Why Sudan's horrifying war is being ignored

0:01Yousra Elbagir:Sky News. The full story first.

0:11Dominic Waghorn:The West Watch is on whilst the war in Sudan continues to cause untold misery and suffering. And this is why.

0:29Dominic Waghorn:Hello, I'm Dominic Wagcorn, and on this special edition of This Is Why, we're returning to a conflict that gets nowhere near the attention of the wars being fought in Ukraine or the Middle East, but is arguably more catastrophic than any of them. So far, fighting in Sudan has led to an estimated 1 million deaths. 15 million people displaced and 25 million without enough food the numbers are staggering so why isn't more being done to bring an end to the conflict my colleague skies africa correspondent yusra el bagheer has recently returned from sudan and is here with me now so yusra great to have you on we're going to look into how this war began why it is so big why don't enough of us know enough about it but but first of all give us an update on what you found in your latest trip there so

1:17Yousra Elbagir:So this was our ninth trip in just over three years in Sudan, but also on the borders of Darfur. And I think I'm always blown away by how relentless the war is. It's this constant drum of violence from morning to night. People are dealing with it every moment of their day. They're waking up. There's no power. There are drones overhead. They're terrified about their kids going to school. Then you've got eight million children who are out of school, not getting any sort of education for over three years. And it's just this catch-22 of either you try and regain some sense of normalcy and go about your life as you would and deal with that constant violence, or you halt it and you stop your life and you're completely at the mercy of the violence.

2:00Yousra Elbagir:It's sad to see that things are still going on with such fervour, with such intensity.

2:07Dominic Waghorn:So the people of Sudan are getting used to this war. It's more than three years old. I think a lot of people listening and watching probably don't know how this began, who is fighting it and what kind of scale is this war being waged on now?

2:19Yousra Elbagir:It started on a sleepy Saturday morning in Ramadan, April 2023. And we'd all heard that there were these simmering tensions between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary rapid support forces. So the rapid support forces have been an auxiliary of the army for a very long time since the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. They were a border force. They were even working with the European Union to crack down on illegal migration. And in 2017, that group of militias was formalized in Sunni's parliament as the rapid support forces. So there was a power struggle between the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the head of the RSF, Mohammed Hamdan Dagala, also known as Himeti.

3:01Yousra Elbagir:the army wanted to absorb the RSF formally into the armed forces. And the RSF had been making money as a militia for hire. They fought for the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. I mean, mediators were dealing with the army saying, we need the RSF to be absorbed into the armed forces in two years, and Himiti turning around and saying 10 years. So it was a complete deadlock. And then that erupted into explosions, gunfire in the capital on a Saturday morning when Himitti's forces wanted to take control of the capital. And they held it for two years before the army could reclaim it.

3:39Dominic Waghorn:And it has descended or escalated month by month since then into this absolutely massive catastrophic war. Give us a sense of the scale of this, because if you're looking at that number of, what is it, 15 million people displaced. That is the entire population of London, Kent, Surrey and Sussex getting up and deciding that it's just too dangerous to live where you are and running for their lives, literally.

4:03Yousra Elbagir:And more than once, many more than once.

4:05Dominic Waghorn:And on a much bigger area.

4:07Yousra Elbagir:Exactly. People flee to sanctuary cities. We saw this from the beginning of the war. Many sanctuary cities fell. So Al-Fashir was a sanctuary city for people who'd been displaced. They then had to move somewhere else. Madani in the centre of the country was also a sanctuary city. all the INGOs and the humanitarian bodies moved to Medani, and then it was captured by the RSF. So people dealing with displacement once, twice, three times, and going to places that are unsafe. We moved through the country, and as we were leaving cities that are booming, Adbara is now the kind of gold hub of the country, a drone hit the morning that we were leaving to move northeast to leave from Port Sudan.

4:45Yousra Elbagir:So there's nowhere in Sudan that's safe right now. There are places of relative safety, and even then that safety is fleeting.

4:51Dominic Waghorn:So you don't know if you're living in one city that's been safe to now, whether it could be the next Al-Fashia. And Al-Fashia, for people who don't know, was a city about a year ago, wasn't it? It was surrounded by the RSF, and they kind of built a sand berm around most of it, didn't they? And then they kind of contained the people in it, and went in and killed men, women, and children, everyone they could find, aid workers, humanitarian workers, and the death toll, which is up to 60 ,000 people. That's just one city. I mean, you're Sudanese. How do you feel about that?

