Why Sudan’s conflict matters – The Global Jigsaw podcast, BBC World Service

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

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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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