Sudan is Dystopia Now

In July 2024 I wrote two posts about Sudan (see here and here). The war had already run more than a year. Khartoum was being destroyed. Darfur was returning to the ethnic killing that made its name infamous twenty years ago. Millions displaced. Hunger spreading. Hospitals collapsing. The death estimate then: somewhere around 13,000 to 15,000, mostly civilians.

Almost no one in the West was talking about it. Still isn't. Yet it was already one of the worst situations on earth.

Ukraine became a war of attrition. Gaza took the headlines. Then the Israeli-US-Iran war. Israel has a special relationship with America. Sudan does not. South Sudan does not. Chad does not. Ethiopia does not. Some places become catastrophe as an ongoing fact rather than an event. Nobody denies it's happening. They just don't look.

I read a piece this morning titled "Sudan: The Deadliest War You're Not Hearing About." A little dramatic for my taste. But the point stands. Sudan's war isn't hidden. It's just not urgent. I was already writing about the subject. I have my eye on Sudan.

The numbers have gone ridiculous. The UN says 33.7 million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance in 2026. Over 9 million displaced inside the country. Almost 19.5 million facing crisis-level hunger or worse earlier this year. Fourteen areas in Darfur and Kordofan now at risk of famine. But, by either God or Allah, the war will go on.

It has changed since I last wrote. Things have intensified in ways I did not foresee. It spread into a regional struggle. Became a drone war. And the longer I've looked at it, the more it seems necessary to go back — before 2023, before my own posts, before Bashir even fell.

This isn't two generals fighting in Khartoum in April 2023. That's just the latest release of an old Sudanese and, indeed, East African system.

When I say Sudan here, I mean Sudan and South Sudan both. The old Sudanese world. Split formally in 2011. Never split in history, armed factions, borderlands, or the political habits that keep producing wars.

The turning point was supposed to be the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 — ending the Second Civil War, which began in 1983 after the earlier Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 fell apart.

The first agreement gave the south a measure of autonomy. Not paradise. Better than war. Then Khartoum broke down the southern regional system, imposed Islamic law, and started treating southern oil as northern property.

The second war ran more than twenty years. The Sudanese government, the SPLA, southern militias, regional commanders, ethnic factions, oil fields, foreign powers, armed groups for hire. The 2005 agreement was meant to end the war, share the oil, build a national settlement, and give the south a referendum after six years.

It ended the war between Khartoum and the south. That's all it ended.

South Sudan became independent in 2011. Got most of the oil. Sudan kept the pipelines, the refineries, Port Sudan on the Red Sea. South Sudan could pump it. Sudan controlled the only route it could travel.

Oil is worthless without a port.

South Sudan was landlocked, dependent on infrastructure running north through a country that had lost the oil but kept the leverage. Two states, one commercial relationship neither could escape.

The old border disputes never left either. Abyei. South Kordofan. Blue Nile. Communities that fought with the SPLA but stayed inside Sudan when the south departed. Commanders, militias, clan loyalties, smuggling routes, cattle routes, men who'd learned an armed following was a political asset.

South Sudan inherited the old SPLA system — flag, capital, recognition, oil revenue, and regional commanders who'd learned that power comes from holding armed constituencies together through patronage. Two years after independence, it had its own civil war.

Sudan stayed under Bashir. Darfur had been burning since 2003. The Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile were never resolved. Bashir never built a state that could absorb these conflicts. He did what leaders in this system always do. He armed clients.

That's how the Janjaweed became the Rapid Support Forces.

Recruited from Arab pastoralist communities in Darfur and Kordofan. Useful to Khartoum because they knew the terrain and could do what the formal army preferred not to have its name attached to. Legal status by 2014. Weapons, money, protection, then independent wealth — gold, smuggling, mercenary work in Yemen and Libya. Its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemedti — became one of the most powerful men in Sudan.

Sudan and South Sudan don't have states with a stable monopoly on violence occasionally troubled by rebels. The state itself keeps relying on local militias, ethnic allies, and men with their own followers and their own ambitions.

