Sudan’s Counterrevolutionary War: No Justice, No Peace

Introduction

Amidst information of a peace deal coming to Sudan, over the last few days the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) regained the town of Bara in North Kordofan State, and on October 26, 2025, the 6^th Infantry Division army headquarters in Al-Fashir, North Darfur, fell, ending an 18-month siege on the city. Al-Fashir^[1] has been one of the last remaining cities in Darfur that the RSF has been attempting to capture, and further legitimize the parallel government it announced in August, from Nyala, South Darfur. Over the last few days, thousands of people have reportedly been massacred, with more than 20,000 fleeing Al-Fashir, and over 2,000 fleeing Bara. 

Much like what has been happening with each announced “peace talk” that continues to legitimize war criminals as political entities, this last attempt to take Al-Fashir saw even more carnage in and around the city. It is likely that the RSF would rather enter a negotiating room with more leverage, which means more innocent lives lost. Videos of gruesome indiscriminate killings are flooding the internet despite the systematic silence of global media on the worst humanitarian crisis of our time^[2]. While we stand in solidarity with the Sudanese people, and use all within our capacity to call for an end to ethnic cleansing in Darfur and profound peace across Sudan, we must call this war what it is, a global counterrevolutionary^[3] war – a war against a people that asserted “going back is impossible.”^[4]

The hypocrisy of international peace efforts once again became starkly evident this week when the RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo "Hemeti’s” brother, Algoney Dagalo— once a peace delegate during the U.S.-mediated talks in Geneva in September 2024 and a subject of U.S. sanctions a year ago in October 2024 —was sited at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. for rumored peace talks, even as RSF forces are massacring the civilian population of Al-Fashir, half of which are children. As a war criminal is permitted to enjoy luxurious establishments in a country that has supposedly sanctioned him, residents of Al-Fashir were eating livestock feed for survival, children were begging in streets after communal kitchens closed, and RSF drone strikes were killing over 60 people at the Dar Al-Arqam shelter and more than 75 worshippers during fajr prayers at Al-Safiya Mosque (Atar Correspondent, 2025). The contradiction exposes the fundamental unseriousness of peace processes that treat war criminals and their representatives as legitimate diplomatic interlocutors while their forces simultaneously perpetrate atrocities against civilians.

Between 2019 and 2023, the revolutionary process in Sudan reached irreversible heights, and threatened a global system, which was left with no repressive options but crude violence against its challengers. The same external forces that had tolerated and supported Omar Al-Bashir's regime—the Quad and the broader Friends of Sudan coalition—moved swiftly to contain the revolutionary potential unfolding since 2019. Today, these same forces claim to be helping broker peace in Sudan. We are witnessing a form of “peace” that translates into an unsustainable stability that secures external interests at the cost of Sudanese peoples, much like what happened in Somalia, and again in Libya. Unlike the colonialism that created states out of multiple nations, neocolonial plunder seems to seek the opposite^[5]. 

This article will look at three distinct counterrevolutionary interventions by the “international community”: (1) the transitional government formed following the June 3, 2019 massacre, (2) the legitimization of the coup forces in 2021, and (3) the Framework Agreement of 2022. These three interventions worked to preserve the role of the security apparatus in Sudan's politics and economy, demonstrating that their commitments to “civilian-led rule” and supporting “the Sudanese people” mask a real interest in maintaining exploitative accumulation patterns that depends on violence. By using the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France to show the real interests of external forces, and discussing three counterrevolutionary interventions by the “international community,” this article urges that we refuse yet another^[6] foreign mediated political configuration in Sudan that is likely to reinforce the role of the security apparatus in politics and economy, the very reasons that led us to this war. 

What’s been happening since 2019?

