A coalition led by the paramilitary group fighting for power in Sudan’s brutal civil war has announced the leadership for its self-declared parallel government, further tearing the fabric of an politically fraying nation.
As fighting in central and south Sudan intensifies, the Sudan Founding Alliance said Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, would head a 15-person government council that would include regional governors. A statement issued on Saturday named a Sudanese politician, Mohamed Hassan Othman al-Ta’ayshi, as prime minister.
The coalition said the formation of the council renewed its “commitment to building an inclusive homeland and a new, secular, democratic, decentralized, and voluntarily unified Sudan founded on the principles of freedom, justice, and equality.”
When pressed, the spokesman for the coalition, Alaa Eldin Awad Naqd, said, “We have six-month emergency plans in every service sector, and there are strategic plans in all sectors in the country.” He would not elaborate.
The next step for the parallel government, he said, will be the formation of a ministerial council.
Democracy activists in Sudan have long denounced the military’s stranglehold on power, but the coalition’s lofty language notwithstanding, fighters for the Rapid Support Forces, known as the R.S.F., have been accused of atrocities.
Rights groups, the United Nations and the United States have accused both sides of war crimes, but only the R.S.F. has been implicated in genocide. A 2023 outbreak of violence against the Masalit ethnic group by the R.S.F., whose fighters are predominantly ethnic Arabs, led to allegations of ethnic cleansing.
Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday condemned the coalition’s announcement and called on other governments to avoid interacting with “this illegitimate entity declared by the terrorist militia.”
Alan Boswell, the Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group, said the coalition’s announcement would only deepen Sudan’s division.
“R.S.F. appears to think this move will increase its own legitimacy and leverage,” he said. “More likely, it will only make the war even harder to end and Sudan even harder to piece back together.”
The war grew out of a feud between opposing generals in April 2023 and has since killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and plunged much of the country into famine.
Though Sudanese forces drove the R.S.F. out of Khartoum in March, the paramilitary-led coalition has declared its own government in the areas it still holds.
Most of that territory is in the Kordofan and Darfur regions, with the exception of the embattled city of El Fasher, which is held by Sudan’s Army. American officials have warned of ethnic slaughter if the R.S.F. is able to take over the city.
Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting.
Eve Sampson is a reporter covering international news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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