Why Sudan’s conflict matters – The Global Jigsaw podcast, BBC World Service
My name is Amal, that does mean hope, but
I don’t find any hope, unfortunately.
Amal al-Hassan is a journalist from
Sudan who fled to Kenya last year,
after war broke out in her country.
Every Sudanese woman, child, man facing very hard
time. This war is like a nightmare. We
are all suffering a lot, we are lost.
Sudan is about to mark a sad anniversary,
one year of war with no end in sight.
Right now with Sudan, things are really
quite dark. The nation is divided. The
mistrust between the two actors and
also across a country runs so deep.
Sudan is in the grip of a humanitarian disaster.
The UN believes the country is experiencing
the world’s largest internal displacement
crisis. There are fears that if not stopped,
this conflict could further destabilise an already
volatile region. In this episode we try to piece
together the Sudan picture from the few trusted
sources that are left on the ground – with the
help of our Africa watchers who we met in Nairobi.
And a warning – there are distressing details.
I’m Krassi Twigg and this is The Global Jigsaw
– an original podcast from BBC Monitoring,
zooming in on political, security and social
shifts around the world, through the lens of its
media. Our team listens to, watches and analyses
media narratives in one hundred languages.
Sudan remains important despite
the fact that it’s become the war
that sort of been in the back burner
because there’s so many other things
going on. Now there’s a war in Gaza,
there’s still the conflict in Ukraine.
Beverly Ochieng, one of our top Africa experts,
was telling me why the world should
be paying attention to this conflict.
There’s a bigger Middle East crisis and Sudan
straddles that region. It’s an African country,
but it also has very strong Muslim Arab links.
So, it’s still caught in the crossfire of all
of that. There was concerns about the
possibility of Sudan further fracturing.
A further fracturing in a high stakes region might
have far-reaching consequences
– but more on those later.
This is a complex story. So let’s get the basics
– what’s happening and who is fighting whom?
Here’s another Africa
watcher – Ahmed Mohamed Abdi.
The war that broke out between the Sudanese
Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support
Forces – two very well armed parties – has created
a huge humanitarian situation in the country and
also displacement at unprecedented
levels. So this one is more complex,
bigger in terms of the spread of the conflict
because it has affected the whole of the country.
Here’s what this mean in numbers: 18 million
people face acute hunger, according to the World
Food Programme. The UN says 8 million people are
internally displaced or have fled the country.
The war in Sudan is a multi-layered conflict
so before we can start unpicking it, we need to
know a bit of the history. with the help of Deka
Barrow from our Nairobi team – and this factfile.
Sudan is the third largest country in Africa,
stretching across an unstable and geopolitically
vital region. It’s predominantly Muslim
and with 46 million people. one the poorest
countries in the world. It straddles the
Nile River and borders seven countries,
each with security challenges that
are intertwined with the politics of
Khartoum. Sudan has lucrative minerals,
including gold, uranium, and iron ore.
It has been in an out of civil wars
since it gained independence in 1956.
Its western region of Darfur saw successive
wars from 2003. Another protracted war led to
it splitting into two countries in 2011
after oil-rich southern Sudan voted for
independence. This followed decades
of struggle by the mainly Christian
and animist south against rule by the Arab
Muslim north. Sudan has also had successive
coups entrenching military regimes that
favoured Islamic-oriented governments.
Another turning point came in 2018 when
nationwide protests broke out demanding
the removal of one of Africa’s longest serving
leaders – Omar al-Bashir. He came to power in
an Islamist-backed coup in 1989 and was the first
ever sitting president to be indicted on genocide
charges by the International Criminal Court.
Women played a prominent role in the revolution.
Following Bashir’s ousting, a Sovereign Council
consisting of military and civilian leaders, meant
to prepare Sudan for a return to civilian rule and
elections but that was hijacked by another coup.
Since then, Sudan has been torn between two
military men trying to share power – General
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the army, and
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti,
leader of the Rapid Support Forces formerly
based in Darfur and known as Janjaweed militias.
Their dispute led to an outright
war that started last April.
Let’s go back to 2018 – a key
moment for people power which
resulted in the removal of
a long-serving strongman.
In January 2018, we were talking about protests
and disgruntlement because of the rising cost of
bread, which is a basic commodity for many.
