The roots of the conflict run deep, right into the bedrock of modern Sudan, which was created almost 70 years ago by foreign rulers, who cobbled together a nation from far-flung and ethnically diverse regions that made little sense as a single, centralized state. It included the swampy south, which was populated by dark-skinned Christian and animist peoples who had more in common with neighboring countries like what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya, and the Darfur region, which was populated by a mix of Muslim tribes. Darfur was loosely and sometimes imprecisely divided between Black and Arab communities, many of whom had deeper ties with the Sahelian peoples of Chad and Niger. This jigsaw nation has since been ruled by an Arab elite drawn from tribes along the Blue and White Nile Rivers near Khartoum — an elite that the British favored, and that under both military and civilian rule, has resisted giving power to local authorities, instead collecting hefty taxes and sending almost nothing in return.
These ill-fitting parts have formed a kind of booby trap, plunging Sudan into cycles of violent strife. Rebels in the south fought two civil wars against the Khartoum government. At least two million people died in those wars. The region seceded by referendum in 2011, becoming the Republic of South Sudan, generally considered the most recent widely recognized nation on Earth.
Like their southern countrymates, armed groups made up primarily of Black African rebels rose up in Darfur in 2003, demanding greater autonomy and a share of the nation’s wealth. The government in Khartoum responded as it always has. Rather than negotiate or even fight the rebels on the ground with its own troops, it supplied weapons to Arab militias in the region, giving them free rein to terrorize rebels and civilians alike. Hundreds of thousands of people would die in that war; millions would flee their homes. Twenty years later, many of them are still in camps inside Sudan and in Chad. Ultimately Sudan’s president, al-Bashir, would be charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court for his role in the slaughter.
But the very Arab militias on which al-Bashir relied to wage a “counterinsurgency on the cheap,” in the words of the Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, that proved to be his undoing. Al-Bashir folded these militias into the armed forces as a new paramilitary called the Rapid Support Forces and placed a Darfuri Arab leader, Mohamed Hamdan, also known as Hemeti, in charge of it. When a powerful civilian protest movement rose up against al-Bashir in 2019, Hemeti and the army general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, joined forces to topple and arrest al-Bashir.
But any hope of re-establishing democratic government in Sudan was quickly dashed when the military massacred protesting civilians and pushed out a fragile transitional civilian government in a coup. Now, the two generals who overthrew al-Bashir have turned their guns on each other, with the Sudanese people caught between them.