298 - The Senseless Wars of Africa, and Russian Meddling

Sudan and the Sahel

            The Sudanese official armed forces (SAF) captured another bridge across the Nile yesterday, boosting their week-long attempt to regain control of Khartoum, Sudan’s devastated capital city. For much of the year it has been in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an upstart paramilitary irregular militia backed and funded by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

            The SAF assault on its one-time stronghold of Khartoum was made possible, after many months of retreat, by new funding and equipment supplied from Russia. Putin, once allied through his mercenary Wagner Group (now his Africa Corps) to the RSF, has switched sides or, just conceivably, is playing a complicated double game with both sides in Sudan’s massive, deadly, and utterly senseless internecine war.  Russia desperately seeks a naval base on the Red Sea near the SAF’s current (interim) capital and headquarters in Port Sudan, a key petroleum exporting loading point on the Red Sea. (Farther down the Red Sea, in Djibouti, France, the U.S., and China have their own military bases.)

            Until this week, the SAF controlled only northern Sudan, which is largely desert, and eastern Sudan and its 500-mile long Red Sea littoral. The RSF, which stormed into Khartoum and neighboring Omdurman (the country’s largest cities) a year ago, controls most of southern Sudan including Sennar province, the nation’s agricultural breadbasket. Both sides contend bitterly for hegemony in Darfur, Sudan’s gold-rich westernmost province, but the RSF has already captured el-Geneina and Nyala, two key cities, and surrounds el-Fasher and its beleaguered encampments of thousands of displaced and hungry black African Darfuris.

            The UAE has long funneled money and hard-core weapons to the RSF from an airbase in eastern Chad. Recently, it began flying Chinese-manufactured drones from that base to provide the RSF with real time intelligence, possibly controlling the drones electronically from Abu Dhabi.

            The Africans of Darfur, the Margalit, Zaghawa, and Fur peoples, are being hunted down throughout Darfur by the Arab RSF, just as the camel mounted Janjaweed, the RSF’s precursor, hunted them down and killed 300,000 of the same African ethnic groups during the 2003-2006 Sudanese genocide. The same form of “ethnic cleansing” is underway again now, with RSF killing African men and boys, raping women and girls.

Nicholas Kristof has been reporting in recent days in the New York Times from refugee camps across the Sudanese border into Chad, just as he did during the genocide twenty years ago: “The [RSF] man clubbed her with his gun and was ready to shoot her, but his partner was rattled and told him to leave her alone, she said. They left without raping her or her niece. [Her] mother was murdered, and her father and one of her sons are missing and may be dead. She led the surviving members of her family to the safety of a refugee camp across the border in Adré, Chad, where one of her adult sons remains hospitalized after brutal torture in Sudan. He suffered a mental breakdown and can’t talk about what he endured….Sudan reveals the human capacity for evil.”

            As I have written in this space earlier, the civil war that has literally destroyed much of Sudan,  caused  more than 75,000 deaths and 100,000 casualties, displaced fully 10 million Sudanese, and precipitated the globe’s most acute humanitarian crisis, began in April 2023 when Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo  (Hemeti) refused to merge the 100,000 strong RSF into the 150,000 person SAF and thus give Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, his then fellow ruler of Sudan (after a coup in 2019 and another in 2021), more power.  Both orchestrated Sudan’s earlier genocide on behalf of Gen. Omar al-Bahir, head of state until Burhan and Hemeti removed him in 2019.

            The World Food Program estimates that 25 million Sudanese are hungry and, according to a Dutch agency, more than 2.5 million are about to starve. Food and potable water are difficult to locate amid constant battles. Poverty hardly purchases what little food there is for sale.

            Hemeti and his legions months ago bombed and assaulted Khartoum, pushing out the SAF. Backed from the start by the UAE and, for many months, by Putin’s Wagner Group, the RSF marauded and expanded its reach. Gold exports went both to Dubai and Moscow. Washington has been unable or unwilling to do more than rap the UAE’s knuckles, because of Gaza, and innumerable attempts to effect a ceasefire in the war have been stymied by Burhan’s distrust of the UAE, the inability of Washington and Riyadh to influence the Emirates, and the RSF’s winning postures.

            But the SAF’s thrust in the last six days into Khartoum, and its tentative regaining of lost territory and lost initiatives, signals Russia’s presumed turnaround – naturally in its own strategic interest (with possible assurances that gold exports would still flow toward Moscow).

            This reassessment of Russia’s strategy in Africa parallels what Russia has been doing farther south, in the Sahelian countries of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. There, despite the abysmal failure of its Wagner Group (Africa Corps) mercenaries to stem the assaults on all three countries of al-Qaeda and Islamic State-linked jihadists sweeping out of the north to massacre civilians, local soldieries, and even numerous Russian troops, Moscow has strengthened its ties to the military officers who rule all three places after coups overthrew elected governments and ousted French and American contingents. The French mostly, with some American assistance, were effectively protecting the Sahel from Islamist attacks. Within the last year, however, the new local military leaders sent the French and the U.S. packing, even from a costly airbase used for U.S. drone surveillance and intelligence gathering in northwestern Niger.

            The Russians are both rewarding the post-coup establishments in all three countries and, evidence indicates, harvesting gold (and uranium from Niger) and other valuable resources. But, as last week’s al-Qaeda assault on the main airport and a training school outside of Bamako, Mali’s southern-located capital, suggests, the Russians have totally failed to keep the jihadists from sweeping over Mali from their distant bases in the Sahara, in Mali’s far north.

Likewise, two-thirds of Burkina Faso is now penetrated by both the forces of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.  Niger is also under daily attack from the north. Like Bamako, Niger’s capital of Niamey is also in the far south of the nation and it, too, is endangered. Burkina sits between its two neighbors and may soon fall completely to one or both competing fundamentalist conquerors.

            The young military men who took command in the Sahel since 2020 and invited in the Russians while dismissing their French and American (and British and German) protectors theoretically could reverse course. But human avarice is on the side of the Russians, just as it is for the RSF and its ties to its UAE paymaster and arms supplier.

            What Russia wants out of these places and these wars is influence, support in the UN, wealth especially from gold, and an outflanking of the U.S. The UAE also seeks influence and continue flows of gold toward Dubai, but its strategists further contemplate extending the UAE’s reach deep into Africa to counter both Saudi Arabia and Iran, and to boost its own “big power” pretensions. The UAE has forged close ties to Ethiopia’s autocratic prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, and helped him win a civil war against Tigray, the country’s rebellious northern province, in late 2022. It now backs him financially as yet new civil wars erupt in Ethiopia. Farther south, the UAE has just lent Kenya $1.5 billion to repay international debts and to keep President William Ruto’s authoritarian government afloat. It backs a pretentious warlord in eastern Libya and is investing wherever it sees opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa.

            Exactly how Europe and the U. S. can best mitigate or moderate the increasing Russian and UAE interventions in Africa is not clear. But the road to peace (or at least the cessation of hostilities in the Sudan and the Sahel) must be paved with a resumption of American intensive action in Sudan (where bringing severe pressure on the UAE ought to be possible) together with a readiness to resume helping to battle the jihadists in the Sahel (along with France). Despite the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the bombings in Lebanon, paying more attention to the vast humanitarian crises in Africa, and doing more to help resolve them, is imperative.