THE CARNAGE OF WAR IN SUDAN CONTINUES APACE
IMPORTANT NOTE: This write-up is the sequel to an earlier article I had published about the crisis engulfing Sudan. If you haven’t already done so, please read that earlier article first before reading this one.
Although, the Americans had nothing to do with the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir on 11 April 2019, they enthusiastically welcomed the removal of the military ruler who had been a figure of incendiary hatred in American ruling elite circles for over two decades.
There were several reasons to dislike Bashir in the USA, but the most important one was his provision of sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden in the early 1990s after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for criticising Saudi-US relations and the presence of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula.
A few years before, Osama Bin Laden had cooperated with the Americans in the fight against the Soviet-backed secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which, despite the name, was not “democratic” at all. But then, it wasn’t the absence of democracy in Afghanistan that worried the Americans, but the presence of Red Communism.
During the Cold War, obsession with Red Communism outside its own borders had led the US government to ally itself with all kinds of crazy people—from ex-Nazis and ex-fascists in post-World War II Europe to extremely repressive military rulers in Latin America to nihilist death squads in Angola and Mozambique to jihadi extremists in Afghanistan.
One of such jihadi extremists was Osama Bin Laden whom the mainstream media of the 1980s referred to as a freedom fighter—a foretaste of what would happen a few decades later when the same media outlets described regressive, head-chopping jihadis in Syria as “moderate rebels” and atavistic, slave-holding, al-Qaeda terrorists in Libya as “democracy-seeking freedom fighters”.
By late 1993, Osama Bin Laden had already fallen out of favour in the USA. There was no more use for him. Soviet troops had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989. The Soviet Union itself ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. The secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan lost its long war for survival to the jihadists and dissolved on 28 April 1992.
After his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991, he stayed briefly in war-torn Afghanistan before accepting sanctuary in Sudan and moving to Khartoum in 1992.
From 1992 to 1996, the Americans watched in dismay as their former “freedom fighter” and “hero of Afghanistan” turned completely against them. Osama Bin Laden’s followers executed the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and carried out a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—an important US ally— in June 1995.
Shortly after the assassination attempt on Mubarak, Omar al-Bashir's Sudan was declared a “state sponsor of terrorism” for habouring Osama Bin Laden whom the US government had begun to openly call “terrorist”. The good old days when Osama Bin Laden went by nice appellations—such as “freedom fighter” and “hero of Afghanistan”— were over.
To his credit, Omar al-Bashir tried to make amends. He expelled the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) terrorists, who had attempted to kill Mubarak, from Sudan. Despite using his personal wealth to bankroll the al-Bashir regime and pay for the construction of roads and other critical infrastructure in Sudan, Osama Bin Laden was compelled to leave the northeastern African country for Taliban-ruled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 18 May 1996.
These appeasement efforts achieved absolutely nothing for Omar al-Bashir. He made repeated attempts to meet senior American officials, but was consistently snubbed. The label of “state sponsor of terrorism” remained rigidly affixed to Sudan and would not be removed until twenty-three years later.
On 20 August 1998, sex scandal-ridden President Bill Clinton ordered the US Navy to destroy al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the Sudanese capital city of Khartoum, claiming falsely that it was producing VX nerve gas for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida movement.
The factory had nothing to do with nerve gas manufacturing. It was a civilian facility that produced ordinary medicines for Sudanese people and veterinary drugs for animals. It employed over 300 people and produced more than half of the total pharmaceutical products used in Sudan at the time.
Nevertheless, the factory was obliterated by thirteen cruise missiles fired from two US navy ships.
Ordinary Americans got to hear from their corporate media propagandists— perhaps for the first time— about Omar al-Bashir the “evil dictator” and “state sponsor of terrorism” who ran some semi-arid African country most of them had never heard about and couldn’t find on a map.
Propaganda in the corporate media turned the Sudanese military ruler into an object of public hate and eventually he became one of the first set of indictees of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the behest of a cynical United States, which controls the court while refusing to officially recognize its authority.
Back in 2002, at the behest of the highly reactionary Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and his sidekick in the US House of Representatives, the “born-again Christian” Tom DeLay of Texas, the United States Congress passed the American Service Members Protection Act mandating the US government to rescue any American or Allied nation military personnel detained by the ICC using any means possible.
