The War Nobody Stopped
A War Fought for Gold, Not Ideology
The Sudan civil war is, at its core, a fight between two men over who gets to loot a country. This is not cynicism. It is the analytical framework that many serious observers have converged on, from Alex de Waal’s characterization of Sudan’s political economy as a militarized kleptocracy to Cameron Hudson’s assessment that the gold economy sustains indefinite warfare by giving both leaderships a profit motive against peace.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan leads the Sudanese Armed Forces. General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, leads the Rapid Support Forces. Both men came to power through Sudan’s militarized kleptocracy. Both control vast economic networks. And both understand that losing this war means not just losing power but losing access to the resource extraction networks that make them billionaires.
The resource at the center of this equation is gold. Sudan is Africa’s third-largest gold producer, and the RSF controls much of the artisanal mining sector in Darfur and Kordofan, a sector that generates billions of dollars annually, much of it exported through UAE-connected smuggling networks that bypass international sanctions and oversight. Suliman Baldo’s research at the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker has meticulously mapped these gold flows, showing how extraction, transport, and sale fund weapons purchases, pay fighters, and enrich a network of middlemen connecting Darfur’s mines to Dubai’s gold souks.
The SAF has its own revenue streams: control of Port Sudan’s customs revenue, access to oil transit fees from South Sudan’s pipeline, and the institutional military budget funded by allies like Egypt and Turkey. Both sides have concluded, correctly by their own logic, that the cost of fighting is less than the cost of peace, because peace would require sharing or surrendering the economic assets that sustain their power.
This is why every ceasefire negotiation has failed. The Jeddah process in 2023, the various UN and African Union mediations, the Quad diplomacy under Secretary Rubio, all have foundered on the same reality: neither Burhan nor Hemedti can accept terms that threaten their economic base, and no mediator has the leverage to impose costs that exceed the benefits of continued fighting.
The UAE’s Shadow War
No external actor has shaped Sudan’s war more decisively than the United Arab Emirates, and no external actor has faced less accountability for doing so.
The New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation documented what analysts had long suspected: the UAE operates a covert arms pipeline to the RSF. Flight logs, geolocated videos, and satellite imagery exposed the transformation of an Emirati airbase into a drone and weapons hub linked to RSF operations. The UAE withdrew drone equipment days after publication, an implicit admission, but the pipeline resumed through alternative routes.
The UAE’s motivations are complex but decipherable. Abu Dhabi views Hemedti as a strategic partner in a broader regional competition with Turkey and Qatar, both of which back the SAF. The UAE’s gold trade connections to RSF-controlled mining operations create direct economic incentives. And the Emirates’ post-Arab Spring foreign policy, which has consistently favored strongman stability over democratic transition, aligns with Hemedti’s authoritarian populism over the remnants of Sudan’s civilian democratic movement.
The SAF has its own foreign backers. Turkey provides Akinci combat drones that have transformed the SAF’s military capabilities, enabling the March 2025 recapture of Khartoum. Egypt provides logistical support from a remote southern base and sees the SAF as a bulwark against the RSF’s destabilizing influence in its own southern border regions. Iran has reportedly provided weapons to the SAF, adding yet another layer to a conflict that increasingly resembles a proxy war between Gulf rivals.
The result is what Alex de Waal has characterized as a war that outgrew Sudan. The conflict is no longer merely a civil war between two Sudanese factions. It is a theater in a broader regional competition, with external arms flows ensuring that neither side runs out of weapons, neither side faces sufficient pressure to negotiate, and the civilians caught between them bear a cost that is, by every measure, catastrophic.
The SAF has filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice accusing the UAE of genocide complicity. The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on RSF figures. But neither mechanism has materially altered the UAE’s calculus. As Cameron Hudson has noted, the international community’s response has amounted to hoping that naming and shaming will substitute for leverage it does not have.
Darfur’s Second Genocide
What is happening in Darfur is not a new crisis. It is the continuation, and in some ways the completion, of the genocide that began in 2003.
