Sudan:
In the Time of Massacres

Nov 10, 2025

This article is translated from the November 7 issue, #2988 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa’s Rapid Support Forces besieged the capital of Sudan’s Darfur region, el-Fasher, for 18 months before entering it on October 26 and massacring its inhabitants.

Sudan has been gripped since April 2023 by a civil war pitting two military leaders against each other for power: Dagalo, nicknamed Hemedti, and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The confrontation between these two predators has already claimed nearly 150,000 lives. Thirteen million men, women, and children—one in four Sudanese—have been forced to flee their homes, hunted down by killers from both sides.

After starving the population of el-Fasher by isolating them from the rest of the country with a sand wall, Hemedti’s men machine-gunned its inhabitants from their vehicles. They raped and murdered women in a maternity ward. They videoed their atrocities and posted them online to terrorize the rest of the country. They engaged in ethnic cleansing, targeting non-Arab populations against whom they wage nonstop war. They are the successors of the former Janjaweed cavalry, militias that ravaged the Darfur region some 20 years ago. Then-dictator Omar al-Bashir relied on them, equipped them with modern weaponry, and at one point deployed them to fight in Yemen.

Al-Burhan was head of the official army in 2019 when a powerful mass movement led to al-Bashir’s overthrow. The movement began as a protest against an IMF-imposed hike in the price of bread. As heads of the two branches of the army, Hemedti and al-Burhan decided to get rid of the embattled dictator rather than be brought down with him. At first, they judged it safer to share the government with selected civilians supposedly representing the mass movement. It was understood that real power remained in their gloved hands. As soon as possible, the two warlords launched a brutal crackdown, drowning the mass mobilization in a bloodbath. After crushing the population, they quickly turned on each other. Since then, the entire country has been experiencing the horrors of war, region by region. Last May, al-Burhan’s forces relentlessly bombarded and recaptured Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.

This horrific conflict would not have lasted so long if it were not fueled by neighboring states, which wage a proxy war at the expense of the Sudanese people. Fighters on both sides have no difficulty rearming themselves with the help of these allies. The United Arab Emirates supplies the Rapid Support Forces with sophisticated anti-aircraft equipment and Chinese-made drones. They outfit their armored vehicles with equipment manufactured by French companies. They also facilitated the arrival of Colombian mercenaries, who fought in el-Fasher. Al-Burhan’s so-called regular army is supplied by Egypt with fighter jets and drones. All the regional powers benefit from gold mined in Sudan.

The major imperialist powers, and especially the U.S., content themselves with issuing platonic calls for peace and enacting embargoes that exist only on paper, while they watch the country sink. This is not indifference or passivity. It is their deliberate policy. They are waiting to see who the victor will be—or the victors, as a new partition of Sudan into two states is by no means out of the question. Similar conflict led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011.

The major powers put no pressure on their allies in the region, who are on both sides, to stop fueling the conflict. The United Arab Emirates and Egypt are among the top clients of Western arms industries. They are much too valuable pawns in the game the U.S. is playing in the region for the U.S. to risk even slightly upsetting them.