As my American readers already know, that federal law is jokingly referred to as the Hague Invasion Act because it implies that the US government should use violence— if necessary— to rescue soldiers detained by the ICC, which is headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands.
Thankfully, Jesse Helm’s federal law has never been tested because, until recently, the ICC had “wisely” restricted its indictments to African leaders, who were in no position to order an invasion of The Hague. One furtive attempt in June 2020 by an ICC prosecutor to investigate war crimes in Afghanistan was quickly quashed when the Masters of The Universe running the US government growled in disapproval.
Several months earlier, December 2019, the same American Masters of the Universe had also warned that their close ally—the special nation of Israel— should under no circumstances be investigated for its behaviour in the occupied Palestinian territories. Obviously, the idiots running the ICC had gotten carried away; forgotten that USA and Israel aren’t located on the continent of Africa.
After years of complaints by resentful Africans that the court was exclusively targeting political figures from their continent, the Prosecutor of the ICC finally caused Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova to make history as the first set of individuals with no African ancestry to be indicted.
Unfortunately for the ICC Prosecutor, governments and political commentators inside Africa aren’t particularly impressed with the recent touch of “diversity” and “inclusion” being massaged into the running list of indictees.
Until his overthrow in 2019, the ICC indictment was used by the media and governments of NATO states as a tool for further demonization of Bashir and harassment of countries that insisted on maintaining good ties with him.
Nevertheless, Bashir was defiant. For ten years following his indictment (2009-2019), he visited several countries including South Africa, Kenya, China, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Chad, Djibouti, Uganda, Ethiopia, Qatar, etc. The governments of host countries declined to arrest their Sudanese visitor despite immense pressure from the United States.
In South Africa, the extremely westernized liberal activist judiciary tried and failed to get the South African government to arrest the Sudanese military ruler when he visited in June 2015.
Within Sudan itself, Omar al-Bashir was much safer as USA had no reliable means of removing him from power.
Even before Bashir came to power, American diplomatic presence in Sudan was already shrinking. In April 1986, following the shooting of a US Embassy employee, the number of American diplomatic staff in country was drastically reduced.
Ten years later, the remaining Americans still operating at the Embassy were all pulled out of Sudan, which had just been tagged “state sponsor of terrorism”.
In the absence of a well-functioning US Embassy—and a fully staffed CIA Station—it was a huge challenge to apply the standard cloak and dagger subversion tactics against the regime of Omar al-Bashir.
Economic pressure through the application of sanctions were attenuated by Omar al-Bashir’s relationship with Russia and China, which grew precipitously in the two decades that the Americans were absent.
In December 2018, everything changed. The security of Omar al-Bashir's position as Head of State unravelled dramatically. Internal economic problems in Sudan—combined with citizens sick and tired of the corrupt tyranny of Bashir’s regime— sparked a wave of popular demonstrations, which NATO-aligned governments and media outlets were happy to vocally support from the sidelines.
Once al-Bashir and his regime were out of the picture in April 2019, a delighted United States re-established full diplomatic ties with the new Sudanese military ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Sudan was removed from the magic list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. The previously dormant US Embassy in Khartoum was rejuvenated and a resident Ambassador appointed for the first time since 1995.
I penned an article in April 2023 to debunk claims made both in the mainstream corporate media and alternative media that external forces were behind the conflict currently raging between the Sudanese junta and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Contrary to claims in the mainstream corporate media, the past relationship between Wagner Group and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries is not evidence at all that Russia instigated the conflict.
Alt-media outlets claim that the Americans are sponsoring the RSF paramilitaries to fight the Sudanese military junta. The apparent reasoning behind this claim is that the Americans are using the conflict to scuttle talks between the Kremlin and the junta about the possibility of setting up a Russian military base in Port Sudan, which overlooks the Red Sea.
Again, this specious assertion is arrant nonsense based on the usual shallow one-dimensional assumptions and suppositions that often pass for “analysis of African issues” in certain alt-media outlets.
In reality, the situation in Sudan nuanced. The current Sudanese military regime led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan enjoys excellent relations with the United States and good relations with Russia.
