Sudan's Two Generals Are Burning the Country While Foreign Patrons Pay

How many more drone strikes will it take before we stop calling this a "conflict"? Reports from Abyei say a drone strike has killed 153 people. The figure is still unverified, and we will not inflate it, but even the possibility should stop us cold. Abyei is a border region that has already seen too much blood. Now the sky itself is a weapon over people who have nowhere left to run.

Since 15 April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have been fighting a war that neither side can justify to a single mother searching for her child in the rubble. The UN estimates that more than 12 million people have been displaced, making Sudan one of the largest displacement crises on Earth. Those are not abstractions. They are families who fled Khartoum with a plastic bag of clothes, who walked for days toward a border that may not open, and who now live in camps where the water is contaminated and the children are dying of diseases that a functioning state would have prevented.

The pattern of atrocity is documented, not rumored. UN fact-finding mission reports and monitoring bodies have recorded killings, sexual violence, ethnically targeted attacks, and the systematic looting of homes and hospitals. When El Fasher fell to the RSF in late October 2025, reports described mass killings in the city and the flight of tens of thousands of people along desert roads. Both armies have been accused of war crimes. Both generals have treated civilians as collateral in a fight over power, land, and gold.

Here is what must be said plainly: this war did not start on its own. Investigations by Amnesty International and reporting by UN experts have pointed to weapons and logistics pipelines that run through the United Arab Emirates to the RSF, a claim the UAE denies. On the army side, Turkish and Iranian drones have been used in strikes that killed civilians, and Egypt has been a significant military backer of the SAF. Russia's Wagner Group has been linked by reporting to gold extraction in Sudan, a trade in which the mineral pays for the violence. Each of these outside powers speaks the language of stability and partnership. Each of them has, in practice, helped to make Sudan less stable and more deadly. You cannot pour fuel on a fire and then sell firefighting services.

We have seen this script before. Across the Sahel, the Horn, and Central Africa, foreign powers arrive offering weapons, security contracts, mining deals, and "development," and the people who pay are always the same: the poor, the displaced, the young men conscripted into militias, and the women who carry the weight of families with no men left. The new scramble for Africa has different flags than the old one, but the logic is the same. Sovereignty is treated as a commodity, and governance as an obstacle.

Sudan also carries a painful lesson in what happens when the democratic dream is betrayed. In 2019, millions of Sudanese, many of them young women and professionals, filled the streets and forced the removal of Omar al-Bashir. They built civilian institutions and negotiated a transition. Then, in 2021, the generals who had promised to protect that transition seized power. Burhan and Hemedti shared the coup. They were partners in dismantling the civilian future, and when they fell out over who would control the army and the gold, they turned their guns on each other and on the country. The lesson for every African is simple: a military that answers to no civilian authority will eventually answer to whoever pays the most.

So what must be done? First, the African Union must stop hiding behind diplomatic language. It suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, but suspension is not a strategy. The AU should lead a credible, time-bound peace process that puts civilians at the center, not the generals' bargaining table. Second, the UN Security Council must enforce the arms embargo it has already imposed on Darfur and expand it to every supplier, state or private, that sends weapons, drones, or financing into this war. Sanctions should follow the money, including gold networks and shell companies. Third, the ICC and national courts should pursue accountability for commanders on both sides, because impunity is the fuel that keeps these wars alive.

Sudan's own civil society has offered a model worth copying. The Emergency Response Rooms, volunteer networks of doctors, engineers, students, and neighbors, have kept clinics open, delivered food, and documented abuses while the state collapsed. They do not need applause from foreign capitals. They need protected humanitarian corridors, direct funding that bypasses corrupt intermediaries, and recognition that they are the closest thing Sudan has to a functioning government. Africa also has proof that better is possible. Botswana built prosperity on mineral wealth by insisting on transparent contracts, independent courts, and accountable institutions. Mauritius shows what open markets and rule of law can produce in a single generation. Senegal, after years of tension, completed a peaceful alternation of power through the ballot box. None of these countries is perfect, but each proves that the path out of tyranny runs through institutions, not through gunfire.

The Cameroon railway story that aired alongside this crisis carries its own message. Ten years after the Eseka derailment killed 79 people, their families are still waiting for an acknowledgment that their pain is real. That is how states treat their citizens when accountability is optional. If a government cannot investigate a train crash and tell grieving families the truth, why should anyone believe it will protect them from a drone?

So here is our demand. We are Africans, and this is our continent, our youth, our future. We demand that the AU name the war crimes, suspend the foreign suppliers feeding this slaughter, and force both generals to the negotiating table with civilians present. We demand that the UN Security Council enforce its embargo with teeth. We demand that every government that sells arms to Port Sudan or Khartoum, and every company that buys Sudanese gold tainted by blood, be exposed and sanctioned. And we demand that Sudanese voices, especially the women and youth who built the 2019 revolution, be heard before another city falls. Silence is not neutrality. In Sudan, silence is the sound of a grave being dug.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24