When President Omar al-Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militias against Darfur’s non-Arab communities two decades ago, the international community eventually responded with ICC indictments, peacekeeping forces, and the language of ‘never again.’ UNAMID, the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission, deployed 26,000 troops. Bashir was indicted for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Then UNAMID withdrew in 2020. De Waal has described the withdrawal as a serious miscalculation that created a protection vacuum. Three years later, the RSF, the direct institutional descendant of the Janjaweed, led by the same Hemedti who rose through Janjaweed ranks, launched a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing across all five Darfur states.
In El Geneina, West Darfur, RSF forces and allied Arab militias massacred an estimated 15,000 ethnic Masalit civilians. Governor Khamis Abakar, who had been publicly documenting the atrocities on social media, was assassinated by RSF militants. City after city fell to a pattern that NYT Visual Investigations documented with devastating precision: surround, cut communications, disarm non-Arab residents, loot, execute military-age men, burn homes, and drive survivors into the desert toward Chad.
El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the last major city in the region not under RSF control, fell in October 2025 after a prolonged siege. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab documented through satellite analysis that the RSF conducted ‘widespread and systematic mass killings’ in the aftermath.
The U.S. government formally declared that the RSF is committing genocide in Darfur, a determination that carries legal and moral weight but has produced no material change in the RSF’s behavior. The word ‘genocide’ has become, in Sudan’s case, a diagnostic label applied to a disease for which the international community has chosen not to prescribe treatment.
15,000 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves in the Khartoum area since April 2024. The actual death toll is almost certainly far higher. Yale researchers have warned that 2026 has the potential to be the bloodiest year yet. The machinery of mass killing is operating at industrial scale, and no force, internal or external, is positioned to stop it.
Starvation as Strategy
Both sides in Sudan’s war have weaponized hunger with a deliberateness that amounts to a war crime, and, in the view of multiple analysts, a crime against humanity.
The SAF blocks humanitarian aid trucks at the Chad border, the primary supply route into Darfur. Convoys that do enter are subject to bureaucratic delays, permit requirements, and arbitrary rejection. The SAF expelled WFP officials and suspended the operations of international organizations it accused of bias. In July 2024, the New York Times documented how the military was deliberately blocking humanitarian corridors while famine spread through the regions it claimed to be defending.
The RSF’s approach is more direct: looting. Aid convoys are hijacked, warehouses raided, food stocks seized and redistributed to fighters or sold on black markets. WFP has lost staff to RSF attacks. MSF has been forced to suspend operations in areas where it is most needed. Humanitarian workers operate under the constant threat of being killed, kidnapped, or expelled.
The result is famine on a scale not seen in Africa in decades. The WFP reports 24.6 million people facing acute hunger, roughly half of Sudan’s population. Famine has been officially declared in El Fasher and Kadugli, with 20 additional areas at risk. Two million people face famine or the immediate risk of famine.
Alex de Waal, who has studied famine as a political instrument for four decades, published a devastating essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that American and Gulf state inaction amounts to complicity in mass starvation. His analysis is precise: famine in Sudan is not a natural disaster. It is not caused by drought or crop failure. It is the predictable and intended consequence of decisions made by armed men who control food supply routes and have concluded that starving civilian populations serves their military objectives.
The humanitarian system’s response has been overwhelmed. Sudan accounts for 10% of global humanitarian need, one country consuming one-tenth of the world’s humanitarian capacity, yet only 36% of the UN’s funding appeal has been met. U.S. aid cuts under the current administration have compounded the crisis, closing emergency food kitchens that were the last line of defense against mass starvation in several regions.
The children bear the worst of it. Reports document RSF forces abducting children during Darfur raids. Both sides forcibly conscript minors. A quarter of Sudan’s population faces food insecurity. The education system has collapsed entirely. A generation is being destroyed, and the world’s response, as Cameron Hudson has characterized it, has been performative concern without consequential action.
The Partition Nobody Wants but Everyone Expects
Many analysts now consider de facto partition the most likely medium-term path for Sudan, an outcome they regard as catastrophic but increasingly difficult to avoid.