The Americans have used this friendly relationship to persuade the Sudanese military ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to do things that would have been unthinkable for any previous Head of State in Sudan.
Thanks to the Americans, the Sudanese junta signed up to the Abraham Accords in 2021. Also, at the behest of the Americans, the Sudanese military ruler held a very public meeting on 2 February 2023 with Mr. Eli Cohen who was Israeli Minister For Intelligence at the time.
As already stated, the Sudanese junta also has good relations with Russia (and China), which it inherited from the previous military regime of Omar al-Bashir.
As stated earlier, for the decades that the al-Bashir regime was under various American and European economic sanctions, China and Russia provided a lifeline in terms of finance, technical know-how and weaponry. The Sudanese Armed Forces is heavily dependent on Russia (and China) for military equipment.
Likewise, the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) owes a debt of gratitude to military trainers of the then Kremlin-backed Wagner Group, which transformed it from a ragtag militia of lightly armed men on horseback and camelback to a professional paramilitary force capable of operating tracked-wheel armoured vehicles, mortars, howitzers and rotary-wing aircraft.
Before the conflict broke out, the RSF also had good relations with USA, Russia and China as its leader, Hamdan Dagalo, was de facto second-in-command to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan within the military junta ruling Sudan. Both Dagalo and al-Burhan were happy with the idea of a Russian naval base of 300 military personnel and 4 naval ships in Port Sudan as reported by Associated Press in February 2023, two months before hostilities broke out between the two men.
Historically, the only people who expressed some misgivings—on national sovereignty grounds— about the Russian naval base deal were some civilian members of the Sudanese civilian-military mixed regime, which was the governmental authority ruling the country in December 2020 when the naval base deal was first made public. Those skeptical civilian politicians wanted ratification of the naval base deal to be delayed until the civilian-military mixed regime was replaced by a democratically elected civilian government and a legislative body.
Unfortunately for those civilian politicians, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan killed the idea of democratic elections when he staged a pre-emptive coup d'état in October 2021 and dissolved his own civilian-military mixed regime in favour of the pure military junta, which currently rules Sudan.
As reported in my previous article, that particular coup d'état swept away many civilian politicians from government office, including Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who had no problems with the naval base deal.
There were some uncertainties in the immediate aftermath of the October 2021 military coup as to whether Hamadan Dagalo would retain his position in the pure military junta that supplanted the civilian-military mixed regime. But that was quickly cleared up with the announcement that the RSF leader would carry on as de facto second-in-command to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in the new set-up.
All of that changed this year, when the ten-year-old cold war between RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces turned into a shooting war. As soon as the first shots rang out, Hamdan Dagalo and his RSF subordinates were anathematized and expelled from their positions within the junta.
While still keeping communication lines open to the RSF, the Americans made the decision to take the side of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
In the days following the outbreak of violence between the rival military forces, US officials issued statements denouncing the behaviour of the RSF paramilitaries, especially with regards to their brutality towards civilians.
The jilted RSF reacted to those American statements by firing on a convoy of US diplomatic vehicles in April 2023— an incident that prompted US government to evacuate 70 officials in its embassy in Khartoum even as it strived to maintain some semblance of relations with the RSF.
For those readers interested in learning the actual cause of the conflict between the Sudanese junta and its RSF rivals, I highly recommend that you to read either the original article written in April 2023 or the slightly updated Substack version posted below :
The current conflict, which broke out on 15 April 2023, between military junta and its estranged paramilitary force is actually the fifth major conflict involving the Sudanese national state and an insurgent group. The previous four major conflicts being: the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972); the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005); the Civil War In Northwest Sudan (2003-2020) and Insurgency in Northeast and Central Sudan (2011-2020).
The ongoing seven-month-old war between the junta and the RSF have so far killed between 9,000 to 10,000 people and turned another 5.6 million people into refugees, some of whom had fled across international borders and ended up in Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan.
In theory, the military junta should have been able to overcome the RSF. After all, it controls the better-equipped Sudanese Armed Forces, which has a total personnel of 109,300 divided amongst its army, republican guard, navy and airforce.
