What’s behind the war in Sudan?

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1:11It's October 2025, and glimpses of unfolding massacres in Sudan have once again reminded the world of a long-running conflict that's been often overlooked. Distressing images and videos have been trickling out from the city of El Fasher after the paramilitary rapid support forces seized control of the city in Darfur from the Sudanese army. The UN has raised the alarm. And a warning before we go further. There are some graphic descriptions in this program which some of you might find upsetting. The UN, through our High Commission for Human Rights, has received credible reports of summary executions of civilians, including unarmed men being shot as they lie on the ground.

1:57We also have received credible reports of summary executions of civilians trying to flee the city. The scale and brutality of the mass killings have shocked even those familiar with this bloody conflict. What we are seeing is an activity pattern by the Rapid Support Forces consistent with house-to-house killing of civilians. And we can see on the ground objects consistent with about 1.5 to 2 meter long linear objects, which is the average measurement of the body of an adult human being. We see a discoloration around objects consistent with human bodies that when we process it, the color is red.

2:41Nathaniel Raymond from the humanitarian research lab at Yale, who monitors Sudan, referring there to blood-soaked earth visible in satellite images. We believe that they are pools of blood. There are thousands of these objects. We're hearing from sources on the ground before we've lost communications with them. In the morning, they believe 1 ,300 were dead. By the evening, they said it was over 10 ,000. The urgency to stop this tragedy cannot be overestimated. The war in Sudan has been going on for two and a half years with no end in sight. During that time, at least 150 ,000 people were killed and 14 million people fled their homes.

3:26In this episode, which we recorded in the spring of 2024, we dig into the prehistory of the latest atrocities with the help of BBC Monitoring's Africa Watchers. We profile the warring parties and the foreign powers aiding them, and the dangerous task for the journalists, reporting on the war and its narratives. We offer it to you now for background to the events that led to this latest dark chapter.

3:58Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Krassi Ivanova-Twig, and this is the Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, exploring the narratives, the propaganda, and the disinformation.

4:31Sudan remains important, despite the fact that it's become the war that's sort of been in the back burner because there's so many other things going on. Now there's a war in Gaza. There's still the conflict in Ukraine. Beverly Ochieng, one of our top Africa experts, was telling me why the world should be paying attention to this conflict. There's a bigger Middle East crisis and Sudan straddles that region. It's an African country, but it also has very strong Muslim-Arab links. So it's still caught in the crossfire of all of that. There was concerns about the possibility of Sudan further fracturing.

5:07A further fracturing in a high-stakes region might have far-reaching consequences. But more on those later. This is a complex story. So let's get the basics. What's happening and who is fighting whom? Here's another Africa watcher, Ahmed Mohamed Abdi. The war that broke out between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary rapid support forces, two very well-armed parties, has created a huge humanitarian situation in the country and also displacement at unprecedented levels. It has affected the whole of the country. 18 million people face acute hunger, according to the World Food Programme.

5:49The war in Sudan is a multi-layered conflict. So before we can start unpicking it, we need to know a bit of the history with the help of Deke Barrow from our Nairobi team and this fact file. Sudan is the third largest country in Africa, stretching across an unstable and geopolitically vital region. It's predominantly Muslim and with 46 million people, one of the poorest countries in the world. It straddles the Nile River and borders seven countries, each with security challenges that are intertwined with the politics of Khartoum. Sudan has lucrative minerals, including gold, uranium and iron ore.

6:31It has been in and out of civil wars since it gained independence in 1956. Its western region of Jafu saw successive wars from 2003. Another protracted war led to its splitting into two countries in 2011 after all-rich southern Sudan voted for independence. This followed decades of struggle by the mainly Christian and Ani-Mist South against rule by the Arab Muslim North. Sudan has also had successive coups entrenching military regimes that favoured Islamic-oriented governments. Another turning point came in 2018 when nationwide protests broke out demanding the removal of one of Africa's longest-serving leaders, Omar al-Bashir.

7:16He came to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989 and was the first ever sitting president to be indicted on genocide charges by the International Criminal Courts. Following Bashir's ousting, a sovereign council consisting of military and civilian leaders meant to prepare Sudan for a return to civilian rule and elections, but that was hijacked by another coup. Since then, Sudan has been torn between two military men trying to share power, General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, head of the army, and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, leader of the Rapid Support Forces, formerly based in Darfur and known as Janjawid Militias.

8:00Let's go back to 2018, a key moment for people power, which resulted in the removal of a long-serving strongman. In January 2018, we were talking about protests and disgruntlement because of the rising cost of bread, which is a basic commodity for many.

8:20and then within the span of a year how those protests morphed into calls to remove one of the longest serving leaders in the region and how the state of the economy had been so shattered under Omar al-Bashir because there had been western sanctions because of the allegations that they were sponsoring the al-qaeda group there was a period in the 90s where it was discovered that Osama bin Laden the then leader had been hiding out in Sudan But there was also the wave of change that was coming from young people who were exposed. The media had opened up at this point. There were lots of newspapers, lots of online pages who were mobilizing online by these so-called neighborhood resistance committees, by even just young activists and artists.

