U.S. Fears Sudan’s War Will Worsen Humanitarian Crisis

The U.S. Department of Defense is increasingly fearful is that the five-month conflict between Sudan’s two rival generals is worsening an already awful humanitarian catastrophe.

“The biggest concern is the growing humanitarian crisis,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin across Africa this week. “The people who suffer are civilians and refugees, and the numbers are growing in Sudan.”

Sudan’s humanitarian crisis kicked off long before the current round of fighting in the country, but it has only deepened since Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemeti, who leads the upstart Rapid Support Forces (RSF), began a sprawling, five-month civil war in April.

At least 5.4 million people have been displaced by the renewed fighting, both within Sudan’s borders and into neighboring countries, according to the United Nations. “Hostilities, fighting across Sudan, and other obstacles faced by aid organizations have made access to people in need extremely challenging and unpredictable,” the world body’s humanitarian arm reported this week.

In recent weeks, both Burhan and Hemeti have resisted calls from the U.N. and aid organizations to provide safe passage to aid convoys. The movement of humanitarian supplies into Darfur, controlled by the RSF, has been on hold for three straight weeks, and aid groups are plagued by shortages of fuel and other logistical constraints.

The United States has so far resisted placing sanctions on Burhan or Hemeti, whose RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. The U.S. Treasury Department levied sanctions on Hemeti’s brother, the group’s deputy commander, earlier this month, stating that the RSF had engaged in acts of violence and human rights abuses, but U.S. officials fear that targeting Hemeti personally could exhaust U.S. leverage to halt the war at the negotiating table.

Great powers have largely stepped aside as the fighting has picked up, and senior U.S. defense officials believe that the RSF did not welcome an offer by Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group to expand its presence there.

“What we have done in the past and continue to do is to encourage our allies and partners to encourage both parties to move to diplomacy,” Austin told reporters in Djibouti. “We’ll continue to do that. Again, this is a very complex situation, and as long as they’re not coming to the table, there’s no hope to resolve this.”

But the RSF still remains decamped in hundreds if not thousands of homes throughout the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, relying mostly on living off the land to keep the partial occupation of the city going. “The RSF would never be able to hold Khartoum if they take it,” said Joshua Meservey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “They’ll run out of things to plunder.” The group is also being held down by a long logistics trail that snakes hundreds of miles into Darfur, Meservey said.

The absence of Russia, China, and the United States in the conflict hasn’t stopped smaller groups from entering the fray. The cast of characters surrounding both Burhan and Hemeti has gotten more colorful, growing to include loyalists of Omar al-Bashir, who led Sudan for three decades before being deposed in a coup d’état four years ago, one of the first of many that have stretched across the African continent in recent years. While the Wagner Group still has close ties to the RSF despite the declined expansion of the mercenary force there, China, a major oil investor, has played a smaller diplomatic role since the fighting began, and the United States has also taken a backseat to regional powers.

“Other groups are getting into the fight,” the senior U.S. defense official said. “Each side thinks if it keeps fighting, they think they’re going to be the ones to outlast the others.”

After nearly six months of war, Khartoum has been cratered by bombs and relentless shelling, but neither side has gotten the upper hand. And the fighting has sharpened regional rivalries in the nearby Persian Gulf that were already on the rise.

The United Arab Emirates has provided significant military support to Hemeti and the RSF, and it’s given the strongman who controls Sudan’s western half free rein to use Dubai’s banks—mostly outside the reach of U.S. and European sanctions—in exchange for access to Sudan’s gold mines and oil wells. Saudi Arabia has tried to provide a diplomatic counterweight through peace talks in Jeddah, though the negotiating effort, which also includes African Union partners, has largely stalled.

There is frustration on Capitol Hill and among Washington experts that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to end the conflict, with some thinking that the United States should pick a side. Meservey, the Hudson Institute expert, has publicly called for the United States to quietly back Burhan’s military forces via Egypt, which has used airstrikes to try to tip the balance, fearing that RSF control would turn Sudan, a major natural resource power in Africa, into a pro-Russian pariah state.

Publicly, the United States has hoped for Burhan and Hemeti to put down arms and rekindle the long-delayed transition to civilian rule that evaporated amid the sprawling conflict. Privately, U.S. officials believe that the ongoing fighting has lock-bolted the window for talks. It’s clear who will ultimately pay for that.

“There are more and more militias getting involved, but the humanitarian dimension will also get worse,” said Tibor Nagy, the former head of the State Department’s Africa bureau in the Trump administration. “Pick your calamity.”

Correction, Oct. 2, 2023: A previous version of this article incorrectly characterized the areas that the RSF controls in Sudan.