The mass uprising that erupted in 2019 in Sudan was not simply a protest against economic hardship or authoritarian rule—it was a revolutionary challenge to the fundamental organization of politics and economy in Sudan. After four months of coordinated demonstrations that began in December 2018, the Sudanese people succeeded in removing Omar al-Bashir, a 30-year incumbent whose National Congress Party (NCP) had entrenched a patriarchal militarized Islamist system of rule. The revolution's demands were clear: Freedom, Peace, and Justice. These demands reflected a vision for multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-gendered Sudan built through democratic bottom-up processes led by women and youth. At its core, the revolution demanded justice for crimes committed by the state and its security apparatus (including the military, militias, intelligence, and police forces) and the reorganization of Sudan's politics and economy to serve the interests of Sudanese working peoples rather than political-military elites in the country or their foreign beneficiaries.

The social forces that populated the revolutionary process occupied specific positions in Sudan's political economy. Working peoples—including small-scale producers, precarious workers, the urban workforce, and the unemployed—formed the base of the movement. Women and youth led the charge in the streets, with organizations like the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) coordinating strikes across sectors, neighborhood resistance committees organizing at the grassroots level, and multiple labor and demand driven groups, such as the Tea Sellers Association and TAMs^[7] mobilizing thousands. Professional unions representing doctors, journalists, lawyers, and teachers worked alongside grassroots organizations across both what are considered the peripheral and central-riverine regions of Sudan. This broad network represented the dominant social classes in Sudan—the working peoples, professionals, and youth—whose labor and role reproduces society but whose interests had been systematically subordinated to foreign interests since the colonial occupation of Sudan. In addition to the bottom-up participatory political processes that characterized the 2018/19 uprising, not only was “the discourse of this generation is generally embracing diversity, equal citizenship, anti-racism, and the other demands of the revolution” (Arman 2019),^[8] but “chants carried a strong anti-military, anti-imperialist sentiment, particularly in advocating for economic rights and justice” (Hassanain and Sidig, 2024, 100).^[9]

Although violence has always emerged as a historical necessity to exploit Africa and subjugate Africans, the lack of empathy for victims of the most brutal war of our lifetime speaks to more than the necropolitics inherent in racial capitalism. It unequivocally demonstrates how the war in Sudan is a punishment – punishment of a people that dared to determine their future, and began to generate effective methods of organization towards that future. A future with free schools and refined curriculums, free and affordable healthcare, better environmental and wealth distributive policies, and investment in and protection of local populations. It is a punishment to a majority Muslim (and home to multiple religions) peoples that refused Islamist rule – challenging religious, racial, and ethnic manipulations and basis for politics and economy. It is punishment of young people that abandoned a vision they never created and asserted that foreign interests, and temporary benefits of an intermediary class, will not be privileged or allowed to be the basis for Sudanese economy and politics – challenging American-led global capitalism and political Islam, iterations of colonial and neocolonial rule in Sudan. A punishment to women who inspired their brothers, and challenged their elders, and religious and cultural leaders. A punishment to professionals that increasingly understood their struggle one and the same with farmers, pastoralists, technicians, tea sellers, etc., and to young migrants that returned to rebuild their homes so as to end the periodic brain drain and exodus of Sudanese peoples. This is a punishment to tea sellers, hustlers, street children, internally displaced peoples, landless farmers, and working peoples that synergized their capacities and vantage points to build a bottom-up political process exhausting the repressive capacities of the state, and building a new Sudan from below. 

Counterrevolution: Transitional Government, Legitimized Coup Forces, and the Framework Agreement

The Transitional Government: Technocrats and Generals

The June 3^rd massacre^[10] was a turning point for Sudanese people and the revolution: a glimpse into the nature of the counterrevolution. 

The August 2019 Constitutional Declaration between the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) and Transitional Military Council (TMC) superficially acknowledged revolutionary demands—mandating attention to young people, women, and war-affected regions like Darfur, establishing a 40% quota for women in the legislative council, and listing the June 3rd massacre investigation as a priority. However, the actual power structure revealed no genuine commitment to these demands. The Sovereignty Council gave military forces structural veto power, with SAF commander al-Burhan as chair and RSF commander Hemeti as deputy-chair—the latter leading forces implicated in the Darfur genocide. Despite promises of civilian leadership transfer after 21 months and an elected parliament within six months, neither materialized before the October 2021 coup. The military's commercial divestment agreement also never materialized, and each delay—tolerated by the “international community”—extended their political and economic entrenchment while revolutionary justice remained unaddressed.

