The RSF’s defeat will not end Sudan’s war but merely fragment it

Sudan’s service has had a bully summer. Last month, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) recaptured respective towns on the strategical Export Road, known locally arsenic Sadirat, which connects the cardinal Nile vale to the country’s west, and pushed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into a antiaircraft crouch crossed overmuch of the centre of the country.

On the backmost of these gains, SAF leaders are present speaking much confidently of defeating the RSF entirely, alternatively than simply containing it.

But look east, to Sudan’s Blue Nile state, and the representation inverts. In mid-August, the RSF and its ally, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (led by Abdulaziz al-Hilu), retook Kurmuk and seized Geisan wrong days, successful attacks that Sudanese subject sources said were launched from crossed the borderline successful Ethiopia. Drone attacks connected aggregate army-controlled cities this period besides showed that the RSF’s scope extends good beyond Darfur, its main territorial stronghold.

The acquisition of the summer, then, is not that the SAF is connected the verge of decisive victory. It is that subject triumph and governmental solution are becoming 2 precise antithetic things. Even a afloat RSF decision whitethorn not extremity Sudan’s warfare truthful overmuch arsenic fracture it into respective smaller conflicts.

A look astatine the coalitions doing the warring helps explicate why. The anti-RSF conjugation is coordinated and led by the SAF, but the service besides relies connected allied equipped movements, including Darfuri factions that signed the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement (JPA). These see Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement, led by Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi. The JPA required their forces to beryllium integrated into Sudan’s subject and information services, but they person been reluctant to springiness up the subject autonomy that underpins their governmental leverage.

Yasser al-Atta, past adjunct commander-in-chief and present service main of staff, announced successful March that the service would activate mechanisms to organise and integrate allied irregular groups into the ceremonial subject and information services, but small has happened since.

Al-Atta wasn’t adjacent the archetypal to committedness to code the problems of the proliferation of weapons and equipped groups. Two years earlier, lawman commander-in-chief Shams al-Din Kabbashi told a graduation ceremonial for Minni Minnawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement fighters that the service had “begun enacting a instrumentality and structures to power the galore fashionable absorption groups”, informing that the array of semi-autonomous militias, tribal coalitions and volunteers backing the SAF’s warfare efforts, the “popular resistance” arsenic it is called, would “become the adjacent information if we proceed this way”.

More than 2 years connected from Kabbashi’s speech, the underlying occupation remains mostly unresolved.

Then determination is the RSF’s ain coalition, which is actively fragmenting. A drawstring of elder figures, al-Nour al-Qubba, al-Savanna, and much recently, the RSF-appointed politician for the Kordofan region, Hamad Khalifa, person defected, amid reports of Saudi fiscal inducements arsenic good arsenic tribal grievances.

When al-Nour al-Qubba left, helium took dozens of combat vehicles and a ample contingent of fighters with him. Given that the RSF is simply a franchise much than a unified warring force, these defections should interest the SAF arsenic overmuch arsenic they comfortableness it: defectors often get arsenic intact forces loyal to their commanders, not soldiers utilized to reporting to a concatenation of command. In a way, the SAF inherits the RSF’s structural weakness with each defection.

Another illustration is Abu Aqla Keikel, an SAF-trained serviceman who initially fought connected the army’s broadside aft the warfare erupted successful 2023, earlier defecting to the RSF aboriginal that twelvemonth and past back to the SAF successful October 2024. His Sudan Shield Forces remain, successful practice, much nether his ain bid than the army’s, adjacent arsenic helium appears alongside SAF enactment and Darfuri commanders astatine caller battlefield-victory photograph ops.

Many commanders wrong the anti-RSF campy support a reasonably wide borderline of operational independency and consequently their ain governmental calculations. This volition go acold much evident erstwhile the warfare ends and determination is nary longer a communal force to insubstantial implicit the differences.

Sudan’s Islamists, meanwhile, inhabit a unusual position. Brigades similar al-Baraa ibn Malik, affiliated with Sudan’s Islamic Movement, which underpinned Omar al-Bashir’s erstwhile ruling National Congress Party (NCP), supplied thousands of fighters and were instrumental successful retaking Khartoum from the RSF. The United States has sanctioned al-Baraa ibn Malik, portion the European Union has sanctioned its leader, al-Misbah Abu Zaid. Amid this planetary unit and SAF battlefield gains, immoderate Islamist fighters and leaders person begun pulling back, successful what 1 Sudan Tribune study described arsenic a “tactical withdrawal”. Al-Misbah precocious posted that “we person returned to our civilian lives”.

But retreating from the battlefield is not the aforesaid arsenic retreating from politics. Ahmed Haroun, president of the erstwhile ruling NCP, told Reuters quality bureau past twelvemonth that the Islamic Movement could enactment an extended play of service rule, with an oculus towards returning to authorities done “the ballot box”, arsenic Haroun enactment it.

Indeed, different imaginable flashpoint for the SAF is that the warfare has fixed fighters successful Islamist brigades similar al-Baraa ibn Malik years of battlefield experience. There is small crushed to deliberation fighters who helped recapture the superior volition disarm and disband the infinitesimal the warfare is over, astatine slightest not without a governmental colony that creates a way for demobilisation.

This is the discourse successful which SAF main and de facto president General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s precocious announced nationalist dialog should beryllium read, little arsenic a broad solution to the country’s militia occupation than arsenic a governmental process that could person the army’s wartime alliances into post-war influence.

Burhan has explicitly ruled retired the instrumentality of RSF leaders to power, promising determination would beryllium nary “incomplete peace” that allowed Hemedti oregon different RSF leaders backmost into government. Given the RSF’s abysmal quality rights grounds during the war, the exclusion is defensible, but the broader armed-group occupation remains unresolved: namely, however the RSF’s remaining forces would really beryllium dismantled oregon integrated, peculiarly successful Darfur, and however the SAF’s ain allied militias would beryllium brought nether a azygous concatenation of bid erstwhile the shooting slows down.

Another structural occupation that is older than this warfare reinforces wherefore claims of full triumph stay elusive. The Sudanese service has agelong struggled to task sustained powerfulness crossed the country’s peripheries. Under Omar al-Bashir, the authorities relied connected Janjaweed militias to assistance the service combat the rebellion successful Darfur. In 2013, galore Janjaweed fighters were brought into the recently created RSF.

There is small crushed to deliberation a hollowed-out, cash-poor SAF, babelike connected unpaid recruits, Islamist militias and Juba Peace Agreement signatory forces, tin present win wherever the pre-war authorities repeatedly struggled: successful Darfur, a portion astir the size of France, wherever the RSF continues to usage cross-border proviso routes.

Even if the RSF is someway yet broken, its weapons and its fighters volition not simply disappear. They volition walk to whichever governmental entrepreneur is champion positioned to prime them up. Meanwhile, successful Khartoum, the questions of the time aft volition pry unfastened conflicts that the warfare has, for now, kept closed.

The views expressed successful this nonfiction are the author’s ain and bash not needfully bespeak Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.