The State Of The Civil War In Sudan

0:07The violence of Sudan's civil war continues to escalate. 50 or 60 people in a single street or 10 or 20 people. They kill them. Then they would go to the next street. And again, that's the massacre I saw in front of me. That was a witness in Sudan's city of Al-Fashir talking to Reuters. The city was seized by the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces or RSF in late October. That takeover led to reports from the Sudan Doctors Network of mass executions, including over 400 people killed in a hospital. The RSF and the Sudanese military have been at war for over two and a half years now. The conflict in a country that's home to more than 50 million people has led to famine, millions displaced, and allegations of horrific war crimes, including sexual violence.

0:54There is mounting evidence that rape is being deliberately and systematically used as a weapon of war. Women's bodies, ladies and gentlemen, have just become a crime scene in Sudan. That's Anna Mutavati with the group UN Women speaking to NBC News. She's UN's Women's Regional Director for East and Southern Africa. These details come as a U.S.-led humanitarian ceasefire is in the works between the RSF and the Sudanese military, although a full agreement has yet to be reached. The brutal war, which has gone largely overlooked by U.S. media and global fundraising, raises questions about the global community, both in terms of support and who may be benefiting from the conflict.

1:37We discuss the latest with our panel after this short break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Back with more in a moment.

1:50Let's meet our panel. Joining us from Nairobi, Kenya, is Declan Walsh, the chief Africa correspondent at The New York Times. Good to be here. And Khaloud Heer is a Sudan political analyst and the founding director of Confluence Advisory. That's a think tank founded in Khartoum that focuses on policies related to peace, security, and governance. Khaloud, welcome back. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Khaloud, let's talk a bit more about how we got here. The war began in April of 2023 between these two military factions and their leaders. What do we need to know about these two groups? I think it's probably more accurate to say that the war reached Khartoum in April of 2023.

2:27The war has been, you know, we've had endless wars in Sudan in the 70-year independence history. I think only nine years have been without war. And it just goes to show sort of the types of political and governance set up in Sudan that keeps Sudan embroiled in these endless cycles. But what we have here is a very strong paramilitary force that was brought into the center of power by the former dictator, Omar al-Bashir. And he sort of kept SAF and the RSF, that's the Sunni Zan forces and the Arab support forces, in opposition with each other. But they worked together to unseat him after popular revolt in 2019.

3:03And then they ruled together reasonably comfortably until they led a coup in 2021. It was at that point after that coup and after which they couldn't reconcile their differing political ideas that we started to see the crack show. And in the sort of 18 months leading up to the April of 2023, we really saw very belligerent attitudes, very bellicose language. We saw the Islamists of the Bashir regime come out of the woodwork and really stir the pot. We saw Saf and RSF argue over money, over integration of troops, over the freedoms that they enjoyed, and over their inability to really foment the same political constituencies.

3:43Declan, over the last two and a half years, how have we seen the motivations of each military group change? Well, it started out, as Khaloud said, in April 2023 in what was often described at the time as a clash between the two leaders of these two groups, a war of two generals. In reality, it was a little bit more complex than that. it was really a struggle for power between these two dominant factions inside Sudan's security forces, the regular military and then this paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, that was a successor to the notorious Janjaweed militias that had fought in Darfur two decades ago.

4:26So really, it started as a clash between these groups. But it quickly, you know, firstly it spread across the country and then it metastasized into this much bigger conflict that began to draw in other armed groups in Sudan, sort of armed groups which had been dormant to some degree since earlier wars or hadn't been very active. They got drawn into the conflict and then what really made it complex and indeed far worse I think for the civilians of Sudan, is it started to draw in foreign powers as well. Countries from the Persian Gulf, from the region that started to take sides in this war, backing one side or the other, supplying weapons, supplying money, giving political support.

5:11And that, you know, both fueled the fighting by pouring weapons into the war, some very sophisticated weapons, including drones and others. But it also just has politically made it much more complex to solve because it's no longer just a fight about, if you like, the equities of these two competing groups in the security forces, but it also involves the interests of this plethora of other countries that have become, that have taken stakes in it. Now, the U.S. said nearly a year ago that RSF forces committed genocide in the Civil War. Will in Maryland emails this. Can you give a little historical and social background to help us understand why the Arab ethnic group wants to exterminate the African ethnic groups in that region.