The paramilitary RSF has 100,000 men in its ranks and no real air force to speak of. It has tanks, howitzers, mortars and some anti-aircraft weapons, but these were overmatched by the huge arsenal at the disposal of the conventional Sudanese military at the start of the conflict.
Nevertheless, since hostilities broke out, RSF has been making consistent progress on the field of battle.
Although majority of the landmass of Sudan is still under the control of the military junta, the RSF have seized large swathes of Khartoum State where it engaged in looting; commandeering homes of ordinary citizens; and firing artillery guns at hospitals, civilian buildings and military barracks occupied by besieged government troops struggling to hold onto the capital city of Khartoum.
Due to the bitter fighting, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan relocated from Khartoum to the much safer, picturesque city of Port Sudan.
In the northwest region, better known as Darfur, the RSF paramilitaries routed the Sudanese army and seized control despite futile attempts by the Sudanese Air Force to reverse the gains by aerial bombardment and strafing attacks.
In Darfur, the paramilitaries had the advantage of fighting in their home region. After all, the RSF is largely a reincarnation of the ragtag private militia of lightly armed native men, riding horses and camels, known as the Janjaweed.
In the earlier years of the Civil War In Northwest Sudan (2003-2020), the Janjaweed had fought Darfuri rebels on behalf of the national state of Sudan, taking control of vast expanses of sandy northwest plains not patrolled by a flagging Sudanese Army exhausted from 21 years of prosecuting the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005) against the largely Christian South Sudanese guerrillas.
At this juncture, I would like to point out that the civil war in the northwest region and the separate insurgency in northeast and central regions were both offshoots of the Second Sudanese Civil War.
The Muslim fighters who ignited insurgencies in their native Darfur (northwest region), Blue Nile (northeast region) and South Kordofan (central region) had learned from the earlier example set by the Christian guerrillas of South Sudan. Some Muslim insurgents in Blue Nile and South Kordofan had actually fought alongside the Christian guerrillas in their war against the Sudanese national state.
As I explained in my previous article, ethnic groups in Sudan that don’t identify as “Sudanese Arabs” face discrimination regardless of their religious beliefs. So, it is no surprise that some Muslims fought on the same side as Christians against the national government in pre-partition Sudan.
When the South Sudanese Christian guerrillas gained a separate country from the partition of Sudan in July 2011, the Khartoum government decided that its major priority was the destruction of the Darfuri rebels in the northwest region lest they cause a second partition of the country and the suppression of insurgents in the northeast and central regions who wanted a referendum on whether the international border should be adjusted to allow the cession of Blue Nile and South Kordofan to the newly established Republic of South Sudan.
Omar al Bashir’s decision to avoid further loss of national territory was what caused the Janjaweed private militia to become the nucleus of a new government paramilitary called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) in August 2013.
The creation of RSF as a rival military force to the conventional Sudanese Armed Forces is at the core of the present-day violent struggle for the control of the Sudanese national state and not any external machinations by Russia or the United States.
By 2019, it was clear to all observers that RSF had failed in its primary mission to destroy the rebels of Darfur. Instead, the war in the northwest had sunk into a stalemate.
Within weeks of Omar al-Bashir’s overthrow, the new military ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, initiated earnest talks with Darfuri rebels. Insurgents of the separate conflict in Kordofan and Blue Nile were also brought into the talks.
The end result was a comprehensive peace agreement on 31 August 2020 closing both the civil war in the northwest and the low intensity insurgency in the northeast and central regions.
Once the peace accord was signed, leaders of the former rebel groups were incorporated into the administrative structures of the Sudanese national state.
Suliman Arcua Minnawi, who led the rebel Darfur Liberation Front (now called Sudan Liberation Movement) became the Head of the Darfur Regional Government, which exercises oversight over the activities of five states in the region, namely Central Darfur, East Darfur, North Darfur, South Darfur and West Darfur.
Two other rebel leaders of the Darfur Liberation Front (i.e. Sudan Liberation Movement) were appointed state governors. Khamis Abdullah Abakar was given governorship of West Darfur State. while Nimr Abdel Rahman became governor of North Darfur State.
Members of the rival Darfuri rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), were also given important posts within the civilian-military mixed regime (and later on, the pure military junta).