9:03There were people who were chanting, you know, Sudan is ours.

9:10And then eventually those chants changed into Omar Bashir must leave. The ousting of one of Africa's longest-serving autocrats sent waves of excitement and optimism around the region that the voice of the people could become a real factor in Sudan's politics. But it wasn't the people who reaped the rewards. It was two men with appetite for power. It started as a revolution and it ended in a coup. Before the war broke out, there had been some discussions for the possible formation of another government which would include some of the civilian and political actors who had been part of that transition.

9:50The former Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, who had been removed, and there was still the military leader, Burhan, and then there was the leader of the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, Hemeti. And there were discussions where the RSF would need to be dissolved. And Hemeti wasn't too happy with the possibility that he might lose his own center of power. and because of these two centres of power constantly antagonising each other, a war broke out. Was their disagreement always about who's going to be number one? Essentially, yes. Hemeti seemed to be building himself to be a bit of a statesman and sometimes it felt as if he would be overshadowing Burhan.

10:29Burhan is from an old guard, so he's not doing social media videos and he's not doing, you know, your very slick campaigns online or showing up in suits in places. Hematty was really reaching out to the civilian coalition, the Forces for Freedom and Change. He was building a whole campaign around himself. He was travelling to different places. And this was sort of giving him a bit of a mark. And there was the discussion that there was the possibility they could hand over Bashir to the ICC, which may have implicated the two men. So in a way, they had to find a way to outmaneuver each other, it seems.

11:02Two men with their eyes set on the top chop, each one fearful of the looming threat of justice, each one with a lot to lose. The result is a country caught in their power struggle, not what the people behind the revolution were hoping for. The military to move, the most powerful man. But I think that wave of euphoria has been shattered, particularly now because of the war and because many of those groups that had been galvanizing this pro-democracy movement where you have young people and women at the centre of politics, they're now either escaped because of the war or their voices cannot really be heard in, you know, you have gunfire literally almost every day.

11:45One of those seeking shelter from the shooting in the first weeks of the conflict in Omdurman was journalist Amal al-Hassan and her small team of the El Tahir website. She watched the war descending on her country. We're facing a very horrible time. And at the same time, we keep working because we tell each other, this is our job. When the war starts, the first victim is the truth. And there is like a big propaganda from the both sides of conflict parties. That is why we have to continue speaking about Khartoum. It became like a city of coast in no time. U.S. Special Operations Forces executing a dangerous and daring mission.

12:33Embassies vacated their staff, in some instances destroyed documents because of safety. More than 100 Special Ops Forces, including the Navy's elite seal. There was some anger towards Western states because the Sudan war was also taking place the same time as the war in Ukraine. And there were some visa arrangements for Ukrainian nationals leaving the country. And people were calling out Western governments for not making similar arrangements for Sudanese nationals, even those who had families away. The capital Khartoum hadn't seen war in decades until last April. People left in their hundreds of thousands, including many journalists like Amel.

13:13That created an information vacuum which was quickly filled with rumours and propaganda. So how do you monitor a country at war where your reliable sources vanish almost overnight? Moses Rono, a veteran of monitoring Africa's media, explains his team's challenges. The media generally was repressed under Bashir. Journalists used to struggle to get access to information. I remember a long time ago when I started, we used to have what used to be called pre-press censorship. so government agents would confiscate complete print runs of newspapers just before they are made available in the newsstands, and you'd get blank pages of newspapers.

13:56There was the hope after the revolution that the tight controls that Bashir had imposed on the press and the media generally in Sudan were going to go away, and the media would be more robust. But with the war starting, we've had massive challenges as a team monitoring Sudan, the biggest challenge is getting reliable information from the country. All the actors are fighting to control the message. If you look at the state TV, radio, Omdurman, and Sunna, the official news agency, all controlled by the army, and they skew the reporting towards the army line. At the same time, outlets that are pro, the RSF, would skew the reporting to favor them.

14:44So that's been a challenge because finding reliable information is really difficult. The number of media sources, including websites, even radios, are no longer accessible. Some of the reliable websites, they will take weeks and weeks before they update. It's quite sporadic and unreliable. It is very unsafe. We couldn't get freelancers. We couldn't get access to some of the newspapers. We couldn't get access to radio stations. that's a big challenge that we face. Amal Al-Hassan, the Sudanese editor of El Tahir website, has an on-the-ground perspective on why reliable information has become hard to get.

15:23I'm responsible for my team. All the time I told them there is no story valuable more than your life. I wanted them to stay safe. At the same time, I know that mission they are doing, it is not easy. They are in very dangerous places. They could have lost their life, and no one is going to ask what happened. So they are really very brave. They are still working every single day. Even they have, like, very problems, like there is no power for days, and there is a problem of accessing the Internet. But when the Internet comes, they bring their stories immediately. One day he wrote a story about something happened before three days.

16:10I said, nobody knows about this, don't worry. We can't call it news in our evaluation of what news is something happened now. But it is still news and you are doing a great job.