The tribes have changed names, religions, rulers, alliances, territories, over centuries. The psychology underneath hasn't. Kinship. Ethnicity. Clan. Faction. Inherited grievance. Armed protection. Reciprocal obligation. All of it more immediately real than distant government or abstract citizenship.

These are modern states on paper. Ministries, flags, airports, oil fields, universities, banks, diplomats, mobile phones, now drones. But the deeper political culture runs older than any of that. The state stays thinner than the loyalties beneath it. Citizenship is less real than belonging. Law is weaker than the man who controls the road.

That's why 2005 was never going to settle the whole thing. It settled a war. It didn't replace the loyalties that organize life beneath the state.

Then Bashir fell in 2019.

For a moment Sudan looked like it might escape its own history. Millions protested for civilian government. They wanted the military in the barracks. Something bigger than generals, Islamist networks, and militia commanders trading power among themselves.

But Burhan remained. Hemedti remained. The SAF remained. The RSF remained.

They shared power for a while. Then jointly killed the civilian transition in 2021. In April 2023 the two armed institutions turned on each other.

This isn't a government putting down an insurgency. It's two claimants to the same state, fighting over which one gets to be it. The SAF and the RSF both grew out of the same apparatus — one the formal inheritor, one the paramilitary Bashir built and armed himself. Older rebel factions, SPLM-N pieces among them, have folded in on one side or the other depending on grievance and opportunity, not on any government/rebel line. And none of it respects the border drawn in 2011. Sudanese and South Sudanese fighters cross it freely, because the loyalties underneath never recognized the partition to begin with.

That was the war I wrote about in 2024. The RSF had the momentum then. Most of Khartoum, spreading across central and western Sudan. The SAF had air power, artillery, the state's name, the ability to bomb. The RSF had mobility, technicals, gold money, and a willingness to treat whole communities as obstacles.

The SAF counteroffensive started in September 2024. By spring 2025 it had retaken Khartoum and Omdurman. A real reversal. The army looked like it was recovering the country's center.

But the RSF wasn't destroyed. It moved west, dug into Darfur, tightened the siege of El Fasher — the last major Darfur city still held by the SAF — and took it in October 2025 after roughly eighteen months. Another wave of atrocities came with it.

The war shifted again. Khartoum stopped being the center. Kordofan became the hinge — El Obeid, Dilling, Kadugli, Blue Nile. The SAF holds most of the north, east, and the Nile corridor. The RSF holds Darfur and is pressing into Kordofan. This is starting to look less like a war one side wins and more like a partition enforced by whoever's holding the ground.

Here's where Ethiopia matters. The oil economy explains why Sudan and South Sudan stay locked together. The Ethiopian frontier explains why none of this stays a closed Sudanese affair.

Blue Nile runs along that border. So does South Sudan's northeastern corner. Ethnic communities, refugees, cattle routes, smugglers, militias, and rebel networks that predate the 2011 split all cross it freely.

In February, Reuters reported a secret camp in Ethiopia's Benishangul-Gumuz region, near the border, training thousands of fighters for the RSF. Satellite imagery, Ethiopian security material, diplomatic reporting. Recruits reportedly included Ethiopians, Sudanese, South Sudanese, some allegedly linked to the SPLM-N. Reuters couldn't verify every claim about outside financing, and the UAE denied involvement. Verify what you can. The larger point holds regardless: Sudan's war is pulling in neighboring territory, neighboring people, regional supply lines, outside patrons.

The old Sudanese war system was never contained by a national border. It ran through Darfur and Chad, Blue Nile and Ethiopia, South Sudan, Libyan supply lines, gold routes, refugee camps, and the competition among regional governments that has always used this place as a proxy floor.

In June, Sudan War Monitor reported the RSF had acquired new armored vehicles and a Chinese-designed BZK-005 drone, identified at Nyala airport by Yale researchers and military analysts. Wingspan about nineteen meters. Range roughly 2,400 kilometers. Payload up to 370 kilograms. Built for surveillance and attack. The RSF used to fly smaller drones. This is a different order of thing.