Rebel leaders who led the insurgency in the central and northeast regions of the country were not left out. Malik Agar, who led the northeastern insurgency in Blue Nile State, was also incorporated into the civilian-military mixed regime (and later on, the junta).
Ahmed al-Omda who had served as Malik’s subordinate in the formerly rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North (SPLM-N) became governor of Blue Nile State.
When conflict erupted between RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces in April 2023, the former rebels were caught in the middle, but soon had to a choose a side to support.
Nearly all the former rebel groups chose the side of the military junta. That includes a faction of the SPLM-N led by Malik Agar who was later elevated to the position of second-in-command to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Only two former rebel groups went against the grain by taking the side of the RSF paramilitaries. They were the Tamazuj Movement and a rival faction of the SPLM-N led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu.
RSF paramilitaries based in the troubled northwest region (Darfur) have always outnumbered troops of the Sudanese Army stationed there. However, military support from most of the ex-rebel fighters who control certain parts of Darfur did help to attenuate the army’s numerical disadvantage.
But then, when the shooting started, the still numerically superior RSF was able to swoop on the positions of the Sudanese troops in the region, inflicting heavy casualties, and forcing a rout. Over 320 soldiers, lucky to still be alive, fled across Sudan’s western frontier into neighbouring Republic of Chad.
Thousands of civilians joined in the flight to Chad after the RSF paramilitaries butchered an estimated 1,300 people— including Khamis Abdallah Abakar, the former Darfuri rebel fighter who had been the governor of West Darfur State since June 2021.
As stated earlier, frenzied attempts by the Sudanese Air Force to reverse the gains of the RSF in Darfur region, with air strikes, came to nought. RSF controls most of the region’s landmass with some enclaves still held by the fighters of the Darfur Liberation Front allied to the Sudanese military junta.
Meanwhile, in the cities of Khartoum and Omdurman, the RSF paramilitaries are laying a siege. Entire neighbourhoods in Omdurman have been cut off from electricity, food and water.
The besieged city of Omdurman is inhabited by 2.4 million people while Khartoum city has 6.4 million residents. Artillery barrages from the RSF and aerial bombardment from the Sudanese Air Force have killed lots of civilians.
Since the conflict broke out, the Sudanese Air Force have suffered several setbacks. Some of its Mi-24 attack helicopters have been shot down. A couple more of those helicopters have been captured intact on the ground by RSF paramilitaries. There are also reports MiG-29 fighter jets donated by the Egyptian Air Force have either been captured and destroyed on the ground by the RSF.
With its arsenal depleting, and its weaknesses exposed, the Sudanese Armed Forces have been desperately trying to learn new tricks from wars being fought abroad.
Sudanese top brass had observed the effectiveness of aerial drones in the Azerbaijan-Artsakh War, the Tigray Insurgency In Ethiopia and in the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War. In all three conflicts, the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones played a role.
In the Azerbaijan-Artsakh War, the Bayraktar drones played a major role in the comprehensive defeat and demise of the 32-year-old unrecognized Republic of Artsakh.
The Ethiopian government forces, which had been on the back foot, was able to turn things around as soon as it acquired Bayraktar drones. Those drones inflicted enough casualities on the Tigray insurgents to convince them to enter African Union (AU)-mediated peace talks and sign a pledge to surrender their weapons to the Ethiopian government.
In the Russo-Ukraine War, Bayraktar drones did little or nothing to help the Ukrainian war effort as the Russians deployed their formidable Electronic Warfare (EW) capabilities to disrupt communication signals between the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and their remote operators on the ground. Beyond EW measures, Russian air defence troops routinely shoot down those Turkish-made drones.
With that being said, other types of drones—smaller than the Bayraktar UAVs—have proven to be much more effective on the Ukrainian battlefield, especially the civilian “first-person view” (FPV) quadcopter drones that have been converted to drop explosives from the air as well as Russian drones such as the Lancet and the Orlan.
Desperate to try their hand on drone warfare, the Sudanese Army has turned to Egypt, Turkey and Ukraine for help in supplying the much desired unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
So, why is the Sudanese Army turning to Ukraine for help? Well, the answer is quite simple— the ruling military junta is now prioritizing its relationship with USA over its ties with Russia because of ludicrous claims in the mainstream media that Wagner Group might be backing the RSF paramilitaries.
