The Transformation of Sudan’s Civil War
The current state of Sudan’s civil war, which began in April 2023, was not anticipated by many. The prevailing expectation was that the war would end quickly. However, let me point out that this situation is no surprise to those familiar with Sudan’s internal dynamics, social differences, and history of conflict. The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was initially presented to the public as a struggle for power between two military forces. The social, political, and military factors that gave rise to the war were overlooked. Because the conflict was not properly understood at the outset and efforts to resolve it were built on the wrong foundations, the war both dragged on and changed in character.
The ongoing war has moved far beyond the framework of a “power struggle” between the SAF and the RSF. The resurgence of ethnic and regional tensions, particularly in Darfur, the division of the country into different spheres of control, and the support provided to the parties by external actors are the main factors reshaping the conflict. Today’s war is far more complex and internationalized than the initial struggle between two sides. To understand the current situation, it is useful to examine three main dimensions: ethnic and regional conflicts, the country’s de facto fragmentation, and intervention by external actors. Another development that has become increasingly apparent must also be added: the shift in the war’s geographical center of gravity toward western Sudan, particularly the Darfur–Kordofan corridor and border regions.
Ethnic and Regional Conflicts
One of the defining features of the war in Sudan is that it reproduces the country’s earlier ethnic and regional conflicts. This is particularly evident in Darfur. Given the RSF’s historical origins, viewing its growing strength in the region solely as an increase in military capability would be misleading. This process can also be understood as the reconstitution, within a new military organization, of earlier ethnic conflicts and the armed groups that formed around them. Indeed, the intensification of fighting in Darfur after 2023 pushed the war beyond a struggle between two sides to seize central power.
Describing the war simply as a “conflict between Arabs and Africans,” based on what happened during the RSF’s capture of El Fasher in 2025, would be inadequate. Local land disputes, intercommunal rivalries, political alliances, and the regional interests of armed groups have also become increasingly influential in shaping the conflict. Viewed this way, the war in Sudan involves not only the extension of a struggle for central power into the country’s peripheral regions, but also the incorporation of various local conflicts into the SAF–RSF war. The most striking example is the alliance between the SPLM-N in South Kordofan and the RSF. This movement, which fought Khartoum for years, is now part of the RSF-led “Tasis” alliance. The renewed intensification of clashes in 2026 between the SPLM-N and the Otoro community living in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan demonstrates how the SAF–RSF war has drawn other local conflicts into its orbit. Rather than eliminating older regional and social conflicts, the war has reproduced them within a new military and political struggle.
Geographical Fragmentation and Parallel Administrations
The second major dimension of the war is Sudan’s increasing division into separate zones of military and political control. By mid-2026, Sudan no longer functioned as a single state. A de facto fragmentation has emerged, with different authorities governing different regions. Sudan is not legally divided, nor is it recognized as a divided state by the international community. Yet the military division is increasingly turning into a political one. While Sudan’s internationally recognized government returned from Port Sudan to Khartoum in January 2026, the RSF and its allies established a parallel administration based in Nyala. The RSF’s creation of parallel governing mechanisms, along with its efforts in 2026 to establish security institutions and a new defense structure, indicates an attempt to build an alternative state order. This structure has now acquired monetary and administrative dimensions as well as a military one. The Nyala administration established its own bank in January 2026 and, in May, banned the use of new banknotes issued by Khartoum in its territories. Separate currencies, banks, and ministries are the clearest manifestations of this de facto fragmentation.
This situation makes it difficult to view the conflict solely as a “war to capture the state.” What is emerging points toward a process of “Libyanization.” Naturally, this raises a critical question about the future of the war: Do the parties still seek control over all of Sudan, or do they intend to establish permanent political orders in the territories they control? The RSF’s establishment of a new administration makes the second possibility increasingly difficult to dismiss.
External Actors and the Internationalization of the War
The third dimension of the conflict is its growing entanglement with the interests of external actors. Numerous investigations indicate that the SAF and the RSF receive political, military, and financial support from different countries. The SAF maintains relationships involving various levels of support with Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, while the RSF’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is at the center of international debate. The UAE denies allegations that it supports the RSF. However, the SAF’s external relations are not without difficulties either. On July 20, 2026, the United States imposed a second round of sanctions on the Khartoum government, alleging that the Sudanese army had used chemical weapons during the war. Aircraft linked to the SAF were banned from using U.S. airspace, and Washington announced that it would oppose lending to Sudan by international financial institutions. This move indicates that the SAF faces a diplomatic crisis that support from Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia has been unable to offset.
The parties’ access to weapons, ammunition, drones, financing, and logistical assistance from abroad enables them to sustain their capacity to wage war. External support both prolongs the conflict and allows the parties to establish more permanent military and political structures in the territories they control. The United States’ submission of a draft resolution at the United Nations in August 2026, calling for broader sanctions, also demonstrates growing international recognition of the role external support plays in sustaining the war. However, divisions within the Security Council exposed the limits of this effort: while the arms embargo on Darfur was extended by two months in October, a proposal to expand the embargo nationwide was rejected because of opposition from Russia and China.