And then within the span of a year how those
protests morphed into calls to remove one of
the longest-serving leaders in the region.
And how the state of the economy had
been so shattered under Omar al Bashir,
because there had been Western sanctions
because of the allegations that there
were sponsoring the Al Qaeda group.
There was a period in the nineties,
where it was discovered that Osama Bin Laden
that then leader had been hiding out in Sudan.
But there was also the wave of change that
was coming from young people who are exposed.
The media had opened up at this point. There
were lots of newspapers, lots of online pages,
who were mobilising online by these so-called
neighbourhood resistance committees, by even just
young activists and artists. There were people
who were chanting, you know, ‘Sudan is ours’.
And then eventually those chants
changed into ‘Omar Bashir must leave’.
The ousting of one of Africa’s longest
serving autocrats sent waves of excitement
and optimism around the region, that the
voice of the people could become a real
factor in Sudan’s politics. But it wasn’t the
people who reaped the rewards. It was two men
with appetite for power. It started as
a revolution and it ended in a coup.
Before the war broke out there had been some
discussions for the possible formation of another
government, which would include some of the
civilian and political actors who had been part
of that transition – the former prime minister
Abdullah Hamdok, who had been removed, and there
was still the military leader Burhan, and then
there was the leader of the RSF, the Rapid Support
Forces, Hemedti. And there were discussions
where the RSF would need to be dissolved,
and Hemedti wasn’t too happy with the possibility
that he might lose his own centre of power, and
because of these two centres of power constantly
antagonising each other a war broke out.
Was their disagreement always about
who is going to be number one?
Essentially, yes. Hemedti seemed to be building
himself to be a bit of a statesman and sometimes
it felt as if he would be overshadowing
Burhan. Burhan is from an old guard,
so he’s not doing social media videos and he’s
not doing, you know, your very slick campaigns
online or showing up in suits and places. Hemedti
was really reaching out to the civilian coalition,
the Forces of Freedom and Change. He was building
a whole campaign around himself. He was travelling
to different places and this was sort of giving
him a bit of a mark. And there was the discussion
that there was the possibility that they could
hand over Bashir to the ICC, which may have
implicated the two men, so in a way they had to
find a way to outmanoeuvre each other, it seems.
Two men with their eyes set on the top job, each
one fearful of the looming threat of justice,
each one with a lot to lose. The
result is a country caught in their
power struggle. Not what the people
behind the revolution were hoping for.
The military removed the most
powerful man, but I think that
wave of euphoria has been shattered.
Particularly now because of the war.
And because many of those groups that had been
galvanising this pro-democracy movement, where
you have young people and women at the centre of
politics, they now either have escaped because of
the war, or their voices cannot really be heard.
You have gunfire, literally, almost every day.
One of those seeking shelter from the shooting
in the first weeks of the conflict last April in
Omdurman was journalist Amal al-Hassan and
her small team of the Al-Taghyir website.
She watched the war descending on her country.
We facing a very horrible time. And at the
same time we keep working because we tell
each other – this is our job. When the war
start, the first victim is the truth. And
there is like a big propaganda from both side of
conflict parties. That is why we have to continue
speaking up out there, what happened to the people
and the failings the Sudanese people are facing,
and how has Khartoum became like a city of ghosts
in no time. Sudanese people suffering a lot.
Embassies vacated their staff, in some instances
destroyed documents because of safety. There was
some anger towards Western states because
the Sudan war was also taking place at the
same time as the war in Ukraine, and there
were some visa arrangements for Ukrainian
nationals leaving the country. And people
were calling out Western governments for
not making similar arrangements for Sudanese
nationals, even those who had families away.
The capital Khartoum hadn’t seen war in
decades until last April. People left
in their hundreds of thousands, including
many journalists, like Amal. That created an
information vacuum which was quickly filled
with rumours and propaganda. So how do you
monitor a country at war, where your reliable
sources vanish almost overnight? Moses Rono,
a veteran of monitoring Africa’s
media, explains his team’s challenges.