The unlikelyhood of a Constitutional Declaration that incorporated the security apparatus to bring freedom, peace, or dignity was not only evident from the June 3rd massacre, but when civilian technocrats attempting to recover regime assets themselves faced obstruction from their military partners. The Regime Dismantlement Committee (RDC)—born from revolutionary demands—seized approximately 126 companies owned by the former regime. However, in the months before the coup, the military accused the RDC of corruption while blocking its mandate. RDC member Wajdi Saleh alleged that Finance Minister Gibreil Ibrahim demanded the return of seized assets to their owners, including to Zadna, a company the RDC identified as a military money-laundering vehicle (Saleh, 2021, as quoted in Cartier, Kahan, & Zukin, 2022: 21). Although FFC-civillian leaders in the Transitional Government worked with Washington to recover assets from the military and Islamists, their compromise to sit with the generals was not their only betrayal to the revolution. The Transitional Government’s economic policies were not only rejected by different social forces inside Sudan, but it was reflective of and supplemented/drafted by external interests and actors. The analysis that external and elite economic and political interests were prioritized and implemented during the transitional government’s tenure has been well argued (Ali and Mann, 2023; Ali, Alneel, and Hassnain, 2024). It is important here to reference the “intellectual assimilation” of Sudanese technocrats (Ali, Alneel, and Hassanain, 2024), whose ideas of development were constrained by the neoliberal and neoclassical economic frameworks for development, which are incapable of disrupting and transforming recursive economic patterns that work against the interests of Sudanese working peoples. 

The imperial chain in Sudan thus followed, states like the U.S. and UAE provided technical (including intellectual and logistical) and political support for the civilian and military factions of the Transitional government, while the “Friends of Sudan” held conferences – such as the “Sudan Partnership Conference” organized by Germany on June 25, 2020, with the participation of more than 50 countries and international and regional organizations” as per Hamdok's speech at the UN – meant to provide opportunities for “donors”/investors and the international private sector. While the technocrats provided local legitimacy and cover for external interests, the security-apparatus played its historical role of organizing violence to create the conditions necessary for foreign capital. With economic conditions worsening under the transitional government, demonstrations and organizing escalated or remained consistent in different regions. By sustaining the economic circumstances of the former regime (including removal of subsidies, liberalized energy tariffs and high inflation rates), adopting top-down political processes for economic deliberations (abandoning the bottom-up processes that confirmed working people participation in the transitional government), and in its willingness to normalize relations with the Zionist Entity, the transitional government aligned itself with the counterrevolution and generated the conditions for the October 25, 2021 coup.

Furthermore, the transitional government's power-sharing arrangement could not even bring peace or security—instead it created conditions for escalating violence as shifting elite dynamics affected realities on the ground. Between 2019 and 2021 alone, there were at least three large scale genocidal attacks that destroyed whole neighborhoods and IDP camps in Darfur (particularly in El Geneina, West Darfur). Much like how those in Darfur and Al-Fashir had been calling for protection before this most recent massacre, in 2020, for instance, the West Darfur Resistance Committees had shared how the August 2020 genocidal massacre in Misterei, a village in West Darfur, was related to counterrevolution and the lack of response from the transitional government:

“…the West Darfur activists stated that the Misterei massacre was preceded by attacks on sit-ins in Misterei, Beida, and El Geneina, without intervention of the authorities…They blame the West Darfur government, the Sovereign Council and the Cabinet for not heeding warnings from the people about an imminent attack on the sit-in of Misterei more than two weeks ago.”^[11]

In this sense, violence is neither unexpected nor incidental, it is structural. 

