The shifting patterns of fighting in Sudan have allowed foreign nationals to escape and given the warring sides an opportunity to assess their rival’s capabilities and fine-tune their battle plans.
The power struggle that erupted two weeks ago, which analysts fear could precede a bloody and protracted conflict, has pitted Sudan’s army, led by the de facto president General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against a powerful paramilitary group commanded by his one-time ally.
With hostilities declared, few see the other backing down. Which of them triumphs will decide the future of Sudan and its 46mn people.
“They’re locked in a kind of pitched battle to the death. There can be only one victor,” said Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to US special envoys for Sudan, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “[Until] one side has achieved tactical superiority over the other, [there is] no opening for any kind of serious negotiation,” he said.
The spasm of violence is the culmination of months of simmering tensions between Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Sudan’s vice-president known as Hemeti who commands the Rapid Support Forces. “They both think that securing a military victory over the other is possible,” a senior UN official said from Port Sudan.
A partial ceasefire was extended for an additional 72 hours late on Thursday. Yet fighting continued in Khartoum and other parts of the country, with the warring factions accusing each other of breaching the truce.
The conflict between the conventional military and a band of paramilitaries involves two very different fighting forces. Burhan’s army is made up of ground troops backed by an air force and heavy artillery. As such, it is better at defending strategic locations such as the presidential compound that has recently come under attack.
Hemeti’s RSF is a mobile guerrilla force, partly derived from the feared Janjaweed militia that crushed the rebellion in the western Darfur region that erupted in 2003.
“The natural advantage in this fight goes to the Sudanese armed forces because it’s a conventional army. It does know the streets of Khartoum, it’s trained in defending fixed locations . . . it can complement its ground forces with air force,” said Hudson.
Burhan commands about 100,000 troops which are “relatively well-equipped” with recent acquisitions of Russian and Ukrainian surplus, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His forces have Soviet-designed MiG-29s and new Chinese fighter ground-attack aircraft. The military also runs a company that manufactures ammunition, small arms and armoured vehicles.
Hemeti’s forces, meanwhile, were “looting and marauding” as their predecessors did across Darfur, said Hudson. Brigades of the Janjaweed — which means “devils on horseback” — were accused by the International Criminal Court of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The RSF has a 40,000-strong troop, according to the IISS, although one senior member of the paramilitary group claimed to have more than 150,000 men equipped with armoured vehicles and Russian anti-aircraft machine guns.
Hemeti has hailed the discipline of his forces — whose members fought in Yemen on behalf of the Gulf-led coalition against Houthi rebels — although others have cast doubt on the chain of command. While about 10,000 of them were intrinsically loyal to Hemeti owing to clan ties, the RSF was otherwise “a force for hire”, analysts said.
“RSF pays significantly better than the Sudanese armed forces and in a nosediving economy, the RSF is a desirable destination for young men who also dream of the lucrative payments given to the fighters that went to Yemen and Libya,” said Jonas Horner, an independent Sudan analyst. “The corollary here is that if the RSF’s financial capacity is cut off and paychecks stop, most of these guys will probably stop fighting.”
A disadvantage for the paramilitary group is that many of its troops — often recruited from clans in Chad, Darfur and peripheral parts of Sudan — have never been to Khartoum or do not know the terrain where the fighting is now centred.
Sudan’s armed forces have during this opening phase of the power struggle sought to encircle the RSF to cut off supply lines and exit routes. But Susan Stigant, Africa director at the United States Institute of Peace, said Hemeti’s forces had managed to create “breakout groups” to open new supply lines, which could point to a protracted fight as its forces “dig in”.
“That sort of guerrilla fighting is good at keeping lines open,” she said. That is critical because the survival of the RSF would hang on ammunition and fuel supplies that, analysts said, Hemeti’s men have been storing across the city.
The RSF would deploy “hit-and-run tactics” to turn the conflict into a “chronic war of attrition”, according to Magdi el-Gizouli, a Sudanese fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, a think-tank. “This is very challenging for the Sudanese armed forces because this means it’s a cat-and-mouse game,” he said.
Where the fighting goes next partly hinges on what outside support Hemeti can secure in the form of weapons, ammunition and even forces. “That’s the thing that keeps them in this fight long term and really prolongs it,” Hudson said.
The RSF could get backing, albeit not publicly, from renegade Libyan general Khalifa Haftar, who controls the east of Libya and who has fighters from Darfur in his self-styled Libyan National Army. Hemeti had also sent fighters to support Haftar’s forces.
The RSF has also forged ties with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary organisation that helped train Hemeti’s forces in 2019. Although Hemeti has said he has since broken ties, analysts fear the Russian mercenaries could offer ammunition and support from their bases in Libya and the Central African Republic.
Depending on how the battle progresses, Hemeti could eventually seek to fall back to his western power base of Darfur. For now, the prize remains Khartoum, a sprawling city of 6mn people where dead bodies are reported to be lying in the streets.
“That’s what no other insurgency in Sudan’s history has managed,” said el-Gizouli, referring to the battle to take the capital. “And it makes the price of fighting very, very high.”