Ever since this conflict began, the military junta led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan have been behaving in a paranoid manner, wagging accusatory fingers in all directions.
Despite declaring its neutrality, Kenya have been accused by the junta of taking money from United Arab Emirates (UAE) to favour the RSF paramilitaries. The Ethiopians and the Eritreans—both neutral— are also been treated with a degree of suspicion by the junta.
Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Djibouti, Somalia and South Sudan are members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional organisation that deals with trade and security issues involving eight countries either inside the geopolitical region known as the Horn of Africa or proximate to it.
Since the outbreak of the Sudanese conflict, leaders of countries belonging to IGAD have been making strenuous efforts to get the two warring parties to resolve their differences. However, the paranoid Sudanese junta officials have declined to participate in peace talks.
President William Ruto of Kenya have made several attempts to mediate between the two warring parties, but this has been brushed off by the Sudanese junta who are now levelling ludicrous allegations that Kenya is backing RSF.
The reason for these allegations stem from William Ruto’s suggestion that member-states of IGAD should consider the idea of deploying peacekeepers to Sudan to separate the warring sides.
During an address to a large group of special forces soldiers, the deputy commander-in-chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces, Lieutenant-General Yasir al-Atta launched a tirade at President William Ruto, challenging the Kenyan leader to bring his own army and troops from an unnamed country that was supposedly backing him. Presumably, that unnamed country was the UAE.
In July, the privately-owned Kenya Television Network (KTN) broadcast a 42-minute long report of the crisis in Sudan that included brief video footage of Yasir al-Atta’s scathing attack on President Ruto.
I have taken the liberty of reducing the entire televised KTN report to just the one minute-long rant of the Sudanese army general, and translated his words from Arabic to English, which I believe is a fair representation of what he actually said. Please watch below:
It is certainly true that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) does sympathize with RSF. There are reports of Emirati cargo planes, bearing both relief supplies and concealed crates of ammunition, landing on an airstrip in the Republic of Chad. The relief supplies go to desperate Sudanese refugees on both sides of the Chad-Sudan International Border while concealed crates of ammunition are smuggled across the border to the RSF paramilitaries. UAE and Chad strenuously deny those reports, and frankly speaking, I am in no position to verify those stories either way.
However, I am confident that Sudanese junta is being ludicrous when it levels allegations that UAE hired Kenya to smuggle weapons to RSF paramilitaries. For one thing, the ruling elites of Kenya aren’t close to the Emiratis. For another thing, it is geographically impossible for Kenya to supply RSF with weapons because it has no international border with Sudan. In fact, Kenya and Sudan are separated by a distance of 1,203 miles (1,936 km).
For Kenyan weapon smugglers to reach the RSF in Sudan, they would have to traverse large swathes of sovereign territory belonging to the Republic of South Sudan.
In other words, South Sudanese authorities would have to be in cahoots with Kenya for the weapons smuggling racket to work. Funnily enough, the Sudanese junta haven’t levelled any accusations against South Sudan, reserving its vitriol for Kenya, which has since reiterated its neutrality and dismissed claims that it is working with UAE to help the RSF.
The unwillingness of the Sudanese junta to engage in peace talks mediated by pan-African institutions, such as the African Union and IGAD, can be attributed to the fact that both institutions have rejected repeated requests from the junta that Hamdan Dagalo and his RSF paramilitaries be completely anathematized. Both IGAD and African Union refuse on grounds of preserving their neutrality in order to be accepted as unbiased peace mediators.
Unfortunately, that reasonable stance has only fuelled the paranoia of Sudanese junta officials who already believe that some African states are secretly sympathetic to the RSF paramilitaries.
On the other side, the Americans have been keen to lock in their excellent relations with Sudanese junta officials by striving to meet them half way on contentious matters and humouring them on uncontroversial issues.
Reluctant to burn all their bridges with the RSF, the Americans decided not to personally target RSF leader Hamdan Dagalo with sanctions. However, in order to please the Sudanese junta, the Americans clamped sanctions on two important subordinates of Hamdan Dagalo.
