From Sidecar.
The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019). In the war’s first weeks, the RSF overran much of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, including the Presidential Palace. Initially constructed in 1825, during the Turkish-Egyptian colonisation of Sudan, the palace was the headquarters of an imperial regime intent on enslaving and plundering the rest of the country. The last governor of Turco-Egyptian Sudan (1820-1885), Charles Gordon, was killed by Mahdist insurgents on the steps of the palace in 1885. Successive regimes would retain both the exploitative tendencies of the Turco-Egyptian colonialists, and their obsession with the Presidential Palace. After the Mahdists demolished it, the British rebuilt it during their colonial occupation of Sudan (1898-1955). It became the ‘Republican Palace’ after Sudanese independence in 1956, and then – albeit briefly – the ‘People’s Palace’ during the reign of Jafaar Nimeiri (1969-1985). Bashir, who took power in a coup in 1989, ordered the construction of a new palace, next to the old one, built and funded by the Chinese. He didn’t get to stay long in his new abode. A wave of protests in 2018-19, triggered by cuts to grain and fuel subsidies, ended his regime.
A transitional government was established in 2019, which saw civilian politicians uncomfortably share power with the leaders of Sudan’s security services: Abdul Fattah Al Burhan, the chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), was made the head of a Sovereign Council, while Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (also known as Hemedti), the RSF’s leader, became his deputy. The two men soon conspired to push the civilians out of power. In October 2021, I wandered through a Potemkin protest organized outside the palace, masterminded by the security services, which used the astroturfed unrest as a rhetorical justification for an autogolpelater that month. Bashir had multiplied his security services as a means of coup-proofing his regime, making sure that no single organ was strong enough to seize power. Each had its own economic empire, which included construction, real estate and banks. It was perhaps inevitable that the two most powerful of the Hydra’s heads, the RSF and the Sudanese army, would turn on each other and compete for control of the capital. After almost two years of conflict, on 21 March 2025, the Sudanese army finally retook the Presidential Palace, and pushed the RSF out of almost all of Khartoum. Jubilant soldiers posed in front of the ruined palace, its walls pockmarked by bullet holes. Two weeks ago, one European diplomat asked me expectantly: does this mean the war is over?
The palace, like Sudanese sovereignty, now lies empty. What began as a battle to control the state has morphed into a war that has no clear end in sight. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army were initially weak military actors without broad social bases. They have waged war in the manner of their mentor, Bashir, who played ethnic groups against each other, and outsourced his counterinsurgency campaigns to militia forces. Both the RSF and the army have created unruly coalitions of communitarian self-defence forces and mercenary fighters. The local dynamics set in motion by this strategy have become disarticulated from the fight for control of the Sudanese state. For the young Hamar and Misseriya men fighting in the Kordofan region of southern Sudan, struggles over land and resources have become existential, and left wounds that a national-level ceasefire could not heal, were one ever to be agreed. A struggle for control of the palace has ignited a hundred wars across the country.
The centrifugal fragmentation of Sudan’s conflict has been funded by regional actors, for whom land in Kordofan is not a heimat but a business opportunity. The RSF’s major backer is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which hopes to augment its domination of Sudan’s lucrative gold trade with the acquisition of a port on the Red Sea, and control of the country’s rich agricultural land. Behind the Sudanese army stands its longstanding supporter, Egypt, along with a motley crew composed of Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. International diplomatic efforts to end Sudan’s civil war start from a presumption that the nations involved would prefer a stable, sovereign Sudan, with a single government. This is not necessarily the case. For those arming Sudan’s belligerents, war can bring with it as many opportunities for profit as peace, and it might be easier to exert influence over a fractured, broken Sudan. Sovereignty may not return to the palace.
Joshua Craze is a writer. He is finishing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions about war and bureaucracy in Sudan and South Sudan.