On Sunday, April 23, barely one week after vicious fighting erupted in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the United States special forces evacuated U.S. embassy staff by helicopter, and other foreign nationals fled the city in hastily arranged emergency convoys. As the chaotic face-off between Sudan’s de facto leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his heavily armed rival, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, continued, it was unclear when the diplomats would return.
What is happening in Sudan is a mobster shootout, and the world is running away from it. That’s a reasonable first reflex to a terrifying war that has already involved the use of the country’s heaviest weapons in the streets of the capital. Residents have been sheltering in their homes as attack helicopters and fighter jets scream overhead and battles rage in the street; many buildings have been reduced to rubble. Water supplies have been cut off, and electricity is intermittent; hospitals are in crisis. A city of seven million people has had no operating bakeries, no food supplies coming in, and no markets for a week. The World Food Program halted its operations there after three of its staff were killed. Aid compounds have been looted.
But the foreign exodus from Sudan also reflects a darker reality. The United States and its Arab and European counterparts that have rushed to save their nationals have made only half-hearted and belated efforts to stop the fighting and help the Sudanese. The United States and Saudi Arabia twisted the two strongmen’s arms for a 72-hour cessation of hostilities, starting at midnight on Monday, but the cease-fire was quickly broken. Along with the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, Washington and Riyadh made up the “quad” of governments that had been backing negotiations with Burhan and Hemedti to return the country to democratic rule following the 2021 coup they carried out together. The quad’s failure to rein in the generals set them up for their lethal showdown. Now, a country that only a few years ago seemed on the brink of a long-awaited democratic transition finds itself instead in a calamitous civil war.
Along with Western nations, Sudan’s Arab and African neighbors, as well as China and Russia, agree that the conflict is a disaster. Failing to halt it is a devastating indictment of the multilateral order, and especially of the quad that had supposedly steered the negotiations. If Sudan’s descent into all-out war isn’t stopped soon, the principle governing the international evacuations—everyone for themselves—will be the order of the day.
THE DEEP STATE VS. THE HIRED GUNS
As leaders of rival Sudanese factions, Burhan and Hemedti can perhaps best be understood as bosses of kleptocratic cartels. Burhan, the head of the Sudan Armed Forces, is the self-appointed chairman of the Sovereignty Council—the body that has served as the country’s supreme executive—and portrays himself as head of state. In April 2019, he fronted a cabal of generals who overthrew their mentor, Omar al-Bashir, the country’s authoritarian leader for 29 years, establishing in his place a civil-military power-sharing arrangement that was supposed to lead the country toward democracy. Hemedti was a coconspirator. But in October 2021, on the pretext of a looming economic crisis, the two unseated the civilian administration of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and took full control of the country.
Burhan’s leadership since then has hardly been inspiring. He is notably lacking in charisma and energy, and his public performances have been lackluster. But his power base includes significant military and corporate interests, which Sudanese democrats like to call the “deep state.” These are a web of crony-capitalist corporations, from banks and telecom companies owned by Islamists and intelligence officers to companies owned by the military itself in such areas as arms manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and transportation. Notably, Burhan launched the coup just as a corruption-fighting arm of the civilian administration—the Empowerment Elimination, Anti-Corruption, and Funds Recovery Committee—was about to publish its investigation of corruption in military-affiliated companies. One of his first acts was to raid the committee’s offices and seize its documentation.
Burhan and Hemedti are bosses of rival kleptocratic cartels.
Burhan’s military strength is debatable. The Sudanese Armed Forces has a plausible resemblance to a professional army and—crucially—includes the Sudanese air force. Burhan has a military pact with Egypt. But the SAF has rarely prevailed in sustained military action—it had plenty of chances to prove its mettle in wars in southern Sudan, Darfur, and the Nuba Mountains but signally failed to do so. And although its officer corps comes mostly from the country’s establishment elite, its foot soldiers are from poorer classes and the long-marginalized peripheries of the country, and morale often flags.
Still, Burhan is buttressed by his links to members of the former Bashir regime. It is no secret that old Bashir loyalists regard Burhan as their best bet for regaining power and many Sudanese see their hand in Burhan’s fight with Hemedti. A week into the conflict, there was a jailbreak in the country’s prisons, and many henchmen of the old regime were released, making public statements in support of Burhan. (Despite speculation, there are no verified reports that Bashir, who has been detained in a military hospital, is among them.) Should Burhan prevail, it seems likely that he will restore the authoritarian rule of his predecessor.
