ASSWAN (Egypt) – Il conflitto that rages in Sudan is at the center of the government interests not only Africans but throughout Europe, the US and Asia because it is upsetting many neighboring countries that share the waters of the Nile with Sudan and the pipelines that transport oil from South Sudan. The new government was supposed to lead the country to new elections but now it is completely overwhelmed by the umpteenth one new humanitarian crisis. Sudan, which must be able to count on foreign aid for its enormous social emergencies, he has always been in the throes of internal strife, from Darfur to the border areas with South Sudan, but this time the fighting has involved same capital Khartoum, the twin city of Omdurman, as well as Port Sudan on the Red Sea, and Merowe, home to an important air base and other provincial capitals. For the first time –and this is what many Western governments ignore or underestimate- the conflitto, instead of affecting the remote corners of the country, takes risks become a giant African powder keg. This huge powder keg should be taken into account primarily because Sudan is located in an unstable region bordering the Red Sea, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. And then because five of Sudan's seven neighbors - Ethiopia, Chad, the Central African Republic, Libya and South Sudan - have themselves faced political upheaval or conflict in recent years. And they still find themselves in conditions of great political, social and economic instability.
Sudan: the protagonists of the clash
I fighting erupted between army e rapid support paramilitary forces (Rapid Support Force – RSF) on April 15, in Khartoum, they did derail a plan internationally supported for a transition to civilian government after the expelled in 2019 of Omar al-Bashir, the Islamist president who himself seized power in the 1989 coup. The conflict opposed the general Abdel Fattah al Burhan, the head of Sudan's ruling council that commands the army, to the RSF irregular forces led by the wealthy former militia chief, the General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, who is Burhan's deputy on the council.
Who are the militias and the army
Le RSF they are a paramilitary group deriving from the Janjaweed, the nomadic Arab militias born in the early 2000s to fight the separatists of Darfur and South Sudan. They have grown into a massive paramilitary group with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates supplying the Yemen war that began in 2014, resulting in 40.000 troops being employed in this conflict. They also sent 2.000 mercenaries to Haftar in Libya. The RFS seems to have come to reach 100.000 and in recent years talks had begun to be incorporated into the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) of 140.000 men plus 13.000 and 190 aircraft in the air force and 1.300 men in the country's small navy. In these eight days of intense war there have been almost a thousand dead with a substantial balance between the parties, where the greater experience in war of the RSF is compensated by the use of heavy weapons, such as artillery, armored vehicles and above all aircraft, by the regular Sudanese army (SAF).
Sudan: why did the clash come about?
The reason for these clashes it is not very clear although the most relevant may be the presidential ambitions of the Vice President Hemedti of the RSF, while other reasons could be related to conflitto now rampant betweenThe West and the countries that oppose the interference American and British and their allies, the Saudis. Moscow, which has long sought ports for its navy, had secured a deal with Bashir for a naval base and Sudan's military leaders said this was still under consideration. In 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the creation of a Russian naval facility in Sudan capable of docking nuclear-powered surface vessels. Western diplomats in Khartoum claimed in 2022 that the Russian Wagner group was involved in illegal gold mining in Sudan and was spreading disinformation.
Wagner passed away 2 years ago
Two years earlier, the United States had imposed sanctions on two companies operating in Sudan because they were considered to be linked to the head of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In an April 19 statement, Wagner has denied operating in Sudan and claimed that his staff hadn't been there for more than two years. From our interviews with local observers it appears that the Wagner militias they played no role in recent fighting and that those that were active in some African countries, were increasingly abandoning them as the war in Ukraine intensified. It is also true that, in February 2023, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met i officials in Sudan during an African tour and obtained confirmation from Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the possibility of having a naval base in Port Sudan.
China is Sudan's largest trading partner
La China is currently the major commercial and strategic partners of Sudan, importing oil and exporting cheap manufactured goods and armaments into the country. Both states enjoy very solid and productive relations in the fields of diplomacy, economic trade and political strategy, but China has never intervened to explicitly support one of the parties involved. United States e West, happy to get rid of Bashir in 2019, accused of genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Court for the Darfur conflict, but never extradited by the new authorities, seem too slow to help a transition to elections and suspend ongoing sanctions. They saw that the percorso towards Western-style democracy it is interrupted when, in 2021, Burhan and Hemedti staged a coup. Furthermore, on April 13, two days before the clashes began, Hemedti, in a phone call with special envoys from the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway, he claimed - falsely - to be committed to an initial framework agreement signed in December to arrive at a civilian government. All according to a communication made known by his office. The latest developments see i Western countries clear out their diplomatic staff and citizens with the support also of military operations, while theRussian embassy in Khartoum, despite being in the center of the fighting line, announces that it has no problems.
The latest fighting should derail any swift return to civilian rule as neither opponent in Khartoum shows any willingness to compromise. Finally, it should be noted that the Sudan it has always been one of the main ones supporters of radical Islamist movements from Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda, to Islamist groups in Algeria, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Hamas in Palestine, to the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and other armed movements in opposition to the governments of Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
°°° The author, Flavio Pagani, has managed to get out of Sudan in the last few hours and is in Southern Egypt which borders on Sudan itself.