The media generally over the years was repressed
under Bashir. Journalists used to struggle to
get access to information. (EDGE IN DRAMATIC
MUSIC – guitar 4 bed – vcs 34104) I remember
a long time ago when I started, we used to have
what used to be called pre-press censorship,
so government agents would confiscate
complete print runs of newspapers,
just before they are made available in the
newsstands. And you’d get blank pages of
newspapers. There was the hope after the
revolution that the tight controls that
Bashir had imposed on the press and the media
generally in Sudan were going to go away,
and the media would be more robust. But with the
war starting, we’ve had massive challenges as a
team monitoring Sudan. The biggest challenge is
getting reliable information from the country.
BRING UP MUSIC
All the actors are fighting to control
the message. If you look at the state TV,
Radio Omdurman and Sunna, the official
news agency, all controlled by the army,
and they skew reporting towards the army line.
At the same time, outlets that are pro-the RSF
would skew the reporting to favour them.
So that’s been a challenge because finding
reliable information is really difficult. A number
of media sources, including websites, even radios,
are no longer accessible. Some of the reliable
websites – they will take weeks and weeks before
they update. It’s quite sporadic and unreliable.
It is very unsafe. We couldn’t get freelancers,
we couldn’t get access to some of the
newspapers, we couldn’t get access to radio
stations. That’s a big challenge that we face.
Amal al-Hassan, the Sudanese editor of Al-Taghyir
website, has an on-the-ground perspective on
why reliable information has become hard to get.
I’m responsible for my team. All the time I
told them there is no story valuable more than
your life. I wanted them to stay safe. At the
same time I know that mission they are doing,
it is not easy. They are in very dangerous places.
They could lost their life and no-one is going to
ask what happened. So, they are really very brave.
They are still working every single day. Even they
have like very problems like there is no power
for days and there is a problem for accessing
the internet, but when the internet is come,
they bring their stories immediately. One day
he write the story about something happen before
three days. I said nobody know about this. Don’t
worry. We can’t call it news in our evaluation
of what news is – something happened now. But it
is still news, and you are doing a great job.
So the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese
Armed Forces are the main parties in this war. Bev
will talk about the RSF, and Ahmed will describe
the army for you. Let’s go through the main
elements. First, who are the warring parties?
The Sudan Armed Forces has ruled this
country for almost 57 years out of the
nearly 70 years of this country’s independence.
Just before the war broke out I think the Sudan
Armed Forces was one of the most powerful in
the Horn of Africa region with over 200,000
troops. This is just a modern army which
has an air force, which has naval troops,
which has also ground troops. They were well
equipped, although most of the equipment
came from Russia and China because of
the sanctions placed on the country.
The RSF was born out of a militia known
as the Janjaweed, which had been operating
in the Darfur region, formed by Arab ethnic
groups. And they were countering rebel groups
that had emerged in the Darfur region – you know
Darfur – the place of the Fur. And the war was
an issue around skin colour and identity.
And the rebel groups were largely from the
Massalit and the Fur black communities.
When they had essentially been defeated,
the Janjaweed was formalised into a force that
would be a sort of paramilitary coalition,
but also would be used for insurgencies
outside of Sudan because that was lucrative,
especially for Hemedti who was building
himself as a sort of king-maker of the region.
The Rapid Support Forces are estimated to have
numbered about 100,000 before the war started
that’s half the size of the Sudanese
army. And the two men vying for the
top job – Burhan and Hemedti
– have a long shared history.
Al-Burhan is a career soldier. He joined the
military college in Khartoum before also taking
military courses in Egypt and Jordan. He has also
been the military attaché of Sudan in China. In
April 2019, he was installed as the chairman of
the transitional military council just a day after
al-Bashir was toppled by his defence minister and
senior military generals, including al-Burhan.
General Burhan, he had been a long-time
ally of Omar al-Bashir. So he is pretty
much of the old regime. He has lots
of military and economic interests,
and then his deputy up until you know the
war broke out was Hemedti – Hamdan Dagalo
Hemedti – and he is the leader
of the Rapid Support Forces,
the RSF. There’s all this contention about
Hemedti’s citizenship. He is believed to be
Chadian possibly. He comes from Darfur. And he
had been the leader of the RSF since the early
2000s. He had been a camel herder. Someone who
has really risen up from almost nothing to being
in the position that he is. And I suppose when
the coup happened in 2019 it did give Hemedti
the possibility of having a bigger political
ambition. He could actually be a statesman.