Burhan’s adversary, Hemedti, has important strengths of his own. As commander of the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful national paramilitary force autonomous from the army command, Hemedti played a crucial role in removing Bashir in 2019. Officially Burhan’s deputy in the Sovereignty Council, he showed the ambition and energy to overshadow his superior. He also runs a fast-growing business empire and has cultivated his own ties to foreign powers. Now in his 40s, Hemedti emerged from the infamous Darfur Arab militia known as the Janjaweed. Twenty years ago, when Bashir realized that the SAF couldn’t defeat rebels in Darfur, he turned to his tried-and-tested counterinsurgency on the cheap—an ethnic militia. The Janjaweed burned, pillaged, and massacred their way through Darfur’s villages in a campaign that the U.S. government designated genocide. Hemedti’s units were among the most capable, and in 2013 Bashir formalized them as the RSF, over the objections of his chief of staff who feared that they would come to rival the SAF. Bashir compounded this error when he asked Hemedti—whom he called his “protector”—to station his fighters in Khartoum as civilian protests escalated.
Hemedti’s 15-year career shows his prowess as a political-military entrepreneur. In Darfur, his forces took over the region’s artisanal gold mines, defeating rival commanders. He has also proved adroit in dealing with local chiefs and militia leaders who buy and sell their loyalties to the highest bidder. And he has built ties to major regional powers by renting out the RSF to fight in Yemen, on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and by forging links with General Khalifa Haftar, head of the so-called Libyan National Army, and with Wagner, the Russian private military company affiliated with the Kremlin. Despite their reputation as ruffians from the sticks, RSF troops are battle tested, disciplined, and armed to the teeth.
After the fall of the Bashir regime, Hemedti took advantage of the disarray in the Khartoum establishment to expand his family-run business empire and to portray himself as a champion of the underprivileged. Energetic and opportunistic, he speaks in the vernacular of western Sudan, appealing to the historically marginalized communities of that region—and inviting condescension, even ridicule, from urbanites. Although he initially supported Burhan, he also distanced himself from the old guard, saying that the 2021 coup was a “mistake.” In recent months, as the showdown with Burhan loomed, Hemedti sought allies among the civilian parties by arguing that he was the only one who could prevent the return of a regime like Bashir’s. Should he and the RSF triumph, however, the likely result is a kleptocratic-populist leadership that would do nothing to remedy the country’s accelerating crises of joblessness and hunger.
DEMOCRACY DERAILED
The current war marks a bitter reversal of the 2019 Sudanese revolution. When Burhan and Hemedti helped topple Bashir after months of huge protests against the regime, it looked like a rare opportunity to secure a nonviolent democratic transition in the Horn of Africa. Indeed, every U.S. president since George H. W. Bush had sought to get rid of Bashir, who had supported the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, hosted the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Sudan for years, and committed relentless atrocities in southern Sudan and Darfur. Moreover, one of the enduring legacies of the Sudanese revolution was the courage and persistence of ordinary people. It was their peaceful activism that brought down the regime in April 2019, and they remained unbowed in the face of a massacre by the SAF and RSF of over 120 protesters two months later, which forced Burhan and Hemedti to agree to a transitional government with a civilian prime minister that would ultimately lead to free elections. Even after the 2021 coup, the courage of the Sudanese people—with ongoing protests by the so-called resistance committees—made it impossible for the two generals to claim legitimacy.
But those civilians have been on their own. Although Washington and its European allies have expressed admiration for Sudan’s democrats, their support has been hollow. In July 2019, weeks before he took up the post of prime minister in the civilian government, the economist Abdalla Hamdok reflected that he had just a few months to halt the country’s growing economic crisis, which he would need to do to gain the political leverage to take on the generals’ stranglehold over the economy. In a conversation with me at that time, he said that he didn’t want to end up as the cashier minding the till in a corner store, while the gang bosses cut drug deals in the back room. In fact, Western powers largely stood by as he was reduced to exactly that.
When Hamdok was sworn in, he found that the Trump administration had delegated its policy on the Horn of Africa to its favored allies in the Middle East: Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. None of these regimes wanted to see a democratic revolution in the Arabic-speaking world and they all preferred to deal directly with their favored generals. For its part, Washington did not lift sanctions or provide debt relief—actions that might have given Hamdok the credibility of stabilizing the economy and the clout to dismantle the military-commercial complex. Instead, the United States supported a quid pro quo whereby Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Burhan, Sudan joined the Abraham Accords, and the U.S. removed its designation of the Sudanese government as a “state sponsor of terror.” Sanctions were finally lifted in the dying days of the Trump administration—at least a year too late.
Washington must support the Sudanese democrats it shamefully betrayed.
But the indifference of the U.S. government was not restricted to the Trump administration. Democratic Senator Robert Menendez insisted that the current Sudanese government should compensate the families of victims of 9/11 and the bombing of the USS Cole, since Bashir had hosted al Qaeda in the 1990s; those cases are in court. Most tellingly, after the 2021 coup—which Burhan and Hemedti mounted just hours after assuring U.S. Special Envoy Jeffrey Feltman that they would do no such thing—the Biden administration decided that it would continue a policy of low-wattage engagement. Feltman left his post shortly afterward, and the State Department refused to impose sanctions targeted at the warlords’ respective business empires. Even as World Bank aid packages were suspended and hunger spread through the Sudanese population, the generals themselves faced no repercussions.
