastline. Iran might well encourage jihadist groups in Sudan as it has done with the Houthis and Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

So, a civil war in Sudan has already drawn in a dozen or more other countries from the region and beyond. Some aspire to be actors but many are the unwitting victims of the war’s overspill as their fragile economies and institutions are undermined by refugees, mercenaries, weapons trafficking, organised crime and all kinds of illicit activity. The countries involved in Eastern Africa represent nearly a quarter of the continent’s landmass and are home to 280mn of its population. So the risk is that a new Sahel could be created, a cluster of failed states with chronic human insecurity and that could keep alive or rekindle other conflicts across the continent by giving the belligerents new access to money, weapons and sanctuary. Already, Tigrayan rebels in Ethiopia, under heavy pressure from the government of Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa, are getting a new lease of life by sending fighters to help the SAF in Sennar province. Eritrea is training some of the militias for the SAF as well, which is a slap in the face of Abiy Ahmed given his well-known support for the RSF. So, Sudan is progressively interweaving its war with a dozen other conflicts and stress points across Africa in a highly volatile and toxic brew of instability. Sudan itself could become another Libya if the war ends up in a stalemate with rival governments in charge of different parts of the country and many cities – as in the examples of Zintan or Misrata – in the hands of local militias answerable neither to Tripoli nor Benghazi. We would then see a replay of the endless international mediation efforts and local disputes over resources and revenues that we have seen in Libya since the fall of Gadhafi in 2011.

In sum, Sudan could be a strategic game changer. It could decide who controls the Red Sea, a vital lifeline for the global economy, which power emerges dominant in the Middle East and whether Africa is able to move forward along the lines of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 for a peaceful continent bound by a single market and trade area, or lapses back into the corruption, poor governance and sectarianism that have isolated it from the rest of the world. So, with all due respect to Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan is not for Europe one of those faraway conflicts of which we know little famously described by former British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in the Europe of the 1930s. It will have an impact on European security and that impact will not be positive. Thus, it would be mistaken Schadenfreude for European leaders to console themselves with the thought that the West’s adversaries will come to grief in Sudan in the way that Saudi Arabia did by intervening in Yemen or Russia has by getting involved in the Sahel. Scores of Wagner soldiers were recently killed by ISIL-affiliated jihadist fighters in northern Burkina Faso. Seeing Iran or the UAE over-extend their reach in Sudan would not inconvenience the transatlantic allies either. Yet waiting for others to stumble or fail is not a policy and Africans will blame the West for its lack of attention as much as they used to blame it for its former ill-starred interventions. So, what should the Western democracies do?

Certainly, there is no silver bullet. As we have seen, the Sudan conflict is developing into what political scientists call a ‘wicked problem’. Pacifying it will mean exerting leverage on a far larger number of recalcitrant players than merely the two military factions competing for power in Khartoum. Yet not having an immediate solution or even a prospect of a ceasefire does not mean that all international action is hopeless. As Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s eponymous play reminds us, moral and ethical principles dictate that human action has to be engaged whether there are good prospects of success or not.

So, the place to start is for Western leaders and politicians to start talking about Sudan publicly and demonstrating that it is on their agendas. So far it has been an issue of the NGOs and the humanitarian community but with little focus on the geopolitics. Medium-sized powers often engage in conflicts because they believe that the Western democracies are not paying attention or are willingly turning a blind eye because they need their support on other, more pressing issues (such as Gaza or Ukraine). But calling them out of the shadows and drawing attention to their actions can put them in the diplomatic spotlight and make them more cautious, especially when their actions risk damaging Western security even if that was not their original intention. The UN Security Council needs to devote more time to Sudan. For the next four months, four Western democracies will hold the presidency of the Council – Slovenia, Switzerland, the UK and the US – and this is an excellent opportunity for these four countries to work together to hold debates and pass resolutions on Sudan. The annual meetings of the UN General Assembly in the third week of September, with many world leaders making the journey to New York, is another opportunity to bring Sudan to public attention and to hold meetings on the sidelines to re-energise the current Geneva peace talks.

Second, more pressure has to be put on both the SAF and the RSF to allow more food and medicine into the civilian population, starting with the besieged city of El Fasher in Darfur. As mentioned earlier, there has been some small progress of late but it is entirely inadequate given the deteriorating humanitarian situation and the prospect of famine. We have seen recently how massive international pressure on the Israeli government has induced it to open up more border crossings into Gaza and allow far more aid trucks into the strip than was happening at the beginning of the Israeli military operation. The Israelis have agreed also to a major polio vaccination programme in Gaza which the WHO has been carrying out in recent days. Similar concerted pressure persuaded Assad of Syria to allow the opening of four border crossings from Turkey into northern Syria in the wake of last year’s devastating earthquake in southern Turkey. So, it is a thankless task but robust international pressure and prompt and proper funding of UN and NGO and charity aid appeals can still save millions of lives in Sudan. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has to lead this effort and his addresses to the General Assembly and Security Council are the right platform. The aid delivery must be as free of bureaucracy as possible, and go to local Sudanese NGOs and relief organisations on the ground or directly to individual citizens in the form of digital payments.

Third, fighting needs money and weapons, most of which come from outside the region. So, an international arms embargo, even if it will be inevitably leaky, is urgently needed. Even if not all the weapons used in the conflict come from the West, Western components and electronics are frequently used in them, as we have seen on multiple occasions with Russian missiles and drones fired against Ukraine. Since imposing sanctions on Russian companies and those in China and elsewhere aiding the Russian war effort in Ukraine, the US and its allies have become astute in tracking sanctions evasion and closing loopholes. Four US companies (Intel, Texas Instruments, AMR and Analog Devices) are currently before the US Congress to explain how their microprocessors and circuit boards have been discovered in Russian weapons as they have failed to control their distribution chains to third countries. A similar effort is now required to identify and sanction those companies involved in supplying weapons to the conflict parties in Sudan or facilitating and benefiting from illegal trade in minerals or other commodities to generate income for them. They need to be subject to sanctions, fines and loss of contracts in the Western democracies. A legal framework to allow these sanctions to come into effect needs quickly to be developed by the EU and certainly by the next US administration if, hopefully, Democrats and Republicans are able to agree more on Sudan than they are on Gaza and Ukraine.

Finally, the peace process has to continue. These processes are protracted and frustrating. The current ceasefire talks for Gaza or the endless negotiations over Cyprus or Syria prove this only too well. But the Western democracies have no choice but to get behind this process and to widen it so that the EU and the UK, as the former colonial power, do some of the heavy lifting alongside the US, Swiss and Saudis. In particular, incentives and sanctions have to be devised to bring both the SAF and the RSF to the table and to at least agree to minimal local ceasefire conditions and humanitarian aid corridors to allow vital relief to be delivered. The fact-finding mission of the UN Human Rights Council recommended also the deployment of an international peacekeeping force and thought will have to be given to the timing and composition of such a force, and the mandate it will need to have. Would it be led by the UN or the AU or a regional organisation like the eastern African Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD)?  Would the EU be prepared to offer troop contributions or at least funding and equipment? It will be a challenge for the incoming EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, to deal with and broker a common EU approach to the war on Sudan. Coming from Estonia, she might have thought that she could spend the bulk of her time dealing with Russia and Ukraine. But an early test of her credibility in tackling the broad spectrum of threats and challenges facing the EU in the second quarter of the 21st century will be to see what kind of punch she packs in Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa and Cairo. It will be a rapid initiation into the strategic realities of the increasingly dangerous neighbourhood in which the EU has to live – and survive.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.