Sudan consists of 18 states. So who’s
in control of which part of the country?
The Sudan Armed Forces controls most parts of
the country, as of now. Most of the states,
especially the north, central and eastern parts,
most of the Sudan Armed Forces
capabilities and bases are still intact.
When the war broke out it almost felt as if
the RSF had the upper hand because they did
manage to take quite a few military bases
in very strategic areas. Over a long time,
the RSF has had de facto control over the
western region of Darfur and that’s because
of their involvement in the 2003 genocide.
If you’re in the Darfur corridor you’re very
close to Chad and even the Central African
Republic. If you were towards the Kordofans,
you were near South Sudan. That is
also a very big trafficking route.
The UN estimates that 300,000 people
were killed in the Darfur war and Omar
al-Bashir is still being sought
by the International Criminal
Court on charges of war crimes and crimes
against humanity over that conflict.
We heard that propaganda replaced
reliable information. So what’s
the message you hear from the warring sides? Let’s
start with the army – their narrative and
how they respond to accusations of abuses.
AHMED 5 – 16687
The Sudan Armed Forces interpret the current
conflict in the sense that this is a rebellion by
a the Rapid Support Forces against the state and
that they are trying to defeat this rebellion
which they accuse of destroying the country,
and also committing atrocities against civilians
in the areas that they seize. There have been
accusations against the army of carrying out
indiscriminate air strikes against civilian
populated areas, especially inside the
capital, Khartoum and also some cities
in Darfur and Kordofan regions. But
the army has repeatedly denied this.
The army also points to the fact that the
areas that are under the control of the
armed forces is where most of the civilians
have fled to. They basically saying that this
shows that the civilians have faith in
the armed forces, they acknowledge that
there have been some civilian casualties in
some of the airstrikes and also some of the
attacks. But they’re saying that these are limited
and not intentional. They always compare that to
what they call the indiscriminate
and deliberate attacks by the RSF.
BRING UP MUSIC
There have been reports by human rights
organisations and the United Nations that the
RSF committed atrocities in the West Darfur state,
the RSF killed between 10 to 15,000 civilians.
The army’s basically pointing to these reports.
To contrast these reports the RSF
are portraying themselves as the good
guys – against multiple accusations
of war crimes, which they deny.
Sometimes they’ll put out material, trying to
demonstrate that they are sharing humanitarian
aid even though the accounts from the media
and activists are very different from that.
What you see on their social media feed is that
they are willing to change Sudan and they want
to be part of the politics. But the narratives
coming out are very different. And one of the
things that they do primarily is the othering.
They would talk about the Islamist influence
in the government and that, obviously, linked
back to Omar al-Bashir and his links with the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They would talk
about the possibility of jihadists. and that
would also echo with the fact that Osama Bin
Laden had once been hosted in the country and
that’s what led to sanctions. And in doing
so they are trying to adapt the language of
the more revolutionary political and social
class, who had wanted Omar al-Bashir out.
The RSF seem to be refashioning some
of the revolutionary language in a
quest for appeal. And they seem to have
a sophisticated social media strategy.
They’re really good with media. Part of
it is believed to be domiciled in the UAE,
they had Facebook accounts, which were taken
down. They do have a raft of Twitter accounts,
including influencers. They have
their official accounts where they
will put a long statements. They put up videos of
organising football tournaments between children,
and by contrast Sudanese media and activists
talked about how the RSF was allegedly rounding
up young men and sometimes just executing
them on site. Whenever allegations of war
crimes emerged the US has cited this, the UN
has cited this, the ICC prosecutors cited this.
The RSF tends to be disproportionately
mentioned a lot more in these reports.
How the army spreads its message
couldn’t be more different.
Sudan TV airs military statements and
videos that promote military propaganda.
Most of these bulletins, they lead with
the Sudanese Armed Forces statements of
battlefield victories and also
reports from the army commander,
General Burhan. The army also uses
social media just like the RSF. Its
account on Facebook has over two million
followers and it uses that platform to
share statements and videos. It’s also
has an account on social media platform X.