Alongside external support, the war economy is also crucial to sustaining the conflict. Sudan’s gold mines have become one of the most important sources of financing for both the main parties and local armed groups. The mines are now military targets as well as economic assets: an airstrike on a gold mine in recent weeks reportedly killed 200 people. This economy has created an entrenched network of interests that makes ending the war more difficult.
In this form, the conflict in Sudan can be described as an “internationalized civil war.” Nevertheless, the term “proxy war” should be used carefully. The conflict has social roots, and the parties have their own independent political, economic, and military priorities. Rather than fully determining these actors’ objectives, external powers increase their capacity to wage war and expand the conflict’s regional dimension.
The role of external actors is not limited to supporting the parties; some of those same actors also act as mediators. In September 2025, the “Quad”—comprising the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt—presented a roadmap proposing a three-month humanitarian ceasefire followed by a transition to be completed within nine months. Burhan, however, argued that the Quad was not impartial because the UAE was part of it. The presence of backers and mediators at the same table is one of the greatest obstacles to efforts to resolve the conflict.
The War’s Shift to the Periphery
One notable development in the current phase of Sudan’s war is the shift in its geographical center of gravity toward western Sudan, particularly the Darfur–Kordofan corridor. After the SAF largely reestablished control over Khartoum, Gezira, and the country’s eastern and northern regions, fighting became concentrated in a new geographical area. In 2026, the areas around El Obeid, Bara, and Dilling in North Kordofan, along with the fronts in Darfur, became the principal theaters of war. From this perspective, the “westward shift of the war” is a de facto strategic trend following the army’s military gains in the center and east, rather than a strategy formally announced by the SAF. This also explains Kordofan’s importance to the SAF. The region serves as a military and logistical corridor linking Darfur with central Sudan. Beyond the military confrontation between the SAF and the RSF, Kordofan is a key geographical hinge that could determine the future of Sudan’s division into two separate spheres of control.
Another notable aspect of this shift is the central role assumed by armed groups originating in Darfur. The conflict in western Sudan is no longer being fought solely between the SAF and the RSF. Significant Darfuri armed groups are fighting alongside the SAF against the RSF. The principal groups include the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), led by Jibril Ibrahim; the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A-MM), led by Minni Minnawi; and SLM/A-Tambour, led by Mustafa Tambour. Many of these groups joined the Darfur Joint Forces following the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement and allied themselves with the SAF after the war began. The result is a confrontation between the Darfur-origin RSF and older movements, also originating in Darfur, that have sided with the SAF.
The concentration of fighting in the west has brought Darfur’s earlier armed and ethnic conflicts back to the center of Sudan’s war. This transformation deserves close attention. The SAF’s control of Khartoum and the country’s central regions does not, on its own, mean that Sudan has been reunified. Rather, it is understood as a shift in the war’s center of gravity toward Darfur and Kordofan. If the SAF maintains its control in the east and center while the RSF retains its dominance in Darfur, the prospect of two enduring security and administrative zones in Sudan will grow stronger. At this stage, the central issue is not which side will gain military supremacy, but how the war in western Sudan will relate to the state authority operating in the rest of the country. Darfur and Kordofan remaining active war zones has become a major factor directly affecting the prospect of Sudan’s de facto fragmentation.
Yet the war’s center of gravity is not shifting westward alone. A new front that has emerged in southeastern Blue Nile State since January 2026 has brought the fighting to the Ethiopian border and deepened its regional dimension. This picture shows the war spreading from the center toward the periphery, particularly border regions.
A Changing War and an Increasingly Difficult Resolution
Sudan has become the arena not of a single war, but of a three-layered conflict: local and ethnic conflicts in Darfur and Kordofan, the de facto division of the country into two separate administrative zones by the SAF and the RSF, and external actors’ support for this struggle. While local conflicts broaden the war’s social base, de facto division raises the prospect of Sudan’s fragmentation; external support both prolongs and internationalizes the war.
The future of the war will depend not only on the military balance between the SAF and the RSF, but also on how these three layers develop. The war’s transformation has made efforts to resolve it both more necessary and more difficult. For instance, negotiations conducted solely between the SAF and the RSF would no longer be sufficient. The interests of local armed groups, regional balances of power, the emerging alternative administration, and the influence of external actors can no longer be excluded from the search for a settlement. A lasting resolution must therefore go beyond a ceasefire between the two main parties and take account of the new military and political balances that have emerged across Sudan’s different regions.
It is precisely at this point that efforts to find a resolution reflecting the emerging realities must be strengthened. The war’s reproduction of older regional and social conflicts within a new military and political struggle makes these efforts all the more important. Armed organizations formed in earlier years have gained territorial control in regions where they possess strong social bases, while alternative structures have emerged. This demonstrates that the problem is not simply a struggle between two forces. When the internationalization of the war is added to this picture, the scope and difficulty of achieving a resolution become clearer. It is not the actors at the negotiating table who pay the price for this complexity, but the Sudanese people, the direct victims of the war. Worse still, their suffering has yet to become a decisive consideration at the negotiating table.