Sudan’s Darfur Controlled by Rival Forces as Civil War Drags On
Gold trade and foreign backing fuel Rapid Support Force’s rise against regular army.
By Gwynne Dyer
The ceasefire in Gaza, however shaky, is freeing up some bandwidth for the world’s media to focus on other ongoing massacres, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres wasted no time turning the spotlight on Sudan.
“The horrifying crisis in Sudan … is spiralling out of control,” he said on Nov. 3, but the civil war may really be coming to an end.
The biggest city in western Sudan, El Fasher, fell to the nastier of two brutal rivals last month after a two-year siege. That was followed by the worst massacre in a civil war that has already killed 150,000 people and made one-third of the population refugees, but with luck, it may be the last such event in the current cycle.
The civil war began in 2023, when the two leading generals split over who was going to run the military regime. The obvious choice was the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan. His rival was Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, also known as Hemedti.
Hemedti was an outsider, a former camel trader from the sparsely populated and mostly desert west of the country. He had created a genocidal paramilitary group known as the Janjaweed that the former dictator, Omar al-Bashir, adopted as a counterweight to the regular army.
In its early days, the Janjaweed was a camel-mounted militia massacring non-Arab tribes for Bashir in the western region called Darfur. In recent years, it has grown into a well-equipped military organization called the Rapid Support Force (RSF). Nevertheless, it should have been beaten easily by the regular army once the split happened.
How did it grow instead into a force that controls the whole western half of the country? Gold.
Most of Sudan’s gold comes from illegal “artisanal” mines in RSF-controlled Darfur. Ninety per cent of it ends up in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it is re-melted, rebranded, and sold onwards.
The UAE has long since stopped being just another one-trick Gulf oil state. It is a country of 11 million people, with an annual gross domestic product of over half a trillion dollars — about the same as Singapore or Sweden — and only a third of its income comes from oil.
Most of those 11 million people (80 to 90 per cent) are skilled and unskilled foreign workers, mostly male, who keep the UAE economy running. In that respect, it is a typical Gulf state. But in foreign affairs, it is a grown-up country with all the usual ambitions and has become a major independent player in the region’s strategy and politics.
The region covers not just the Middle East but also northeast Africa, including Sudan — and Hemedti has long had a close relationship with the UAE. Indeed, the UAE has hired RSF fighters as mercenaries for its interventions in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere.
But the main deal that keeps the war in Sudan going is Darfur’s gold in exchange for weapons the UAE sources from around the world. Those weapons made the RSF a force that could stand up to the Sudanese regular army.
It has now nailed down all of Darfur, admittedly the poorer and more sparsely populated half of the country, but the part where most of the gold is. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran are also being generous with aid to ensure the SAF can keep fighting.
The RSF has now set up its own rival government in Darfur and says it is open to a partition of the country. On Nov. 6, Hemedti announced he would accept a ceasefire on the existing lines, which in practice would mean a Darfur ruled by the RSF and a second partition of the old Sudan. Its “friends” did something similar in neighbouring Libya, so why not?
The African Union’s historic ban on changing former colonial borders to avoid endless border wars is fading with the rest of the “rules-based international order,” so it could easily come to that. Last stop: the Disunited States of Sudan — but first, probably, some more slaughters of the innocent.