Claims of battlefield victories fighting
it out on the information front. And if
the story wasn’t complex enough,
wait until you hear about the web
of external forces with a vested
interest – and it’s a long list.
Egypt was one of the countries that also was
backing the new administration in Sudan after
Bashir was toppled. it also supported the Sudanese
transitional government and is currently accused
of also backing the Sudanese Armed Forces. Russia
and China, they have supported al-Bashir and after
the fall of Bashir they maintained relations
with the transitional council led by Abdel
Fattah al Burhan. They still maintain relations
with the current military-led government. China
had in the past a huge interest in Sudan’s
energy sector. The same goes for Russia,
although it has mainly military cooperation
with Sudan. There have been reports of Russian
companies in the mining sector in Sudan,
especially in the gold mining in Darfur and
the northern and eastern regions of the country.
The Russian government officially says that it
is neutral in this conflict and has called for
dialogue between the two parties and there was
this military cooperation agreement that dates
back to the government of Omar al-Bashir that
Russia will establish a naval base in
Port Sudan, which is on the Red Sea. The
military said that there were reviewing that
agreement that was reached with the Russians.
The RSF has a lot of bases in Darfur. They were
sort of de facto running the goldmine. They were
also linked to the Wagner mercenaries from Russia
and Hemedti did have his own training and support
agreement with the Wagner group. The army has said
that the RSF is possibly getting reinforcements
from the Wagner group either from Libya, or from
the CAR or even somehow getting in through Chad,
because that border area is quite volatile.
There’s also been allegations that South Sudan
may have militarily facilitated the RSF.
South Sudan has officially denied this.
It sounds a bit like a two-circles
Venn diagram with Russia in the middle,
and that is just one actor. Let’s take
a closer look at the regional actors
with a stake in this war – our guide is
Sumaya Bakhsh from our Middle East team:
The key Arab actors in the Sudan conflict
are the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In
terms of what their game is in Sudan, they
have divergent interests. So, for example,
the UAE and Saudi Arabia are both seeking to
increase their influence regionally and so
we’ve seen this play out in the Sudan
conflict which also has translated to
rivalry between the two Gulf states which
we’ve also seen for example in Yemen.
Yemen too has had its own conflict for
a decade now that has brought disaster
to its people. It’s curious to find
a connection between Sudan and Yemen.
The Saudi-led coalition began its military
campaign in Yemen against the Houthi
rebels in Yemen in 2015 and Sudan sent tens of
thousands of troops to fight in Yemen on the
side of the government backed by the coalition.
Thousands have been killed during that time,
but we don’t have clear figures on
that, apart from the Houthi sources.
The Houthis are currently in the spotlight for
attacking ships in the Red Sea – and keeping
that shipping lane safe is important
for the Gulf states, among others.
Any further instability or any broadening
of the scope of any conflict in the region
could further impact the situation
in the Red Sea. Shipping interests,
investment for Saudi Arabia and the
UAE, and it’s not in their interest
to see any kind of further instability
or threats to security in the region.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are
supporting the opposing sites in
the Sudan conflict. What’s this competition about?
For Saudi Arabia, these talks have been really
important in terms of really increasing its
global influence and how it’s viewed as
an important regional player. There is
a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in
terms of both of them, all of the Gulf states,
are seeking to diversify their economies
away from oil and to increase their political
influence in the region and also on a
global level. And in Sudan specifically,
Saudi Arabia backs the army and the UAE has
reportedly got links to the RSF. We’ve seen
reports of it providing arms to the RSF. A recent
UN report said it found credible evidence that
it has been providing weapons. This has been
denied by the UAE, but this is what we’ve seen.
Another significant player that Ahmed
mentioned earlier has more at stake
because of its geographical proximity.
Egypt is Sudan’s neighbour, so firstly
in terms of security bears the potential
threat at its border of armed groups
and spillover, but additionally it
hosts Sudanese refugees and at the moment
it’s hosting more than 300,000 refugees,
and the longer this goes on the more potential
there is for more refugees to arrive in the
country and that could potentially cause further
strain on its already struggling economy.
International efforts to bring peace or at least
a ceasefire have failed to deliver. Getting the
warring parties to the table doesn’t seem an
easy task. Bev guides us through the attempts.
The biggest one comes from the Inter-Governmental
Authority on Development, which is known as IGAD.