UAE, US, & FRANCE: INTERNATIONAL BACKERS OF THE TECHNOCRATS AND GENERALS

With military-led executive and technocrat filled cabinet in power since 2019, Western states and creditors were able to ensure their interests were met as the transitional government "continued implementation of IMF diktats, notably: withdrawing fuel subsidies, the resurrection of junk bonds defaulted on by Sudan in the 1990s and earlier, a privatization programme of state assets, and 'compensation' payments for US victims of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s—without parallel compensation for Sudanese civilian victims of separate aerial strikes by the United States and Israel in the intervening period" (Cross, 2021: 68). The United States' interests in Sudan are related to the necessary infrastructure for a U.S. dominated unipolar global order. Overall, the U.S. is set to benefit from the reintegration of Sudan into U.S.-led markets as International Finance Institutions (such as the IMF and WB) facilitate that process – through debt repayment programs, normalization policies,^[12] neoliberal economic policies, and it seems lately, securing access to strategic minerals in the name of peace. Beyond capital extracted from Sudan’s transitional government[xxxii] at a moment when inflation had reached more than 300%, the U.S.’s role in Sudan since 2019 also meant creating the conditions for corporations like Valmont Industries^[13], like it once had for Chevron in the 1970s.^[14]

Washington’s partner in the Quad, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is another direct enabler of Sudan's security apparatus, to fulfill its own interests of migrant-military labor, gold trade, food security, and projection of regional power[xxxiii]. The UAE has positioned itself as the primary destination for Sudanese gold exports, with the RSF serving as its key facilitator of extraction and smuggling networks. Between 2010 and 2014, more than 4.5 billion dollars worth of gold was smuggled from Sudan to the UAE (Elhashmi, 2017: 5). A 2019 Reuters investigation found that in just a four-week period at the end of 2018, Algunade—an RSF-linked company owned by Hemeti and his family—sent around 30 million dollars of gold bars to Dubai, around a ton in weight. The RSF control of gold mining in regions like Jebel Amir has been sustained through violent suppression of local populations, with militias making an estimated 54 million dollars annually from control over mines and surrounding territories (Elhashmi, 2017: 5, 26). The UAE provides the financial infrastructure for converting this extracted gold into capital: RSF companies maintain accounts in UAE banks, use Emirati corporate registration to obscure ownership, and conduct transactions through Dubai's gold markets.

The military's control over gold mining is essential to UAE interests because revolutionary oversight^[15] would threaten the exploitative terms of extraction. Artisanal miners, exposed to mercury and cyanide, used to earn between 2 and 4 dollars per day while mining one of the world’s most expensive commodities and working in remote areas that lack food supplies and basic services (Elhashmi, 2017: 25), while military forces, Emirati buyers, and international markets capture the value. Throughout the revolutionary process till today, many demonstrations are organized by workers and residents in mining communities from South Kordofan to River Nile state and Darfur regions demanding improved conditions and redistributed wealth. Whereas other accounts have shown how the RSF guards gold mines and preserves control, by destroying forty-five villages and perpetrating extra-judicial killings (Ramani, 2020). This violence is not incidental to the business model but integral to maintaining extraction rates and suppressing demands for equitable revenue distribution or labor protections, which is why Thomas (2025) encourages the use of more explanatory terms such as “neoliberal militias” as opposed to “Arab” or “Islamist” militias in reference to groups like the Janjaweed turned RSF.

The fact that gold, livestock, and agricultural exports continued at near-pre-war levels, and in some cases even increased,^[16] despite total social collapse proves that the violence serves extraction, not disrupts it (Nougud, 2024). Additionally, despite the Sudanese government accusing the UAE of providing military support for the RSF and supporting genocide, the government simultaneously sends wealth extracted from Sudan's natural resources to UAE markets, demonstrating that ultimately the warring parties are in alliance, and the only real winner is the UAE:

"Sudan's militarised system for extracting rural wealth can continue functioning during a period of total war and total economic and social collapse, because its profit rate depends primarily on violence, and not on stable production systems or markets" ( Thomas, 2025: 7).

The UAE, much like Saudi Arabia, also has substantial interests in Sudan's agricultural sector, seeking to secure food supplies for its import-dependent population. Land privatization policies and export-led growth models, which resulted in changes in land relations,^[17] emerged since the 1970s with Gulf and World Bank investments and must be considered when attempting to understand the fratricide we see today through the lens of pitting pastoralist communities against neighboring sedentary farmers (Thomas, 2024). 