Instead, the United States and its quad partners encouraged the generals to negotiate a new transitional arrangement, facilitated by the United Nations, the African Union, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the eight-member East African trade bloc. The mediators insisted, correctly, that this was a Sudanese-led process, but they failed to see that it also needed high-level international custodians. Moreover, the civic revolution lacked a charismatic leader who could front the negotiations. (Hamdok, who had been detained after the coup, signed on to an ill-fated agreement to reinstate him, but he quit as soon as it became apparent that he would have no significant power.) The movement, which was made up of local committees, professional associations, and political parties, was prone to splits, a tendency abetted by the tireless efforts of the two warlords to divide and conquer. Nonetheless, the negotiations led to a framework agreement, signed in December 2022, for setting up a new civilian administration with a timetable for elections in two years.
But a larger problem of the negotiations was what to do about the generals’ own military factions. In theory, the agreement was supposed to integrate Hemedti’s RSF and other former rebel groups to form a single national army, as well as downsize the military payroll and professionalize the military—all under the rubric of security sector reform. A litany of international specialists, including retired military officers from Western countries, advocated for that approach. The key issue in Sudan, however, was political: the country’s security is not a sector but an arena of largely autonomous armed kleptocrats, each determined to have the largest share of the spoils and to be safe from the depredations of rivals. On paper, the questions were whether the RSF would merge into the SAF in two years or ten and who would preside over the process. The longer timeline would allow Hemedti to reconfigure his options. Burhan, who benefited from a shorter transition, wavered over whether to procrastinate or to push for a final decision.
Pressed by the quad, the generals, the civilians, and the mediators agreed to a deadline of April 1, 2023, to inaugurate the transition—and resolve the security reform question. According to the zero-sum logic of Sudan’s rival factions, the deadline was a formula for an explosion. As the two generals hid their intentions, the mediators failed to sound the alarm, even as the deadline was postponed and the two sides mobilized their forces. Then, on April 15, the fighting began. It is not certain who fired first, and it doesn’t matter. By this point, it was far too late for the mediators—let alone outside powers like the United States that had failed to offer high-level engagement since the 2021 coup—to do anything to stop them.
THE FLIGHT TO EGYPT
The peaceful revolution that brought down Bashir showed the extraordinary promise of a new generation of ordinary Sudanese, leaving the walls of the army headquarters decorated with murals depicting liberation, pluralism, and hope. But those democratic aspirations have been dashed. The resistance committees that once led the popular uprising have repurposed themselves as emergency networks for community information, protection, and supplying humanitarian essentials. They are the only functioning civic governance in the country, although it is hard to say how long they can continue amid the shooting, especially since those Sudanese who are able to escape Khartoum are fleeing to Egypt and elsewhere.
Sudanese wars have a terrible, familiar pattern and it now seems increasingly clear where this one might be headed. It begins with fierce confrontations in which each side vows a speedy decisive victory, which never happens. As has already been demonstrated, reaching and maintaining cease-fires is difficult because neither side wants to stop at a point of temporary disadvantage or if it thinks it is winning. As the fighting continues, the material and organizational resources needed for fighting will be depleted, and each side will recruit internal militia proxies and solicit outside help. The fighting is likely to become less intense but more widespread; command and control could fragment. If it is prolonged, moreover, the political struggle could turn into an interethnic war, and civilians could be targeted for their identities. In this downward spiral, starvation could become a weapon, and millions may be forced to flee.
No international power wanted this war. The outside powers—from the United States to Russia, from Egypt to the UAE—may have their favorites, or at least those they consider the less bad option. Cairo plainly backs Burhan, and Qatar and Turkey have kept their ties to the old-guard Islamists who were the backbone of the Bashir regime. The UAE has backed Hemedti up to now. Over time, Washington’s preference for what it euphemistically calls “stability” may make it lean toward Burhan; the Wagner group’s ties to Hemedti and his gold trade may push Moscow in the other direction. But for a fleeting moment—perhaps one or two more weeks—the international consensus is that the conflict should end. International interlocutors have shown that they can reach both generals on the phone and secure their agreement for the evacuation of foreign nationals—and nominally, a pause in the fighting. If they claim lack of access or lack of leverage, it is simply an attempt to provide cover for not acting.
There is now a small window for the United States and Saudi Arabia to demand a more substantial truce on humanitarian grounds and insist on a political dialogue. The hope is that the Saudis can convince Cairo and Abu Dhabi not to fund or arm their respective favorites, and the United States can champion the democratic movement that it has so shamefully betrayed. Kenyan President William Ruto—who has little leverage but solid democratic credentials and can partner with the Saudis in marshaling a united international front—has offered to mediate. Any formula for ending the war will require strong diplomatic skills and a multilateral framework that involves the UN and the Africans. And time is running out.