5:57The statement about genocide came from President Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. But Khaloud, give us some understanding of the ethnic violence we're seeing. So the first thing to note is that this has been going on for decades, and it's largely caused by climatic issues. In Darfur in the mid-80s, I think everyone will remember, there was the big drought and the big famine, you know, Feed the World, Live Aid brought that into prominence. And it was at that time that Arab groups that in Sudan are denoted Arab because they are pastoralists. They were moving into farmer communities and sedentary communities that are denoted as African because, of course, the desert went southwards, it's a Sahara, into that savannah region and forced them to go into those farmlands for their cattle to graze.

6:43And that caused clashes. So it's effectively an issue about land management and resource management in Sudan, something that Sudan has never done well. In its many wars that it's had in its history, that has almost always been the reason. And the ethnic conflicts have always been superimposed on top of those resource sharing issues. And so what we have here is what looks like an Arab-African conflict, but it's really one about land usage. And what has happened subsequently is, of course, we had the genocide of the early 2000s, the first genocide of the 21st century. And that was perpetrated by pretty much the same groups that we're seeing now, these Pasharist Arab groups that were then known as the Janjouid today, they're known as the RSF, after they became formalized and became much richer, much more sophisticated as a paramilitary group under the patronage of the Sudanese armed forces, under the patronage of Ahmad al-Bashir, the previous dictator.

7:37But what still remains today, despite decades, actually of peace agreements that tried to figure out very poorly this idea of resource sharing. What we have today is actually a lot of grievances that have never been addressed. And so the violence that we see in Al-Fashid just in the past two weeks, the violence that we saw two years ago in a Jine 'ina that the U.S. subsequently designated a genocide, all of that has the same perpetrators, has the same victims groups, and largely the exact same motivations. And so today the RSF is much better resource, much more sophisticated and able to enact a whole lot more violence, such that people in Darfur today say that, you know, what they remember of 20 years ago pales in comparison to the violence that they're facing today.

8:20And at the core of this is that actually no one is, still no one is talking about this issue of how do you make sure that these groups are able to share the land what's available and that there are governance instruments put in place that mean that we won't continue to see this conflict in perpetuity. Declan, it's tough to get an exact idea of the number of lives lost in this war, but what sorts of estimates are out there? Absolutely. In fact, I would say it's really a reflection of the neglect of the conflict, that even establishing basic data is so difficult. Until last year, the most commonly cited estimate was 150 ,000 people killed in the war.

8:58And that figure came from testimony by Tom Perriello to Congress. He was then, when he gave that testimony, the U.S. envoy to Sudan. Since then, Mr. Perriello has updated his estimate to as many as 400 ,000 people killed in this war. But the reality, of course, that these are rough estimates, very difficult to determine, and partly because Sudan's health system, I mean, a lot of most of its infrastructure and particularly its health system has been absolutely devastated by this war. So frankly, there just aren't so many people even to count the dead. In a moment, we'll learn more about how this conflict has led to dire levels of hunger and famine in several regions.

9:42But Khaloud, describe the whole scope of this humanitarian crisis. It's the largest in the world. Absolutely. Sudan has the world's largest humanitarian crisis, crisis, the world's largest hunger crisis, the world's largest displacement crisis, and the world's largest protection crisis because of the conflict-related sexual violence that is rampant. And it has had that unfortunate distinction for some time now. I think we're only really starting to see reporting that reflects that. But effectively, what this means is that no one in Sudan, a country of 50 million people, is untouched by this. I don't know a single person from north, south, east and west of the country, even those far away from the front lines of the conflict, who hasn't lost, you know, handfuls of people.

10:28There are people who can't, who've lost their livelihoods. They can't feed their children. 70 % of, at least 70 to 80 % of health services across the country are no longer in commission. 90 % of school children are out of school and out of education and have been for two and a half years. That's a lot of school time missed. There are people who, unfortunately, because there are no livelihoods, have felt that they have had to join an armed group in order to make ends meet or to seek protection or to seek access to food for themselves. There's been very little by way of humanitarian access for some of these international organizations to be able to deliver aid where possible.

