The most recent advances by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in capital Khartoum and the nearby city of Omdurman indicate a change to the bitter and that has dominated the past months of the .
Last week, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, who heads the SAF, returned to headquarters in Khartoum for the first time in almost two years. Earlier in January, the SAF had managed to recapture the strategically important city of Wad Madani, which is around 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Khartoum.
“When Wad Madani fell to the Rapid Support Forces in December 2023, went through the entire country,” Hager Ali, a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, told DW.
“The Sudanese lost confidence in the Sudanese Armed Forces’ ability, which is why Wad Madani is seared into the peoples’ memories as a watershed moment,” she added.
The RSF had burned crops, razed fields and destroyed farming equipment.
“They against the people of Sudan in order to establish control,” Ali explained, adding that “this was the moment when food insecurity not only , it also became something that nobody is going to be able to remedy for the foreseeable future.”
Owing to the loss of vital infrastructure in the central city, “the tactical and strategic significance that Wad Madani had a year ago as Sudan’s breadbasket is almost gone,” so the expert.
Darfur as the next and last battle?
Since the RFS’ loss of Wad Madani, many of its paramilitary fighters have retreated to Sudan’s western Darfur region, where the .
“The countdown for an end of the war has begun, the field of war has moved to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur,” Osman Mirghani, the editor-in-chief of the Sudanese newspaper Al-Tayar, told DW’s radio show Sudan Now.
El Fasher has been under a .
According to UN estimates, the humanitarian situation in Darfur has become particularly dire. Some 1.6 million people are displaced from North Darfur alone, around two million people are facing extreme food insecurity, while 320,000 are already in famine conditions.
Sudanese civilians across the country have been of the conflict, which broke out in April 2023 when General Abdel-Fattah Burhan fell out with his former deputy General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo over the integration of the paramilitary RSF into the regular army.
Clashes between both forces and their allies killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced more than 12 million. Over 30 million Sudanese, over half of them children, are in need of humanitarian aid.
According to the US-based global relief organization International Rescue Committee, Sudan’s war has triggered the “
This week, Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that the “senseless war” has taken an “even turn for civilians.” The comment came on the heels of an incident last weekend, when the paramilitary RSF killed at least 54 civilians and injured more than 160 at a market in Omdurman. A few days earlier, at least 70 people had been killed in an RSF in El Fasher.
As of now, the RSF has denied any wrongdoing and instead accused the Sudanese army and its allies of striking the hospital.
The United Nations Human Rights Office also stated that it was investigating ” that surfaced on 30 January, in which men in SAF uniforms (…) appear to read out a list of alleged RSF collaborators,” as if to indicate they were keeping a ledger of individuals killed.
While the allegations in the video are still being examined, Turk has warned that “such killings must not become normalized.”
Sanctions and war crimes
Meanwhile, after almost two years of warnings, one of the last acts by the outgoing US administration under Joe Biden was to impose sanctions on both generals.
The RSF under General Mohammed Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, was accused of , as well as grave human rights violations.
The SAF under General Abdel-Fattah Burhan was accused of committing and of undermining the goal of a democratic transition.
“These sanctions represent the most significant international intervention to date,” Leena Badri, a researcher at the London-based think tank Chatham House, wrote earlier this month in an op-ed.
“For the RSF, the sanctions and subsequent genocide determination will surely thwart Hemedti’s plan to develop a civilian administration in his strongholds,” she argued.
“Burhan has benefited from his position as the de facto leader of Sudan (…) but with US sanctions imposed on both him and Hemedti, his status will appear reduced,” she added.
Trump as peacemaker?
As part of Biden’s sanctions, the US treasury department also blacklisted seven companies from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and accused them of funnelling arms, finances and support to the RSF.
However, the UAE have been denying being the key supporter for the RSF even though evidence in the form of UAE-produced arms indicate the opposite. The SAF is publicly supported by Egypt and Qatar.
It is still unclear in what ways US President Donald Trump would continue US policy on Sudan during his second term.
During his first term, Trump had delisted Sudan from the US list of terror organizations. He had also brokered a normalization agreement between Sudan and Israel in return for economic relief. The series of agreements, dubbed as Abraham Accords, between Arab states and Israel also included the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain.
However, Badri is not too hopeful that US pressure alone could push the warring generals toward an end of the war.
“President Trump has repeatedly shown a willingness to antagonize even America’s closest allies in pursuit of his own goals,” she told DW.
“As a result, sanctions targeting both warring parties remain largely symbolic without a concerted push — particularly aimed at US partners in the Middle East — to shut down the networks fuelling the conflict,” she said.
“At present, both generals are more focused on securing further military gains as their sources of arms, funds, and backing remain unaffected,” Badri told DW, adding that “they have little incentive to bend to sanctions alone.”
For the Sudanese population, hope now lies on a stop of armed supply before they mark the outbreak of the war for the second time in April.
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