5:19Yousra Elbagir:I, when I think of the war in terms of how it's been dealt with outside of Sudan, I always think of the word inconvenient. Sudan's war is an inconvenient war. It's inconvenient for people who have limited empathy, limited attention span and can only deal with one or two conflicts at a time. And I always tell people it's no coincidence that there was this domino effect that the impunity of Putin encourages the impunity of a man like Hamidti. It's contagious. So I think to see Sudan in isolation is willful ignorance. And I think that we live in a time where people don't want to engage in a way that is meaningful because of one, how exhausting it is, but because also cost of living crisis, so much is going on.

6:03Yousra Elbagir:And I think seeing Sudan as a far flung conflict is a very convenient way to approach it.

6:08Dominic Waghorn:You've done more, I think, than most journalists to keep it in the public eye with these trips when you're going back. And you've highlighted so powerfully the courage and the kind of nobility and dignity of the people that you're meeting. So who have you spoken to on this latest trip? And what have you learned from what's going on in El Abay?

6:26Yousra Elbagir:This is the last stretch of road before we get to El Abay, and there is a complete shift in the comfort level. We're seeing very few cars on the road, very few people. because even though this is a key supply route for the army, the RSF are known to operate a surveillance drone that patrols this territory and launches missiles at military vehicles, fuel tankers, and even trucks carrying aid. I think going to Olubayyad, someone described it, commenting on one of our reports, the unyielding city. It's a city that has endured the longest ground siege in Sudan's war, a period of two years and eight and a half months.

7:03Yousra Elbagir:It's come out of that partially. They still have to deal with drones, RSF drones hitting water station, the power station. And there's so much suffering there. People have held on for so long.

7:16Yousra Elbagir:My husband was killed while I was four months pregnant. Killed in this war. We have been suffering since the day we arrived. We don't have anything. I don't have a bed. I don't have a pan. I don't have a bucket. I don't have any food. And the doctors that we were meeting, who chose to stay, those routes are open now. They can leave, but they're choosing to operate using generators that run out of fuel. They're choosing to care for people when the emergency ward is blacked out, when the power is out.

7:46Dominic Waghorn:You know, when there is bombing, the citizens from the market go to their homes. But the staff, the medical staff from their houses come to the hospital because they want to save lives.

7:58Yousra Elbagir:I think the courage and the resilience and the generosity we've seen across the board, that is where I have faith in the Sudanese spirit. And that's happening while the world looks away, right? So we meet people and they don't expect anyone to come and save them. They are getting on with it.

8:16Dominic Waghorn:There was also a sense of fatalism, wasn't there?

8:18Yousra Elbagir:We joined because if there's nothing to do, we might as well die for the homeland. If you stay home, you die. If you go and fight, you die. So better to enlist and die.

8:31Dominic Waghorn:People get used to the war and they become inured to it. Is that depressing to watch for you?

8:37Yousra Elbagir:It's heartbreaking to see teenagers, young people, deal with these choices and face the futility of life in the times of war. The teenager who joined the armed forces, his sister had her leg amputated from an RSF shell landing on her school.

8:55Yousra Elbagir:It's become normal for me, she says. Yes, it was a tragedy, but it's what God wanted for me and I accept my fate. She says she was able to accept it and she says she wants to study nursing to become like the nurses who helped her. So she's choosing a path from what happened to her and he's not able to accept it. And he's chosen to take up arms and join a fight that he sees as futile and has said to me, I would have never wanted to join the military. but feels compelled to. So one of the things for us was sharing how war mutates the trajectory of a child or a teenager and how they have to go down paths that no one should ever have to.

9:36Dominic Waghorn:What's it like for you though, Yusra? I mean, you're watching the country of your homeland just falling apart in a way that's hard to see it recovering from. How difficult is it to do that when you go back to this place that must mean so much to you?

9:49Yousra Elbagir:The intimacy is in the fact that I see that it could be me, you know, reporting on school children. I remember singing the national anthem at some assemblies when I was in school in Sudan for eight years. And it's crazy to think how your life can take a different route. And when we left, I actually said to the team, now you see why people get on small boats. Now you see why our parents went into exile. so every trip for me I come away one feeling very sad but I also feel deeply reminded of why I do this job and the fact that I have the privilege to go and to cover their stories

10:37Dominic Waghorn:let's move on to what can be done about it I'm looking at what powers are involved and why and what they're saying about it. You've done some work producing evidence with someone who was within the RSF, but also almost on a weekly basis, there's more evidence showing that what the UAE claims is not happening is happening, which is they're funneling in weapons. They're funneling in guns, armored vehicles, drones as well, which are very useful if you're trying to hunt down civilians and your enemy. Now, the UAE says it's not involved and Britain has kind of not questioned that. But evidence has emerged in the last few weeks from a human rights researcher in Yale who said he went to the Foreign Office with evidence that his group had gathered showing that the UAE is involved.

