Smoke rises as clashes in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces reached boiling point in 2023.(Photo by Mahmoud Hjaj/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Sudanese paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) says it is prepared to halt the war in the country — but only if the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) abandons any ambitions of ruling the nation of 46 million people.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, RSF adviser Ibrahim Mukhayar said the conflict — which has killed more than 15 000 people and displaced 10 million — had erupted because of the influence of the extremist Islamic movement in the country on the SAF.
“The Islamists, with their extreme ideology, control the SAF and are determined to regain control of the country by any means necessary, including taking the most extreme measures to achieve their objectives in the war,” Mukhayar said.
Last Friday, the US said it had concluded talks in Geneva, Switzerland, in which it attempted to navigate a peaceful “democratic transition” between the RSF and the Sudanese government’s armed wing.
The talks, which began on 14 August, included a delegation of observers from the African Union, Saudi Arabia, Sudan’s neighbour Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the UN. The UAE has been accused of supporting the paramilitary group with weapons but officials have denied this.
While there was an RSF delegation to the talks, Sudan’s de facto government, headed by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, did not attend, saying they were aimed at “whitewashing” the RSF and countries that support the paramilitaries.
US Sudan envoy Tom Perriello told a press conference in Geneva that the results of the talks were insufficient to address the humanitarian crisis, which he acknowledged was slow, due to the absence of the SAF.
Al-Burhan, who leads the governing Transitional Sovereignty Council, told reporters in Port Sudan on Saturday that the military would “fight for 100 years”, if necessary, to defeat the RSF.
“We will not put down our weapons as the rebellion continues. We will not co-exist with the rebels and we will not forgive them,” he said.
RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, claims to control 72% of Sudanese territory including the capital, Khartoum.
According to Mukhayar, the RSF will keep up its efforts to gain control of Sudan while it continues peace talks to manage the country’s humanitarian crisis.
“We believe the real reason behind the SAF’s rejection of the Geneva negotiations is that the US Secretary of State proposed real control mechanisms for what is happening in Sudan,” he said.
This is not the first time peace talks have been held on Sudan’s civil war. In May 2023 — a month after the fighting broke out — talks were organised by Saudi Arabia and the US but were suspended after the SAF accused the RSF of failing to abide by the declaration.
The January discussions, attended by both forces, took place over three meetings in Manama, Bahrain. Reportedly, among those present were Egypt and the UAE, which are supporters of the SAF and the RSF, respectively.
According to military sources, the RSF stated conditions for a ceasefire, including the reinstatement of Hemedti as deputy chair of the Transitional Sovereignty Council. The talks yielded no results.
The peace talks mediated by the US come on the back of a new report by Amnesty International detailing a weapons flow through the Sahel region from countries like Russia, China, Turkey and the UAE, which has fuelled Sudan’s conflict.
“Shipment-level trade data indicates that hundreds of thousands of blank guns have been exported to Sudan in recent years, along with millions of blank cartridges [which] Amnesty International believes are being converted en masse into lethal weapons in Sudan,” the organisation said in a statement.
The report identified recently manufactured or recently transferred small arms and ammunition from countries such as Serbia, Yemen and China that are being used in the conflict by both the RSF and the SAF.
The RSF has refuted Amnesty International’s claims, saying the report is based on “poor information”.
“This claim is false from beginning to end and lacks compelling evidence. There is a lot of misleading information circulating … In what sense is RSF getting arms from Russia? In fact, in my perspective, Amnesty International’s report was based on poor information,” Mukhayar said.
Amnesty has called on the UN Security Council to amend its arms embargo to restrict weapons being transported into Sudan and also wants the council to strengthen its monitoring and verification mechanisms related to arms sales.
The 16-month-long war began after Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir was toppled in a 2019 coup which split the military power, that was once one body, into two factions namely, RSF and SAF.
The RSF, an independent security force recognised under Sudanese law in 2017, was contracted by the government to act as border guards before the force participated in the coup to topple al-Bashir.
Four months later, the military and the pro-democracy movement reached a power-sharing deal that birthed a joint military-civilian council that would govern Sudan for the next three years until elections were held.
Dagalo was announced as the council’s vice chairman headed by al-Burhan with economist Abdalla Hamdok as Sudan’s prime minister and leader of the transitional cabinet.
However, before signing the deal that should have ushered in a new dawn for Sudan, activists accused the RSF of participating in the killing of dozens of pro-democracy protesters.
In October 2021, the RSF participated in another coup to overthrow the transitional government which halted the agreement to set up a democratically elected government. The move triggered new mass pro-democracy rallies across Sudan which was plunged into what has been described by the UN as a “humanitarian nightmare”.
Intense fighting broke out in Khartoum and quickly escalated across Darfur to the west, with the RSF taking control of most centres.
The war in the North African country has led to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.
The International Organisation for Migration’s latest weekly displacement tracking matrix showed that 9.9 million people have been internally displaced in all 18 states in Sudan — 2.8 million before the April 2023 war and 7.1 million since. More than half are women and a quarter are children under the age of five.
Sudan is also home to the world’s largest hunger crisis, with an estimated 26.6 million people — more than half the population — facing food insecurity, according to the UN World Food Programme, while 14 areas in the country have been declared “at risk of famine”.
A report by Human Rights Watch details the RSF’s involvement in widespread acts of sexual violence in areas of Khartoum, which it describes as “acts that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity”. It says RSF members have in some cases sexually assaulted women and girls in front of their families and forced them into marriages in RSF-controlled regions.
Although the report states that fewer cases of abuse were attributed to SAF members, there was an increase in cases reported after the SAF took control of Omdurman early this year. It reports that men and boys were raped while in detention centres.
Mukhayar rubbished the claims and said that the accusations were “false and lack credibility”.
“The testimonies submitted are one-sided, as no organisation, including Amnesty International, has entered Sudan to date to verify what is happening, despite our invitation and sincere desire to provide the information they request,” he said.
According to Human Rights Watch, researchers have had limited access to Khartoum with the dangerous conditions and lack of services and logistics barriers to obtaining information for reports on the humanitarian crisis.
Mukhayar said he is hopeful that peace talks will continue on the sidelines and that Sudan will achieve a “democratic state” that will prioritise the people.
“Rebuilding the country will undoubtedly be challenging but history has shown that the greatest nations can rise from the debris of war. We will not lose hope and we will never give up on our country,” he said.