11:08And we have seen basically the perfect storm of humanitarian suffering. Let's pause here. Coming up, we hear from the Director of Emergencies at the UN World Food Program to talk about the famine plaguing parts of Sudan. Back with more in a moment.

11:28Let's get back to the conversation and bring in Ross Smith. He's the Director of Emergencies at the UN World Food Program. Ross, thanks for joining us. Great. Thanks for having me on. So earlier this month, famine was declared in Al-Fashur and Kadugli, The world's leading authority on hunger crises, the IPC, detailed the extreme conditions that had been met. The IPC says that 375 ,000 people have been pushed into famine in Darfur and Kordofan as of September. What does it mean to have this declaration of famine? Yeah, and it's thanks. It's not the first time we've had the famine declaration in Sudan, of course.

12:06So this is a longstanding issue. And as Declan and Halud have said, this is the largest, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, the largest protection crisis within that. And certainly from my perspective, one of the least visible. You know, we've had Al-Fashir on our television screens over the past couple of weeks. But overall, you know, very little visibility on the real desperate situation in different parts of Sudan. So, you know, we have, in addition to that famine declaration for two areas, we have 45 % of the overall population of Sudan is acutely food insecure. We have 20 other areas of the country that are at risk of famine right now.

12:46And, you know, it's a really desperate situation. So what this means is that people oftentimes don't know where their next meal is coming from. It means we have very high rates of malnutrition amongst children, pregnant, breastfeeding women, for example. And this is driven by the displacement crisis. 10 million people inside the country displaced, 4 million people outside the country in Chad and South Sudan and Ethiopia. And, you know, it's really it's driven by the conflict. Sheldon Yat is the UNICEF representative in Sudan, and he sent us this message about the challenges of getting aid to children.

13:24First of all, it's the issue of resources. We don't have enough resources. The funding situation here is god-awful. When you look at the scale, it's emergency. It's the largest humanitarian emergency that UNICEF is facing anywhere in the world. And we only have some 27 % of the resources required. Then there's the issue of access. How do you get aid across battle lines, across countries? We have to get support to Darfur. We have to get supplies in overland for thousands of kilometers across multiple countries, across borders, across battle lines. We've got to negotiate with commanders at checkpoints.

14:07We have to negotiate with governments. Children are the most vulnerable, of course, but sometimes they're the last ones served. Ross, tell us more about the main resource and logistical challenges of getting food and aid to people. millions of whom are displaced. Yeah, I mean, as Sheldon has indicated there, the logistics certainly, I mean, resources aside, and I can come back to that, but logistics is a major issue in Sudan. It's a very large country, and you're moving food, for example, and either humanitarian supplies from one side of the country to another over thousands of kilometers. And to do that, it's not simply a matter of the capacity.

14:49We have the capacity in Sudan to do that. We have all the logistics footprint that's needed, but there are often a lot of impediments. There are approvals needed at every level, negotiations at every checkpoint, a lot of delays, a lot of bureaucratic delays along the way that interfere with humanitarian operations, frankly. And, you know, we've seen, I think, real success over the last year. We've doubled our footprint over the last year, reaching four million people a month now, half of them in the Kordofans and Dorfors. But that takes, you know, it takes a massive logistics operation to do that, and it takes the funding.

15:25Well, there are talks of a humanitarian ceasefire. Last week, the RSF said it agreed to a U.S.-backed plan, although the Sudan military has yet to agree. Declan, what do we know about this proposal? Well, it's really rooted in a diplomatic formation that comes out of Washington called the Quad. It started gathering steam back in September. President Trump's special advisor for Africa, Mossad Boulos, gathered three powerful Arab nations that are involved in the conflict, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And they came together and produced a sort of rough sketch for a potential humanitarian ceasefire in September.

