333 - Africa's Killing Fields, I: Splitting Sudan

With Trump cosying up to Putin and Secretary of State Marco Rubio talking to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, it is no wonder that dangerous humanitarian crises in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are being neglected, pushed off to the side of national concerns as Trump and Musk eviscerate our foreign assistance efforts and reject helping others who do not or cannot pay. Thanks to jihadism that Trump et al ignore, Somalia and the countries of the Sahel are also experiencing trauma. All of these dangerous African warring zones grow, now thanks to the Trump administration's ignorance, antagonism, and denial of long provided humanitarian and military assistance. (More on Somalia, the Sahel, and the Congo in a subsequent post.)

The killings are growing more numerous in each of the conflicts. In the latest massacres this week in Sudan hundreds have lost their lives in fierce attacks and counterattacks by the Sudan National Army (SNA) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The SNA has been attempting to retake Khartoum, the nation's sometime capital, from the RSF. Its air force bombs and strafes, killing innocent civilians along the way. Having earlier lost that major capital city and Omdurman, across the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers, the SNA established a new capital at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Backed by Iranian, Russian, and Egyptian help, the SNA has been fighting with to regain national territory lost to the RSF and its United Arab Emirates (UAE) ally and funder. The SNA has also agreed to transfer lands along the Red Sea to Putin's navy, so that it can establish a new base. (Conceivably that new base would replace Tartus, in Syria, if the new Ahmed al-Sharaa government eventually sends the Russians packing.)

Since April 2023, when General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the SNA, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), dissolved their joint military command of Sudan and went to war against each other, as many as 24,000 civilians have lost their lives, 14 million Sudanese fled their homes, 3-4 million became refugees, and once proud and sufficient Sudan, the continent's third largest land mass, became a humanitarian disaster and crisis zone. Millions of Sudanese, some relief agencies say 25 million, today go hungry. Starvation is around the corner for many of those millions because agricultural plantings and harvestings have been obstructed, water is everywhere absent or short, and disease spreads. Relief agencies from across the globe cannot cope. Trump's assault on USAID exacerbated the crisis: hundreds of volunteer soup kitchens that were feeding nearly 1 million displaced persons last week shut down completely as USAID funds were cut off.

Farther south, in White Nile Province, the RSF this week killed at least 200 and possibly as many as 433 local civilians, seemingly wantonly -- some while fleeing. The RSF was attempting to establish control in this fertile grain-growing province along the great river of the same name before the SNA could intervene.

The United States recently declared that the RSF was responsible for genocide in Sudan, especially in North Darfur, where the RSF has long besieged El Fasher, the province's capital. It is surrounded on all sides by a giant displaced persons camp containing 500,000 Africans from Darfur (of Margalit, Fur, and Zaghawa ethnicity) who earlier in the civil war were forced from their homes and pursued by the Arab-officered RSF. The RSF for two years has also attacked Africans of the same groups farther south in Darfur, forcing 300,000 to flee their homes and livelihoods for rough shelters across the border with Chad. This RSF bout of ethnic cleansing is reminiscent of occurrences between 2003 and 2005 by the same marauders against the same largely defenseless African farmers and families; the attacks on Africans were labelled genocide then, and again now.

In a startling move, the RSF this week moved closer to setting itself up as the official governing authority in the 40 to 50 percent of Sudan that it now claims to control. That would be nearly all of Sudan, Africa's third largest nation, south of a line running from Khartoum westwards through Kordofan and Darfur.

Abdul Rahim Dagalo, younger brother of Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), the RSF leader, traveled this week to Nairobi, Kenya's capital, to preside over a lavish display of power. The expectation is that by the end of this week Dagalo and the RSF will sign a "charter" with a smaller rebel group and declare the creation of a "new Sudan" and make claims of territorial hegemony. The smaller group holds power in the Nuba Mountains athwart the international border with South Sudan.

If the RSF actually tries to rule a vast swath across southern Sudan, it could change the character of the intense fratricidal conflict that has roiled Sudan for almost two full years. It could even split Sudan in the way that a warlord uprising in Libya's east -- the old colonial Cyrenaica -- has successfully divided that Mediterranean nation in post -Qaddafi times.

The UAE wants its proxy and client to succeed. Without its heavyhanded backing for the RSF, there would be no Sudanese civil war, no massacres, no displacement of civilians, and no starvation. A serious Trump administration could push the UAE to reconsider. But the UAE has a new ambitious agenda in Africa, and the RSF controls lucrative gold mines, the produce of which is sold in Dubai.

The fact that the RSF charter conclave was convened in Nairobi may further mean that Kenya has decided to back the RSF rather than remaining neutral. If it, and another neighbor like Uganda, backs the RSF, the civil war in Sudan will become much more internationalized than before with an alliance led by the UAE marshalling its forces against Washington and the West. Africa as whole would be divided, too.

It is profoundly in the interest of the U.S. (although who knows what Trump cares about) and the entire West to end Sudan's war and to keep the country together. Another Libya would be destructive. Saving Sudan's population from dying and generations of its children from perishing should be as much Trump's concern as it is the UN's and humanitarians everywhere. Needless suffering because of a falling out between Burhan and Hemeti has no place in a world with even more compelling existential concerns. Trump, who wants a Nobel Peace Prize, should now focus on retrieving the Sudan even before appeasing Putin and selling out Ukraine.