11:18Dominic Waghorn:And British Foreign Office officials said, well, we can't publish that ourselves. We'd rather you did. And he said, well, sure you can. And you've got MI6, you've got GCHQ, presumably gathering similar evidence. Can't you put it out in the public domain? And they said, no, we can't because we're afraid of economic reprisals, which I think is close as we've got yet to Britain being effectively accused of turning a blind eye to what effectively is helping genocide. Is the Rattai now moving towards the UAE having to admit that it's involved and to Britain having to do more to pressurise its very close ally, the United Arab Emirates, to do less and be less involved in this war?

11:56Yousra Elbagir:I think that we are now treating the UAE's military support of the Rapid Support Forces as reported fact. But I think their approach will be denied till you die. I don't think that they're going to turn around and acknowledge their involvement at all. And I also think that they've seen Israel's impunity and they feel as entitled to it as Israel does. You know, I was speaking to someone recently about the UAE and they said, Himadi is their guy. And it's as simple as that. He was their guy in Yemen. He's proven that he's capable of taking the capital and holding the capital. What I think will be interesting is how RSF defections are going to impact his show of force and his ability to carry out their needs and wishes on the ground.

12:35Yousra Elbagir:So commanders who massacred al-Fashir have defected and now joined the army and are being used by the army to reclaim towns and supply routes. We've seen RSF commanders of great weight who come with their own militias and their own forces because it's so tribal. So one commander will have his whole hometown and his whole home region as a fighting force. And so these defections are really the army's strategy to denigrate the RSF to the point where they lose enough personnel to be defeated. When I was on the ground, I kept hearing from people who are covering the war, but also closely watching the war, working around it, that the RSF has a lot of military equipment that they get from the UAE, but not enough personnel.

13:20Yousra Elbagir:So that is where there is a shift. And I think the UAE is watching closely with concern. If this is where Lubeyed becomes even more of a critical battleground, Because if the RSF prove that they can regain the territory that they've lost to the army to the north and the east of Al-Ubaid, then they can prove that they're worth their weight.

13:41Dominic Waghorn:I mean, we have to say the Foreign Office say that they are working towards a ceasefire. They're trying to do what they can to ease the humanitarian situation. They say that no country should be supporting any armed group in Sudan. And they're doing what they can behind the scenes to make things better. but it does sound disingenuous doesn't it when it seems pretty clear that a very close ally of britain is directly involved in this war and there's more and more evidence of that i guess the other thing we have to say is it's not just the uae on the side of the rsf is it you know the saudis are involved supporting their enemies yeah turkey turkey is egypt as well and i guess that the concern is that this is it's a proxy war and the more that these outside powers get involved for whatever reasons, whether it's gold or just geopolitical reasons, the longer this war is just going to go on and on and on.

14:30Yousra Elbagir:Yeah. I mean, I spoke to policymakers last year in Europe who seem to have quite a disconcerting approach where they felt that the RSF was in the embrace of their ally, the UAE, as opposed to Russia or China. But my point consistently is that you are then pushing the Sudanese state deeper into their relationships with countries that are seen as enemies or hostile. And these resources, I mean, the Sudanese state has long leveraged our resources for political power. It's always about military support. It's always about defense. It's for me, I'm almost like you've made your bed. You know, we've been warning, we've been talking about this from the very early days.

15:11Yousra Elbagir:I actually remember in that first year feeling the deals being made, You can feel the shift. You can feel the sort of ominous warmongering of seeing people go for meetings and seeing people fly into different countries and know that deals are being made to make money off this war. And those deals are bearing fruit. And a country like Saudi is a key backer for Sudan and the Sudanese military, and they will get as much as they need from this war. But that will also drive the UAE to dig in their heels and support the RSF because of the competition between the two.

15:44Dominic Waghorn:How do you think this, can it end? Is it a question of one side winning?

15:48Yousra Elbagir:At the moment, where we are is that the war could end with these defections. But for me, that is just a pause. Because then what is stopping another war breaking out when like Himidia, another commander deciding to turn on the security apparatus in the army. So the way that it's going, I don't see it being resolved. I see it pausing. I see there being some respite, a reprieve from the fighting, I hope. Maybe that's just me being hopeful. But we have a really long road ahead of us. And I think what the countries that have backed the warring parties have shown is that they see this as an investment and they will want to see their investment reap dividends.

16:27Dominic Waghorn:And are people there in any sense hopeful? Have they given up hope?