It is important to contextualize the UAE’s predatory infrastructure^[18] to the practice of some of Africa’s oldest leeches, such as France, which considers itself as part of the “Friends of Sudan.” Between 1997 and 2007, French banking giant BNP Paribas functioned as what US prosecutors called “the central bank for the government of Sudan,” processing over 8.8 billion dollars for Sudanese government banks through covert dollar transactions (Maalla, 2025). Between July 2006 and June 2007 alone, the bank processed more than 6.4 billion dollars in US dollar payments for Sudanese clients—including about 4 billion on behalf of state-owned institutions such as the Central Bank of Sudan and Al Shamal Islamic Bank (Maalla, 2025). The bank used elaborate payment structures to conceal the origin of Sudan's oil revenues, allowing Bashir's regime to fund its war effort despite international sanctions. The petrodollars the bank cleared allowed Bashir's regime to purchase weapons and sustain its campaign of murder, rape, and torture in Darfur. Internal correspondence obtained by investigators revealed that BNP Paribas staff openly described Darfur as a “humanitarian catastrophe" and acknowledged that certain Sudanese banks “play a pivotal part in the support of the Sudanese government which...has hosted Osama bin Laden" (Maalla, 2025). Yet senior executives dismissed compliance concerns with a cynical quip documented in internal emails: “The dirty little secret isn't so secret anymore” (Maalla, 2025). What's worse is that despite BNP Paribas paying a record $8.97 billion fine for violating U.S. sanctions against Sudan and other regimes, with prosecutors inviting victims to apply for compensation, none of the forfeited funds actually reached Darfur's victims (Maalla, 2025). 

This historical role in financing genocide through revenue laundering parallels the current interests in Sudan's resource sectors. French corporations, much like American and Emirati corporations, benefitted from military control over extraction industries, whether oil, gold, or agricultural commodities, or militarized consequences that resulted in infrastructure of “peace” and “development” that serves as a humanitarian guise for getting corporations paid. Despite evidence that government officials, police, and militia like the RSF being implicated in human trafficking and smuggling, in 2014, the European Union (EU) established the “Khartoum Process” under the guise of tackling these very same problems by working with the very actors perpetuating them. 

Chandler (2018) explains how the EU avoids its accountability to human rights abuses by the government of Sudan, which it is funding, by providing funds to “a variety of international organizations,” which “on the ground, [makes it] it impossible to trace where all of the funds end up” (84). We do know that some of the funds ended up with the RSF (upgraded from Janjaweed to border guards), which were deployed across Sudan’s border with Libya after the Khartoum Process: 

“early 2016, German newspaper Der Spiegel obtained documents that indicated that the Valetta Trust Fund money had been earmarked to train Sudanese border police and to provide equipment, such as cameras, scanners and servers, to the Sudanese government to register incoming refugees” (Reitano, 2016: 8). 

The Khartoum Process is one of the reasons the Janjaweed militia were able to transform themselves from Border Guards to an armed unit (RSF) capable of rivaling the standing army. The RSF additionally boosted its capacity and global power relations by sending young boys and working peoples to fight wars in the interests of Gulf countries. Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have been subcontracting Sudanese soldiers to fight their wars and join their lower-rank military personnel. 