Abdelrahim Dagalo— deputy RSF leader and brother to Hamdan— was sanctioned for “human rights abuses” while Abdul Rahman Jumma— the RSF sector commander for West Darfur—was sanctioned for allegedly authorizing the murder of Governor Khamis Abdallah Abakar. The local state governor was abducted, tortured and murdered on 14 June 2023 for criticizing the brutality of RSF paramilitaries against innocent civilians.
Apart from propitiating the Sudanese junta officials, the Americans have been busy trying to play on their sense of paranoia. In the mind of junta officials, the string of victories scored by RSF paramilitary isn’t a reflection of the diminished capacity of the Sudanese Armed Forces— exhausted by 54 years of fighting a plethora of insurgent groups in various overlapping civil wars occurring in different parts of pre-partition Sudan.
In the mind of junta officials, RSF victories could only be the handiwork of external influence. While it is without a doubt that UAE is sympathetic to the RSF, there simply isn’t any evidence that a much wider range of countries—both within and outside Africa—are working together to supply the Sudanese paramilitary force.
But objective reality doesn’t matter. What counts is the perception of reality, and the US government was never going to miss a golden opportunity to work on the minds of Sudanese government officials who themselves have a long history of backing proxies in foreign wars. (For example, Sudan backed the Ugandan terrorist-rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army for nearly a decade).
For the Americans, the narrative was quite simple— RSF are scoring victories because the Kremlin is secretly backing them with Wagner mercenaries, some of whom are funnelling weapons to the paramilitaries via Sudan’s international borders with Chad and Central African Republic
That narrative have since been picked up and repeated by the governments of Ukraine and various European countries. The mainstream corporate press have also been doing their assigned job of amplifying the narrative on a daily basis.
While Sudan continues to maintain ties with Russia, there are indications that the US/EU/Ukraine propaganda narrative have gained traction among the paranoid officials of the military junta.
Even before hostilities broke out between RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces in April 2023, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan was already being nudged towards the Ukrainians by the Americans.
Last year, there were local Sudanese press reports stating that the Sudanese Army had allowed several wooden crates containing 122mm artillery shells and 120mm HE-843B mortar bombs to be flown to Rzeszów–Jasionka Airport in Poland. From there, the concealed wooden crates, travelling by road, crossed the Poland-Ukraine International Border.
According to the Sudanese press, from 31 March 2022 to 7 June 2022, Ukrainian-owned Boeing 737 jetliners carried out 35 flights of that nature between Khartoum and the Polish airport located 49.7 miles (80 km) from the border with Ukraine.
After hostilities broke out between RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2023, the Americans began to push for the leader of the Sudanese junta to meet with Zelensky amidst claims by mainstream media outlets that Ukrainian military personnel were on the ground in Sudan operating FPV drones against RSF paramilitaries allegedly backed by Wagner mercenaries.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan finally acceded to the American request by holding an unscheduled meeting with President Zelensky at Shannon Airport in Ireland on 23 September.
After the meeting, the Ukrainian government officials stated that Zelensky and al-Burhan discussed “common security challenges, namely the activities of illegal armed groups financed by the Russian Federation.”
A couple of videos have released by CNN and Kyiv Post showing what they claim are Ukrainian-supplied FPV drones attacking RSF paramilitary fighters in Sudan.
Here is one from CNN:
Another from CNN:
Another video from Kyiv Post:
Both CNN and Kyiv Post, claim that the drone attacks on RSF are being executed by Ukrainian Special Operations Forces inside Sudan. Of course, claims that Wagner mercenaries are inside Sudan remain unproven as the video footage did not provide the evidence. All that can be concluded from the video clips above is that drone warfare is now playing a much bigger role in the conflict between RSF and the Sudanese junta than it did when hostilities first broke out in April 2023.
I have also seen only scant evidence that Ukrainian Special Operations Forces soldiers are operating inside Sudan apart from a video clip of an European man—dressed in a MultiCam camouflage uniform— firing a sniper rifle from the top of a hill called Jibal el Markhyat, which is west of Omdurman city:
The footage above was originally circulated on 5 October 2023 by well-known American media propagandist, Malcolm Nance, who spent most of his time in Ukraine relaxing in Lvov and Kiev while claiming to be on the East Ukrainian frontlines of the Russo-Ukraine War :
While it is entirely possible that the uniformed gunman in the video is indeed part of the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, the repeated claims made by propagandists like Nance that Wagner mercenaries are operating inside Sudan should be disregarded until credible evidence is presented.