The SAF has its own foreign-backed drones, air defenses, supply relationships. Both sides fly commercial quadcopters for short-range strikes. Both sides now reach much farther than that.

Both sides are also still learning how to use what they have. Civilians are part of that learning curve.

Some of it is collateral in the old sense — a convoy or fuel depot or headquarters gets hit, and people live near those things. In a poor, crowded, displaced country, military targets and civilian life sit on top of each other.

But that's not the whole story.

Markets. Hospitals. Power plants. Fuel facilities. Water systems. Neighborhoods. All of it is target set now. Wreck the infrastructure and an area becomes harder to supply, harder to govern, harder to defend, harder to live in. The goal isn't just killing soldiers. It's weakening the social world on the other side.

The RSF's 2025 strikes on Port Sudan showed exactly what that means. Wartime capital. Logistics hub. Main port. Principal working airport. Central aid entry point. Hit anyway — fuel storage, power, the airport, military sites. A war that started as a fight for Khartoum reached the Red Sea coast and the systems keeping eastern Sudan alive.

The old structure holds. Regional loyalties. Armed patrons. Ethnic factions. Local commanders. Foreign sponsors. Gold. Smuggling. Border crossings. Bargains. Betrayals. Old rivalries in new uniforms. The weapons are new. The condition isn't.

No one has a reliable count of the dead. The country's too broken, the records too incomplete, the indirect deaths too hard to trace. Sudan War Monitor puts direct deaths at a minimum of 100,000 since 2023, with 150,000 to 200,000 plausible. Its own sourcing cites a mortality study estimating more than 61,000 deaths from all causes in Khartoum State alone between April 2023 and June 2024 — over 26,000 of those from intentional injury. One state. Fourteen months.

The modern chronology usually starts in 1955, before independence. That's seventy years of recurring war, repression, military rule, ethnic conflict, hunger, displacement, and settlements that settle less than they promise.

But the condition goes back further than 1955.

This region has lived through empire, slave-raiding economies, conquest, colonial rule, religious war, and distant centers trying to command peoples organized around smaller, closer worlds. The tribes weren't the same a thousand years ago. The borders didn't exist. Sudan and South Sudan didn't exist. The political condition would still be recognizable. Local belonging. Armed protection. Power thinning out with distance from the center. A ruler cutting deals with local strongmen because there was no other way to govern the edges.

Famine belongs to that older condition too. Humanity hasn't eliminated hunger. Drought, war, and bad government can still manufacture it almost anywhere. Most of the world just built enough surplus, transport, and state capacity to keep famine from being ordinary. The Sudan region is still a place where that can be undone.

Farmers flee. Crops don't get planted. Livestock gets stolen or killed. Roads become checkpoints. Markets collapse. Aid gets blocked or looted. A survivable drought becomes a famine. Not because there's no food anywhere. Because war keeps breaking the systems that grow it, move it, and get it to people.

That's not a judgment on the people living it. It's just their condition. It's incredible, honestly — generations of people making a living inside all this, surviving it, unless the country forces them out entirely.

A report tells you millions displaced, famine spreading, hundreds of thousands dead, cities wrecked, hospitals gone, aid routes cut. Reads like the end of ordinary life.

It isn't. Not for everybody.

Tens of millions still wake up in the morning. Sell things. Find water. Fix machinery. Tend animals. Teach children. Make a little money. Visit relatives. Get married. Have babies. Argue with friends. Worry about school. Make plans that may or may not survive the week.

Human life keeps reproducing itself inside conditions that should make it impossible. Not heroically, every second. Just ordinarily.

That's what makes it almost incomprehensible.

People write dystopian novels — take one or two features of collapse and inflate them into a clean nightmare. Sudan is already there, except nobody wrote it clean. Not one totalitarian state, one ideology, one apocalypse. Hunger, militia rule, foreign patrons, collapsing cities, drones, tribal war, borderland armies, displaced families, black markets — and people still trying to live normal lives inside every bit of it.

Talk about a miracle.