In the current war, the UAE has also deployed Colombian mercenary forces to support the RSF, with verified videos showing Colombian fighters operating in El Fasher and Zamzam Camp, famine-hit areas where heavy fighting has raged. Whereas, Ukrainian mercenaries are tied to fighting on the side of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). By 2024, it had become clear that the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan was thoroughly internationalized, with multiple external actors providing military support to both warring parties despite rhetorical commitments to peace. On October 9, 2024, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo "Hemedti" delivered an angry speech in which he accused Egypt of playing a "treacherous" role by aiding SAF in bombing civilian areas and RSF positions, claiming that "Egyptian warplanes have participated in recent clashes between the Sudanese and the RSF, including recently in the strategic Jebel Moya area and previously in the capital Khartoum" (Sudan War Monitor, 2024). Hemedti further alleged that "the Egyptian Air Force is bombing our people and destroying our land. They have betrayed Sudan and stand by Burhan, not the people. Their planes have been responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians and the destruction of vital infrastructure" (Sudan War Monitor, 2024). He also accused the United States of supplying bombs and military supplies to Egypt that were used against the RSF, stating "if the Americans were not in agreement these bombs would not reach Sudan" (Sudan War Monitor, 2024), and claimed that Iran is training Sudanese army troops and providing vehicles, while Tigrayan, Eritrean, Azerbaijani, and Ukrainian mercenaries are fighting alongside the Sudanese army (Sudan War Monitor, 2024). These allegations, whether entirely accurate or partially self-serving, reveal the extent to which the war has become a proxy conflict serving regional and international interests rather than a domestic political crisis requiring mediation. In addition to Canadian lobbying firms like Dickens and Madson, which helped the RSF rehabilitate its image, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty's characterization of the Sudanese Armed Forces as "a legitimate institution that should not be equated with the RSF" (Sudan War Monitor, 2024) reveals how external actors used varying mechanisms that selectively confer legitimacy on their preferred military faction while condemning the other, even as both are institutions are committing war crimes and destroying Sudan. 

From Legitimizing the Coup to the Framework Agreement: International Support for Military Power

On October 25, 2021, a military-led coup took place as the army declared taking full power of the state, dissolving the transitional government and declaring a state of emergency. Immediately women, youth, and working people across Sudan defied the state of emergency and flooded the streets with a new demand —no negotiation, no partnership, no compromise [with the security forces] –  that represented a fundamental break from former compromises that followed popular uprisings in 1964, 1985 and the 2019 December revolution. The coup took place with the detention of at least four civilian cabinet ministers, including Prime Minister Abdella Hamdok, effectively suspending the constitutional document of 2019. A slew of condemnation came in from the “international community” talking about the “military takeover” and “situation”, but by November 21, 2021, external forces had reasoned with the generals to bring back some of the detained civilians back to power. Although the streets never realigned with the civilians that decided to rejoin the coup regime[xliii], the superficial reintegration of civilians in the coup was followed up by the Framework Agreement.

Like the Constitutional Declaration, the December 2022 Framework Agreement employed superficial democratic language while preserving military power—but this time it was overtly counterrevolutionary, negotiated explicitly against an alternative already developed through genuine popular participation. While the Quad and Friends of Sudan utilized the tripartite mechanism (AU-UN-IGAD) to broker the Framework Agreement through exclusive meetings between military forces, JPA signatories, and one FFC faction willing to compromise, the Resistance Committees had already been working on the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People's Power (RCEPP), which was developed through neighborhood and state level participatory processes (Alneeel, 2022) and released on February 4, 2023. 

The Framework Agreement^[19] used vague language about security sector reform while conspicuously excluding the RSF from business restrictions, legitimizing Hemeti's forces as a permanent institution, and deferring all transitional justice for massacres. In contrast, the RCEPP explicitly challenged the economic foundations of external intervention, calling for rejection of IMF-like "shock" policies, state control over Sudan's resources and production, and an end to arrangements serving "greedy foreign interests against the interests of the vast majority of the Sudanese people." The RCEPP threatened to fundamentally transform Sudan's subordinate position in global capitalism—precisely what the Quad and Friends of Sudan sought to prevent. By ignoring this nationwide democratic process in favor of negotiations preserving military control, external actors revealed their "support for democracy" meant supporting only those political arrangements that maintained Sudan's exploitation and their own economic interests, even as both the Constitutional Declaration and Framework Agreement provided military forces continued political and economic power while bringing only more violence and no meaningful change.

Lessons and Continued Struggles for Peace

Reports from numerous organizations have documented the ways in which the security apparatus uses violence systematically. Long before weapons, military equipment, and small ammunitions manufactured in France, Russia, China, Türkiye, Serbia, Yemen, and China were implicated in one or both sides of the ongoing war, investigations found that the RSF was purchasing Toyota pick-up trucks from the UAE, onto which it mounted machine guns, to use “by the militia to suppress popular uprisings around the country for over a decade” (Global Witness, 2019). Others showed how similar trucks pulled up to the sit-in in Khartoum before the Ramadan Massacre (HRW, 2019) and during the coup period. The security apparatuses’ violence is not random or excessive—it is calibrated to serve political domination and organize Sudan to the satisfaction of foreign interests.