16:06And that initially didn't get much traction, wasn't taken, frankly, very seriously. But a momentum has built in recent weeks. There was a meeting of the same countries in the White House. And then in recent days, well, certainly in the last week, as we've seen outrage grow, frankly, over the images that have been coming out of al-Fasher, these reports of massacres, of starvation, huge focus on atrocities by RSF troops. We've seen more forthright language from U.S. officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave probably his most trenchant statement yet after the G7 in Canada, you know, that was very focused on RSF atrocities, but also, you know, angled towards the United Arab Emirates, their main backer, saying that, you know, the U.S.

16:58wanted to see not just talks as part of the Quad, but results. But for now, as you said, really, there is no ceasefire. The Rapids Port Forces came out last week and said that they agreed to it. But unfortunately, it's a pattern in this conflict that a side that has recently scored a major victory, like the RSF just did in Al-Fashir, is willing to agree to a ceasefire and the other side won't. So really, until Sudan's military also agrees, then there's little prospect of a ceasefire. And in fact, on the ground, we're seeing the fighting intensify. There's been reports just in the last couple of days that having captured El Fasher, the RSF is now pushing its troops into the Kordofans, which is this region between the territory that it holds and the territory held by the military, and that it is intensifying its siege on another city over there.

17:55And in fact, on another area where a famine has been declared. This takeover of Al-Fasher was reportedly brutal. Satellite images obtained from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab found clusters consistent with human bodies and bloodstains. They were clear enough to be seen from space. Declan, what more do we know about what happened in Al-Fasher? Well, it's very challenging to get exact information because communications have been cut off. And frankly, because many of the people who were living in Fasher have left the city and remain unaccounted for. Just a few days ago, one of the main UN agencies said that about 90 ,000 people had fled El Fasher, yet eight agencies in Tuwila, which is this camp about 40 miles away, where some international agencies are providing a modicum of help, say that only 10 ,000 people have reached there.

18:48So the question is, where are these tens of thousands of people. Now, some of them are almost certainly in villages and rural areas, or trapped in a sort of no man's land between these two areas, or indeed trapped inside Fasher itself. But, you know, the accounts that we have had from people who've made it out are absolutely horrendous. People have talked about summary executions, rapes, fighters going house to house, killing people, people being run over by vehicles in the streets. And, you know, we've got the International Criminal Court, which has announced that it is investigating these accounts as potential war crimes.

19:30Halud, how hopeful are you that this U.S.-backed plan will first be agreed upon by both sides and second, result in real relief for those who are suffering? Not looking good, I'm afraid. Part of the reason is that it's just the beginning of the dry season right now, and the dry season is typically the fighting season. And so both the two main sides here, the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces, want to continue fighting so that they can, as they see it, win this war militarily. Now, anyone who knows anything about the history of war in Sudan knows that there is no pathway to military victory for any side, whether it's the Sudanese armed forces or any group that is fighting them.

20:08So this is sort of a pipe dream. But what remains the case is that, as Declan said earlier, there are so many different international actors that are giving weapons to the different sides that they see that they can actually mount a military offensive that will see them get to some kind of victory. And if not a total victory, then at least enough of a victory around the areas of the ethnic constituencies that are most important to them and with the ability to keep applying military pressure. Now, none of that is, as far as I can tell, featuring in any of the conversations that are happening around the humanitarian truce, whether that's in Washington, D.C., or most recently in Cairo.

20:45And I think the difficulty to getting a humanitarian truce right now under these conditions is actually obfuscating the extent to which this is, you know, the staff and the RSF are not the only people that need to be around the table. What are we going to do about the Arabs, particularly the United Arab Emirates, that is providing such a steady stream of weapons to the RSF? The Quad format doesn't really make allowances for trying to reach some kind of agreement between the Arabs, let alone between the Sudanese parties. How do we get the local elements of this, where a lot of the conflict is actually being driven, where a lot of the revenge attacks, the types that we see in Al-Fashid, are taking place?

21:20How does that feature within a ceasefire agreement? And to be fair to the Quad, Right now, for them, the priority is a three-month humanitarian ceasefire that will be followed by a nine-month procession of hostilities agreement that would pave the way for a political process. That is how they wrote it down on the 12th of September statement. So, you know, it might be still premature, really, as far as the Quad is concerned, to include these pieces. But they are such integral pieces to a peace that without considering them now and making plans for them now, I think we won't even get to that initial humanitarian truce.