The RSF controls most of Darfur and significant portions of Kordofan. The SAF controls Khartoum, the eastern regions, and the north. The front lines have hardened into something resembling a permanent border. The RSF has already taken steps toward formalizing its territorial control: its leadership gathered in Nairobi in February 2025 to advance plans for a parallel government, signing a charter outlining secularism, democracy, and decentralized governance. In March, they signed a new constitution.
De Waal has identified this as the most probable medium-term scenario, rival authorities in Port Sudan and western Sudan, with neither possessing the military capability to reunify the country by force. The model is Libya after 2011, two competing governments, each backed by different external patrons, each controlling distinct territory, each claiming legitimacy.
But Sudan’s potential partition would be far more destructive than Libya’s. Libya’s population is 7 million. Sudan’s is 48 million. Libya’s oil wealth provided both sides with revenue. Sudan’s gold economy is concentrated in RSF territory, leaving the SAF-controlled east dependent on diminishing oil transit fees and foreign military aid. And Libya’s division, while violent, did not involve the systematic ethnic cleansing that has characterized Darfur’s descent.
Partition would lock in the RSF’s ethnic cleansing gains. The non-Arab communities driven from Darfur would have no prospect of return. The RSF’s parallel government would seek international recognition, creating pressure on countries to legitimize territorial gains achieved through genocide. And the humanitarian crisis would become permanent: 12 million displaced people with nowhere to go, straddling a border that neither side respects.
Kholood Khair, the Khartoum-based analyst, has warned that partition would also spawn new forms of predatory governance on both sides, militia checkpoint economies that would define both SAF and RSF areas as the spoils of active warfare run dry. Armed groups that sustained themselves through active warfare would transition to extracting revenue from civilian populations through tolls, taxes, and extortion. The warlords would become the state.
No major international actor wants this outcome. But no major international actor is doing what would be necessary to prevent it: cutting the arms supply lines that sustain both sides, imposing meaningful economic costs on the UAE for its RSF support, deploying a protection force to shield humanitarian operations, and engaging at the highest diplomatic levels to create conditions for a negotiated settlement. The partition is arriving not because it is desired but because the alternative, sustained, costly, politically risky international engagement, exceeds what any government is willing to invest in a crisis that generates no compelling headlines and threatens no Western strategic interests directly.
Why Sudan’s War Is the Test Case for Global Order
Sudan’s war matters beyond Sudan for a reason that the international community has been reluctant to articulate: it is the test case for whether the post-World War II international order retains any functional capacity to prevent genocide, protect civilians, and enforce the norms it claims to uphold.
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, was designed specifically for situations like Sudan. It holds that when a state manifestly fails to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to act. Sudan meets every criterion. The RSF is committing genocide in Darfur, the U.S. government has said so officially. Both sides are committing war crimes. Ethnic cleansing is systematic and documented. Crimes against humanity are ongoing.
And the international response has been: sanctions on individual RSF commanders that have no practical effect, UN Security Council meetings that produce statements of concern, humanitarian appeals that go largely unfunded, and diplomatic processes that both sides attend without any intention of implementing.
The gap between norm and practice is not new. R2P failed in Syria. It was selectively applied in Libya. But Sudan represents something more fundamental: a case where the facts are not in dispute, the legal framework is clear, the moral case is unambiguous, and the international community has nonetheless chosen inaction, not because intervention is impossible, but because it is inconvenient.
This has consequences beyond Sudan. Every government watching, in Myanmar, in Ethiopia, in the DRC, draws the same conclusion: the international community’s stated norms are aspirational, not operational. Genocide prevention is a rhetorical commitment, not a policy one. The cost of mass atrocity, for those who commit it, is diplomatic discomfort but not material consequence.
De Waal frames it most starkly, describing Sudan’s war as a vortex of transnational conflicts that the existing international architecture cannot manage. The UN Security Council is paralyzed by competing interests. The African Union lacks enforcement capacity. The United States, historically the only power with both the capability and the occasional will to intervene, is consumed by the Iran war, domestic politics, and a foreign policy establishment that has deprioritized Africa for decades.
The result is 30 million people in need, 150,000 dead, 12 million displaced, famine spreading, genocide ongoing, and a international community that has learned the name of the crisis but not yet decided whether it is worth the cost of stopping it.