The civil war in Sudan means the fall of the man who led the African country for the longest time, since its independence in 1956. Omar al-Bachir came to power thanks to a coup d’état in 1989. And, 30 years later, he was deposed by a military coup.
The 2019 coup gave rise to a Government of civil and military union, but it was short-lived. Two years later, in 2021, generals al-Burhan and Dagalo joined forces to take power, but tensions between them soon led to the start of a new civil war. In April 2023, the first clashes began in Khartoum, in a capital destined to bear witness to a country that was being divided in half, throughout the fighting.
One of the major elements of discord between both generals was the integration of around 100 thousand men, the paramilitaries of the so-called Rapid Support Forces or RSF, for its acronym in English, into the Sudanese National Army. The irreconcilable positions of both generals contributed to the worsening of tensions and the beginning of the conflict.
The paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces originate from the Janjaweed militias, which became known in the Darfur conflict and which were accused by the United Nations of genocide and ethnic cleansing of tribal and non-Arab populations. The objective of the Janjaweed and now the RSF could be, some analysts denounce, the intentional transformation of the ethnic composition of the Darfur states.
The United Arab Emirates was accused of financing the RSF paramilitaries, in exchange for purchasing gold, whose mines are controlled by the rebels in a large part of Sudanese territory.
Since the beginning of the conflict, at least 150,000 people have died, while the UN reports the existence of around 12,000 displaced people – numbers that some agents on the ground say are conservative.
