Sudan military coup and descent into civil war

Coup rule turned security rivalry into nationwide war

By October 2021 the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces had jointly helped overturn civilian-led politics, long before their commanders openly fought each other. On 25 October 2021, SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan declared a state of emergency and dissolved transitional institutions as soldiers arrested Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other civilian officials. His claim that military intervention would prevent instability did not restore the power-sharing arrangement demanded after Omar al-Bashir's removal in April 2019. Mass protests against the coup followed in late 2021. This rupture stripped civilian politicians of the leverage needed to oversee security-sector restructuring and entrenched rival armed organisations inside the state. The later Sudan civil war therefore grew from a failed transition as well as an immediate contest for command.

The army's institutional history explains why Burhan could not simply order the paramilitary RSF to disappear. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, headed a force whose personnel, finances and patronage networks were distinct from SAF. A Cambridge University Press study published on 22 May 2023 traced the army's repeated use of security partnerships and subsequent struggles against competitors from earlier regimes through the December 2018 uprising and October 2021 coup. The combination of army dominance in formal institutions and RSF coercive autonomy undermined pledges that a unified civilian-supervised security apparatus would emerge. The Burhan–SAF struggle and Hemedti–RSF war became opposing sides of a crisis that was already harming protesters and democratic institutions.

On 15 April 2023 fighting erupted in Khartoum and other locations as SAF and RSF disputed military deployments and the timetable for absorbing the RSF into the regular armed forces. Residents confronted gunfire, shelling and shortages of food, water and medical attention in densely populated neighbourhoods. The war rapidly spread beyond the capital, including into Darfur, where earlier violence and displacement made communities especially vulnerable. Military leaders who had promised stability in October 2021 were now directing or commanding the forces devastating civilian communities. The dispute over incorporation into a single chain of command mattered because neither side accepted institutional subordination that threatened its strategic position.

The political sequence contains distinct failures: the 2019 ouster of Bashir, the 2019 civilian–military transitional agreement, the 2020 Juba peace deal, the October 2021 military seizure of power, the subsequent protest repression and the April 2023 open war. Each event altered the balance among civilian coalitions, army officers, paramilitaries and regional armed movements. It would be inaccurate to attribute the entire collapse to ethnic or tribal grievances alone. Leadership choices, economic interests attached to armed organisations and the absence of an enforceable civilian settlement materially shaped the escalation. The humanitarian dimension is captured by humanitarian access: siege conditions, insecurity on roads and attacks around hospitals translated battlefield decisions into preventable deprivation. The 2023 fighting was not a sudden natural disaster but the violent outcome of unresolved competition between two armed centres of power which had already overridden Sudanese voters' demand for civilian authority.