NATO-aligned Bellingcat guys picked up Nance’s footage, analyzed it and wrote a report on 7 October 2023 stating that they could not confirm that the person in the video was actually a Ukrainian soldier. Of course, Bellingcat’s thoroughgoing russophobia precludes it from expressing the same kind of skepticism about unproven claims that Russian mercenaries are fighting inside Sudan on the side of the RSF.
Like other NATO-aligned media outlets, Bellingcat’s claim that Russian mercenaries are secretly working inside Sudan is based on Wagner Group’s previous presence in Sudan, several years ago. As I explained in this article and that article, Wagner Group came to Sudan in 2017 to train the RSF at the behest of the toppled al-Bashir regime. At the end of the training programme, Yevgeny Prigozhin pulled his men out of Sudan.
Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) recently published a news report of the meeting between Volodymyr Zelensky and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, which featured Nance’s video clip of the purported Ukrainian sniper and a regurgitation of the now memetic NATO storyline of Wagner bogeymen fighting in Sudan.
Regardless of the authenticity of Ukraine sniper video, the most important thing to understand is that neither FPV drones, Bayraktar drones, donated Egyptian aircraft nor the purported presence of Ukrainian Special Operations Forces have done anything significant to reverse the steady territorial gains being made by RSF paramilitaries at the expense of the Sudanese Armed Forces.
The RSF currently control most of the region of Darfur and Khartoum State, which contains the capital city of Khartoum and the riverine city of Omdurman. The paramilitaries have also captured parts of North Kordofan and South Kordofan.
At the time of writing this article, the RSF is still advancing slowly in various parts of the country while the junta scrambles to prevent further loss of territory, and rally government troops utterly demoralized and humiliated by repeated defeats at the hands of a paramilitary group that used to be treated with contempt because of its humble origins as a gang of lightly armed bandits that started out in February 2003 as auxiliaries for the Sudanese Armed Forces during the initial phase of the Civil War In Northwest Sudan.
Even after its transformation from a ragtag militia into a professional paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) never gained the respect of the Sudanese Armed Forces who refused to see its personnel as anything, but inferior. Its leader, Hamdan Dagalo, was regarded as nothing more than the barely educated civilian camel seller that he was, some twenty years ago.
As explained in my previous article on Sudan, Hamdan Dagalo’s incorporation into the military regime that took power on 11 April 2019 was done grudgingly and only because he had unexpectedly betrayed his longtime benefactor, Omar al-Bashir, by arresting him— thereby, allowing the coup d'état instigated by General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf to succeed without the anticipated bloody clash between RSF and the Sudanese Army.
Unfortunately, the inclusion of Hamdan Dagalo in the post-coup national government in 2019 merely delayed that bloody clash by four years. As I conclude this write-up, the carnage and suffering continues in Sudan…
THE END
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On another substack I visit, a commentor had noted that the fighting was still taking place in Sudan, but hadn't seen any coverage in the media. It made me immediately think of you, Chima, and here you are with another informative write-up. If only the devastation and suffering of the civilian population of Sudan were as newsworthy as Israelis or Ukrainians. Above the number of those who have lost their lives in this conflict seems to have displaced an enormous amount of civilians.
Now, the strange bits I've been reading about "Ukrainian Spec Ops in Sudan" makes sense. I hadn't heard about the meeting in Ireland, though. This whole thing sounds like a psy-op of promoting Ukraine and smearing Russia. The neocons never let a good opportunity for a smear pass them up, nor a chance to make any situation all about them and their perceived enemies.
ICC at the order of the master of the universe supported official account of events and wars in ex Yugoslavia persecuting mostly ethnic Serbs while looking the other way for genocide Croatian state has performed over its at that time 1/3 of its citizens. Similarly it failed to do anything about US and British trained and equipped Albanian terrorists who abushed and killed Serbian police in Kosovo and Metohia.