The June 3rd massacre, the military coup of 2021, and the outbreak of the current war months after the signing of the Framework Agreement was enough evidence to heed the calls of Sudanese people - Madaniyya (civilian rule). But time and time again, war criminals were treated like potential democratic leaders, and the language of cultural wars used to obscure fratricide emerging from imperial economic policies. With the SAF using Port Sudan (Eastern Sudan) as the de facto state city, and with the latest capture of Al-Fashir, the RSF now has control over much of Western Sudan, which means we might be looking at a “peace” deal that will try to separate Sudan under two illegitimate military factions. We must reject fraudulent peace processes and resist on all fronts any attempts to create in Sudan a situation akin to Libya^[20]. These external interventions are not well-intentioned efforts at conflict resolution that have unfortunately failed. In Sudan’s case, they are counterrevolutionary by design, intended to contain the transformative potential of a revolutionary process while preserving accumulation patterns and political and economic infrastructure that requires organized violence. 

The contrast is stark: while external actors broker "peace talks" among murderers, Sudanese people endure catastrophic conditions across multiple fronts. In a country of approximately 40 million people, over 20 million are nearing starvation and at least 10 million have been forced to leave their homes. The systematic killing of those in Darfur began in El-Genenia during the so-called 72-hour ceasefire brokered by the Saudis and Americans right when the war broke out in April 2023. And it was over a year ago that famine was declared in Zam Zam Camp, located in the borders of Al-Fashir, one of the largest displacement camps in Sudan where over half a million people had to flee this April due to an RSF “obliteration.” The Dar Al-Arqam massacre alone killed over 60 civilians when RSF drones and artillery struck a shelter (Atar Network, 2025), while across Darfur's displacement camps, cholera killed hundreds—Tawila alone recorded 5,457 infections and 80 deaths since July, with MSF isolation centers designed for 200 beds treating 300-400 patients daily (Abusin & Al-Mirghani, 2025). 

Nationwide, 56,145 cholera cases, 50,000 malaria infections, and thousands of dengue cases overwhelm collapsed health systems, as children die from malnutrition (Abusin & Al-Mirghani, 2025). Education has collapsed and teachers face execution—one witnessed his colleague killed for disciplining an RSF soldier's child—while salaries ranging from $3.50 to $30 monthly fall catastrophically below the $485 monthly survival cost for a five-person household (Abdelhai, 2025). The economic devastation is real: groundnut exports collapsed from $165 million in 2024 to just $1.6 million in 2025 after RSF imposed tolls of 30-40 million pounds per truck (El-Kamel, 2025), while hyperinflation renders survival impossible in besieged cities like Al-Obeid where one kilogram of rice costs 180,000 pounds and residents search bakeries for expired flour (Hanafi, 2025; Atar Network, 2024).

The lesson for the African elites holed up in urban areas, complicit in the exploitation and oppression of their peoples, and refusing to join the youth and working peoples on the streets because of their material interests or lack of vision, is the fall of Khartoum. You cannot isolate yourself in the bubbles that characterize some African cities; for the violence will eventually reach where you are. 

The lesson for the youth and the people of Africa, however, is in the numerous self-organized initiatives of Sudanese women, youth, and working peoples, including the resistance committees, some turned Emergency Response Rooms, which continue to demonstrate the sophisticated adaptive capacity of social and political organizations conducive to working people's interests. At a time we witness the carnage and fratricide in Al-Fashsir, we also remember the statement released by the Al-Fashir Resistance Committees before the fall of the city (see pic below), and remain in solidarity with and uplift the forces truly working for Sudanese peoples. From the communal kitchens, mutual aid groups, makeshift classrooms and hospitals, to the professionals refusing to leave behind their peoples, those smuggling food to besieged areas, and risking their lives to spread information and provide necessary services, the future (and peace) of Sudan, and Africa lives through them. 

Endnotes