21:55We got this email from Carolyn in Massachusetts who says, I think the U.S. media covers conflicts that involve people or places where we have a known relationship. I bet most people can't locate Sudan on a map. Please discuss the history and current U.S. relationship to Sudan and how it is different from South Sudan where Trump wants to send some of our immigrants. Declan, your thoughts? Well, the U.S. has been deeply implicated in Sudan actually for years. I mean, in a positive sense, in the sense of being engaged in diplomacy, but also in what Sudanese would see as a negative sense. The U.S.

22:29had Sudan under a very strict sanctions regime for several decades under its former leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. And those sanctions were only lifted a couple of some years ago. But I would also say that, you know, there is actually, I think, you know, Sudan, we shouldn't forget that Sudan was really a major foreign policy priority for the U.S. only a couple of decades ago during a previous conflict in Darfur. That was the time when we had Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney, you know, leading marches in Washington when solving that conflict was a priority for the Bush administration. There was pressure on China because it had been backing the Sudanese government at that time.

23:14So it's certainly, even though I think the war in Sudan has been really overlooked to a large degree because of the conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza in recent years that have really overshadowed it, despite the intense, the huge scale of the fighting and the intense suffering that people there are undergoing. going. But, you know, there's certainly it's not so long ago since Sudan was a major priority for American policymakers and for the American public. Halud, your thoughts? I think, you know, Sudan doesn't occupy the kind of space that it's used to, certainly under the Bush administration. And in large part, that was because the Christian right in the United States was very seized with the dynamics of the war at the time, particularly between the North and the South, where the South then seceded to become South Sudan, which has a lot of Christians in it, and therefore was of interest to a lot of these church groups and Christian right that was part of the Bush constituency.

24:11Today, you don't have that. Today, the wall is very different. There's no sort of religious element to it, although I've seen recent reporting that says that there is. This is a war that is taking place within a different context also. 20 years ago, when you said there's a famine that's taking place, an entire UN and international architecture would kick into gear that would respond to that. 20 years ago, when you said there is a when the U.S. Secretary of State would like Colin Powell did in 2004, would say there is a genocide taking place in Darfur. The United Nations would mobilize and try to set up a peacekeeping mission as happened in the early 2000s.

24:51That world is effectively gone. Those tools that we could once rely on are no longer there. And as a gentleman from UNICEF said, the funding is no longer there. And of course, with the demise of USAID under this administration, that means that Sudan's largest aid giver, the United States, is completely absent and is a huge gaping hole in terms of the response to the humanitarian need. So the role that the U.S. could have played, it no longer can, both because of its own policies, but also because of the global shift that we've seen. Ross, I want to bring you in here. Share more about the effects of those U.S.

25:28aid cuts on the ground in Sudan. Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think those are good observations from Halud, and certainly we're seeing, you know, less leverage across the board on some of the humanitarian situations inside Sudan at the moment. It puts us as humanitarian actors in a very dangerous position. I mean, we've had our own staff casualties amongst our staff over the last two years, and others have as well. So it's never been more dangerous, but also never less funded. And I think a good example is some of the rapid and first responders are these emergency kitchens, the community kitchens inside Khartoum and other cities that have been really the lifeline in some of these conflict areas.

26:09And, you know, I know that they had approximately an 80 % reduction of USAID funding throughout the course of this year. So putting them in a really difficult spot, you know, there has been some gap filling, including from the World Food Program for these kitchens. But that's a lifeline for a lot of people that's been put under a lot of strain. And you can extend that out to, as Sheldon in the clip mentioned, and for our own operations. I mean, we need another$600 million over the next five months just to maintain a logistics operation that is targeting more than 4 million people a month. It's a big ask.

26:45But there's very few players right now that are willing to step up to that. What would it take to raise that$600 million you need? Well, I think as Declan and Holud have been also alluding to, there is a need for focused diplomacy around a ceasefire or ceasefire-like conditions that allow us to operate, but also the support for a peaceful solution there. I mean, the money is there. There is no question. It's just not going to humanitarian operations right now. Let's take a quick pause here. Still to come, the country's influencing and even possibly benefiting from the Sudanese conflict. Stay with us.