It’s the Horn of Africa block and it spans a
huge area – so Sudan, you have South Sudan, you
have Kenya, you have Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Djibouti. They were among the first to call for a
ceasefire. Kenya has always had this peace-making
role in the region. They facilitated the eventual
fracture between Sudan and South Sudan in a way
that didn’t end up being as acrimonious as we
saw the civil war being. They have played a key
role in peace processes in Ethiopia. President
William Ruto said we ask these generals to stop
the nonsense, and that didn’t go down very well.
It felt like a strong message to stop the war.
But in the end, it has severely degraded the
progress of peace talks. So IGAD has not been
able to play a very influential role as it
would in bringing the two parties together.
Ethiopia has also tried, not just by hosting
refugees, but also trying to demonstrate that
its own peace process from the civil war could
be used as a template for a possible peace
process. That hasn’t worked. But what has
happened now is that the army has said it is no
longer part of IGAD and Hemedti said, you know,
he does not recognise that they still
believe in the IGAD effort. Then you
obviously have the African Union. It did form
a mechanism which will be led by three people
who will be overseeing talks. But then for
the very first time, when talks resumed in
Jeddah towards the end of last year, IGAD and
the African Union did join that process. You
would imagine they would have given it more
weight, but so far there’s still no ceasefire.
I have a more pessimistic view about
where we are in terms of the peace
talks or attempts to end the war. The
biggest players have been Saudi Arabia,
supported by the US. You know they’ve been leading
what has been called the Jeddah track or dialogue.
Moses’ assessment about the Jeddah talks is
somewhat downbeat too. And there’s an elephant
in the room – someone with a big footprint on
the continent – whose presence hasn’t been felt.
What has happened is the US’s own, I
feel, waning diplomatic weight. The US
has tried to bring its voice, tried
to, you know, applying sanctions,
backing talks. But it’s not adequate in
terms of the response, in terms of even
getting some sort of actionability. The two
generals do not feel compelled to respect
what the US is calling for and that says a
lot about its own power and its own weight.
I think there’s been unwillingness by the
two parties, that is the army and the RSF,
to agree on a ceasefire or a settlement of the
conflict because, one, the RSF believes that
it’s about to win the war. The second thing is
the army has demanded that before any progress
is made or an agreement is reached the RSF
should be pushed back. The army also cannot
agree to a ceasefire. That allows the RSF sweeping
powers of control of many parts of the country.
So no talks yet, and even talks about
talks feel like a distant perspective.
Getting everyone in the same room would be an
achievement in itself. Our Sudanese journalist
Amal al-Hassan says there’s an important
omission from the list of participants – the
journalists themselves. The people with the best
understanding of the situation on the ground.
The journalists, they didn’t get involved in the
peace negotiation and ceasefire and this is not
good. We have to be there, we have to participate
and be a witness for what has happened really,
because everyone shares a part of the story
from his point of view. No-one tells the truth.
As a Sudanese journalist, we are all facing a
problem in getting information. The army side,
they just want to put their statement in their
official page and we just have to take that. I
sent them a message to the spokesman of the
SAF several time, I sent him message and he
never respond. Also the RSF, he has people
responsible for the media. When you ask them,
they never answer your questions. Both sides are
hating us. They don’t like journalists. I don’t
think we feel secure inside Sudan. Too many of our
colleagues get killed or kidnapped or arrested.
And if you are a journalist and woman this is very
bad situation because woman are target also by
sexual violence and by attacking her or family. So
the situation of journalists is very bad in this
war. So that is why I decide to save myself and
my family. I’m a single mum and I have two kids.
What Amal describes is the near impossible
task of bringing the unimaginable suffering
in Sudan to the attention of the world.
And there are fears that no resolution
could lead to a deepening of the conflict.
Moses has a few thoughts about the future.
There have been reports of communities mobilising
to protect communities and that is also adding to
the angst and the worry about Sudan. There is
a possibility of a protracted conflict in the
country, in a situation where the army and
the RSF are in a deadlock. The collapse of
the army is another possibility. The next
scenario is the RSF taking control of the
country. The third thing is about the success
of the peace talks. If the Saudi and the IGAD,
the disjointed peace initiatives are brought
together, and the influential players are asked to
help push for a peace agreement – that seems like
a possibility that many people are keen on and
think that could work. The other scenario which
is the army wins. There have been reports that
the army could be considering mobilising militias
and other fighters in its fight against the RSF.