16:27You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring.

16:34So the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces are the main parties in this war. Bev will talk about the RSF and Ahmed will describe the army for you. Let's go through the main elements. First, who are the worrying parties? The Sudan Armed Forces has ruled this country for almost 57 years out of the nearly 70 years of this country's independence. just before the war broke out. I think the Sudan Armed Forces was one of the most powerful in the Horn of Africa region with over 200 ,000 troops. This is just a modern army which has an air force, which has naval troops, which has also ground troops.

17:18They were well equipped, although most of their equipment came from Russia and China because of the sanctions placed on the country. The RSF was born out of a militia known as the Janjaweed, which had been operating in the Darfur region formed by Arab ethnic groups and they were countering rebel groups that had emerged in the Darfur region you know Darfur the place of the four and the war was an issue around skin color and identity and the rebel groups who are largely from the Masalit and the four black communities when they had essentially been defeated the Janjaweed was formalised into a force that would be a sort of paramilitary coalition, but also would be used for insurgencies outside of Sudan, because that was lucrative, especially for Hermeti, who was building himself as a sort of kingmaker of the region.

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19:19The rapid support forces are estimated to have numbered about 100 ,000 before the war started. That's half the size of the Sudanese army. And the two men vying for the top job, Burhan and Hemeti, have a long shared history. Al-Burhan is a career soldier. He joined the military college in Khartoum before also taking military courses in Egypt. and Jordan. He's also been the military attache of Sudan in China in April 2019. He was installed as the chairman of the Transitional Military Council just a day after al-Bashir was toppled by his defense minister and senior military generals including al-Burhan.

20:05General Burhan, he had been a longtime ally of Omar al-Bashir so he is pretty much of the old regime. He has lots of military economic interests. And then his deputy up until, you know, the war broke out was Hemeti, Hamdan Dagalo Hemeti. And he is the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF. He comes from Darfur. And he had been the leader of the RSF since the early 2000s. He had been a camel herder, someone who has really risen up from almost nothing to being in the position that he is. And I suppose when the coup happened in 2019, it did give Hermetti the possibility of having a bigger political ambition.

20:49He could actually be a statesman. The UN estimates that 300 ,000 people were killed in the Darfur war, and Omar al-Bashir is still being sought by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over that conflict. We heard that propaganda replaced reliable information. So what's the message you hear from the worrying sides? Let's start with the army, their narrative and how they respond to accusations of abuses. The Sudan armed forces interpret the current conflict in the sense that this is a rebellion by rapid support forces against the state and that they are trying to defeat this rebellion, which they accuse of destroying the country and also committing atrocities against civilians in the areas that they seize.

21:47There have been accusations against the army of carrying out and discriminate airstrikes against civilian populated areas, especially inside the capital Khartoum and also some cities in Darfur and Kordofan regions. but the army has repeatedly denied this. The army also points to the fact that the areas that are under the control of the armed forces is where most of the civilians have fled. They're basically saying that this shows that the civilians have faith in the armed forces. They acknowledge that there have been some civilian casualties in some of the air strikes and also some of the attacks but they're saying that these are limited and not intentional.

22:35They always compare that to what they call the indiscriminate and deliberate attacks by the RSF. There have been reports by human rights organisations and the United Nations that the RSF committed atrocities. In the West Darfur state, the RSF killed between 10 ,000 to 15 ,000 civilians The army is basically pointing to these reports. To contrast these reports, the RSF are portraying themselves as the good guys against multiple accusations of war crimes, which they deny. Sometimes they'll put out material trying to demonstrate that they are sharing humanitarian aid, even though the accounts from the media and activists are very different from that.

23:28what you see on their social media feed is that they are willing to change sudan and they want to be part of the politics but the narratives coming out are very different and one of the things that they do primarily is the othering they would talk about the islamist influence in the government and that obviously linked back to omar al-bashir and his links with the muslim brotherhood in egypt they would talk about the possibility of jihadists and that would also echo with the fact that Osama bin Laden had once been hosted in the country. And that's what led to sanctions. And in doing so, they were trying to adapt the language of the more revolutionary political and social class who had wanted Omar al-Bashir out.

24:08The RSF seemed to be refashioning some of the revolutionary language in a quest for appeal. And they seem to have a sophisticated social media strategy. They're really good with media. Part of it is believed to be domiciled in the UAE. They had Facebook accounts which were taken down. They do have a raft of Twitter accounts, including influencers. They have their official accounts where they will put out long statements. They put out videos of organizing football tournaments between children. And by contrast, Sudanese media and activists who could report on the conflict talked about how the RSF was allegedly rounding up young men and sometimes just executing them on site.

24:48Whenever allegations of war crimes emerge. The US has cited this, the UN has cited this, the ICC prosecutor cited this. We are collecting a very significant body of material, information and evidence that is relevant to those particular crimes. The RSF tends to be disproportionately mentioned a lot more in these reports. How the army spreads its message couldn't be more different. Sudan TV airs military statements and videos that promote military propaganda.