Abdel Fattah al-Burhan barely gets out of his bunker. The Sudanese president is losing in the war against paramilitary general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. The vast majority of the capital Khartoum is already in the hands of his Rapid Support Forces (RSF). “But even if the RSF fighters win, they will not rule,” said former foreign minister Omer Ismail. “They have lost all their legitimacy and completely alienated the citizens from them through all the looting, murder and rape,” said Ismail, visiting the only independent Sudanese radio station, Dabanga, which broadcasts from Amsterdam.
In the war of destruction between the generals, the civilians are sidelined. Still, the Sudanese will see opportunities to come up with an alternative government, as neither side seems to be able to control the country, says Ismail, who was a minister under Prime Minister Addalla Hamdok from 2020 to 2021. “Eventually there will be a ceasefire that will last. And then there must be an alternative to military mismanagement. One of the most important points: an entirely new army.”
“The people must step forward and say, ‘This is our country,'” he continued. Ismail wants to go back to old agreements with the army that the citizens get all executive power during a transitional regime.
The next step must come from the people and not from the army, he believes. But who represents those citizens in polarized Sudan is the question. According to the former minister, civilian groups such as Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), which negotiated with the army about a transfer of power to a civilian regime until the conflict broke out, have the best chance.
Weapon depot
“Burhan is not a strategic leader,” says Ismail. The president is confined to the defense headquarters, which is partly owned by RSF. He also lost control of part of the grounds on which the presidential palace is located. Although the government army has more men and heavy equipment and an air force, many attacks by its forces have failed. Attacks by RSF on al-Yarmouk, a large arms and ammunition depot, and the police headquarters, were successful.
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Ismail mentions Burhan street smart, but he lacks the vision, strategy or diplomatic dexterity necessary to form alliances to win the battle, he says. “That’s not entirely his fault: he inherited a dislocated army from the fundamentalist Muslims who had been in power for 30 years.”
They transformed the national armed forces into an ideological army, intended to spread and strengthen fundamentalist ideas. The morale of the corruption-eaten government army is also low; for many years a position in the army was a way to participate in a commercial network that was more than eighty percent of the national economy. The army was a wing district, no place for professional soldiers. As a result, it now appears, it has hardly any fighting power. “It’s just a military facade,” Ismail said.
How different is that for the paramilitary RSF fighters. When they were not yet included in the government army until 2014, but did cooperate with it, they were deployed as infantry. With that experience and their great fighting spirit, they now dominate the streets of the capital and the government soldiers do not advance one step.
Oil refinery
The RSF fighters also have the upper hand elsewhere in the country. They attacked the strategic city of El Obeid in the south, where there is a large oil refinery and through which there is a pipeline with oil coming from South Sudan. In the western region of Darfur, government soldiers are on the defensive: El Geneina is in the hands of the RSF, the two other regional capitals Nyala and El Fashar are still being fought over.
The battlefield has become even more complex because two rebel groups have also joined the fray: in El Fashar, the fighters of Minni Minawi are taking on the RSF, in the Nuba mountains, the insurgent group of Abdulaziz al-Hilu has taken over government army barracks.
The civilians are trapped and victims of crimes, especially by the RSF. Since the outbreak of war between the two generals became over two million Sudanese displaced. Aid hardly reaches them: both warring parties have confiscated relief goods. The only structures that still function are those of civilian resistance committees: only they succeed in distributing aid.
“We have to go back to basics, with a citizen representation,” says the former minister. “In the beginning, the government will not be inclusive, but we will expand that. For that there has to be trust. But we have the power of the people. You cannot kill all 45 million Sudanese.”