Bev said at the start that Sudan is
important. Moses spells out why – in
addition to it being currently the largest
humanitarian crisis – Sudan matters globally.
Sudan sits in a very critical geo-strategic
location. It’s a gateway to Horn of Africa and
it’s also the gateway to central and the Sahel.
If you look at the countries that neighbour Sudan,
they are a number of unstable countries, so
South Sudan, dealing with its own civil war,
CAR which has had long-running sectarian war.
You’ve got Libya and the divisions there,
Ethiopia which is recovering from their
recent conflicts and a very important country,
Chad. Chad is so connected to Sudan, in a sense
that the refugees who were fleeing Darfur are
entering Chad; the same communities live on
both sides of the border. We had a coup in Chad,
which triggered this pivot to Russia by the
new military junta. The main concern is that
Chad provides this security firewall. If you’re
travelling from West Africa and the Sahel coming
to East Africa through the desert, Chad is used
to be traditionally the country that was leading
counter terrorism efforts. If the conflict in
Sudan gets out of hand and sucks in Chad and
instabilities registered in Chad – it means that
firewall is gone. It allows the jihadists who
are present and active in all the region from the
Sahel near Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali,
a free rein to travel across if they wanted
to connect with the jihadists in East Africa,
including al-Shabab in Somalia. It
also means criminal gangs across
the desert in Sahara and the Sahel could
also exploit this situation if there was
state failure in Sudan – number one, to traffic
weapons like gun-running and also to facilitate
the illegal trade in moving people, migrants,
through to Europe through the Mediterranean.
The day before I met Amal in Nairobi,
she told me she applied for refugee
status. It felt like an expression of
her fears for the future of her country.
We have to stop the hate speech because
it became very loud and loud and if the
people start to kill each other
because of the colour of skin,
because of which tribe you belong to, this
will be like the end of Sudan like we know it.
There’s no deficit of gloomy
prospects all round. But
occasionally our experts see a glimmer of hope.
There was a tweet by one of
the very vocal activists on X
and they were talking about the Africa Cup of
Nations and the fact that it is being hosted by
Cote d’Ivoire and Cote d’Ivoire had been through
its own civil war and she said something like,
you know, there might still be hope for Sudan.
And voices like that probably need to be heard
more. If you have not followed Afcon – Ivory
Coast did win the tournament, against the odds.
Thank you to all our contributors
– Beverly Ochieng, Sumaya Baksh,
Deka Barrow, Moses Rono, Ahmed Mohammed Abdi and
Amal al-Hassan. The producer is Kriszta Satori,
technical production by Elchin
Suleymanov, mixing by Nick Scripps,
our editor is Judy King and I’m Krassi
Twigg. Thank you for giving us your time.
As Sudan marks a year of war with no end in sight, it’s facing the largest humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.
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There are fears that if not stopped, the conflict could further destabilise an already volatile region. We try to piece together the picture from the few trusted sources that are left on the ground – journalists working in hiding and in constant danger. And a warning – there are distressing details. This episode was first broadcast on 13 April.
00:00 Introduction
03:44 Sudan factfile
06:02 Sudan’s 2018 protests and the ousting of President Omar al-Bashir
09:47 Sudan’s 2023 civil war
11:14 Challenges for journalists
14:48 Who are the warring parties?
19:05: War of narratives
24:10 International players
26:25 Competing interests among regional actors
29:27 Peace efforts
36:03 Why Sudan matters?
38:18 Conclusion
Watch more episodes of the Global Jigsaw here 👉🏽 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz_B0PFGIn4fK2XXqsOE-zcX_7R7gOklU
Producer: Kriszta Satori
Presenter: Krassi Twigg
Editor: Judy King
Original music: Pete Cunningham
Sound engineer: Nick Scripps
Video producer: Suniti Singh
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5 Comments
😮no
It’s not good for that region!
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😮
Deus do Impossível, proteja sempre essas Crianças e seus Pais, Bençãos 💖 ! Amém.