Sudan Today: A Country Divided, but Not Yet Broken

Baba Yunus Muhammad

The most dangerous stage of a civil war is not necessarily the moment when one side appears to be losing and another appears to be advancing. Sometimes the greater danger comes afterwards, when the battlefield begins to harden into geography, geography begins to harden into administration, and administration begins to acquire the appearance of permanence.

Sudan may now be entering such a moment. The Sudanese Armed Forces have succeeded in a remarkable reversal of fortunes. After losing control of Khartoum in the early stages of the war, the army has recaptured the capital and consolidated much of northern, eastern and central Sudan. The achievement is strategically important. Khartoum is not simply another city. It is the political and institutional heart of the Sudanese state, and its recovery has strengthened the army’s claim to represent national sovereignty. But the recovery of a capital is not the recovery of a country. That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

The Rapid Support Forces remain deeply entrenched across much of Darfur and continue to exert substantial influence across parts of Kordofan. The fighting has increasingly moved towards the geographical center of Sudan, particularly the Kordofan region, while Blue Nile has also emerged as another contested theatre. Recent fighting around North Kordofan demonstrates that the war has entered a new phase in which the question is not simply who controls individual towns, but whether either side can establish a continuous and sustainable territorial sphere of influence.

This is why El Obeid has assumed such importance. Situated at the crossroads between the central and western parts of the country, El Obeid is more than a military objective. Its strategic importance lies in its position within Sudan’s transportation, commercial and humanitarian geography. Control of the city and the routes around it could affect the ability of the RSF to connect its western territories with the central theatre, while also determining whether the army can consolidate the territorial gains it has made further east and north.

The intensity of the fighting around the city is therefore a warning about the direction of the war. In August, RSF attacks and mobilizations around North Kordofan continued, while civilians were being displaced from surrounding villages. The United Nations has warned that the encirclement of El Obeid is deepening humanitarian pressures, while recent reports describe repeated attacks and deteriorating conditions around the city. The struggle for Kordofan may consequently become one of the defining battles of the next phase of the war. Yet even this military interpretation does not fully capture the danger facing Sudan. The deeper problem is that the country is beginning to develop the characteristics of two states without having formally become two states.

That process is already visible. The army-aligned authorities have established themselves in the east, while the RSF and its allies have established a rival administration centred on Nyala in South Darfur. The latter has moved beyond rhetoric into the construction of administrative institutions, including ministries, judicial structures and financial arrangements. In June, the RSF-backed administration appointed a former governor of Sudan’s central bank to head a parallel central bank structure in Nyala. It has also discussed monetary regulation and currency arrangements for the territories under its influence.

This development deserves far more attention than it has received. Partition does not always begin with a declaration of independence. Sometimes it begins quietly, through the creation of parallel institutions.

First there are two administrations. Then two security systems. Then separate taxation and commercial networks. Then separate financial institutions and currencies. Eventually, populations begin to organize their daily lives around the authority that actually controls the territory in which they live. At that point, the political fiction of national unity may remain intact while the practical reality of the state has already begun to fracture.

This is perhaps Sudan’s greatest strategic danger. The country could remain internationally recognized as one Sudan while increasingly functioning as several Sudans. That would be extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

Darfur makes this danger particularly acute. The region has long carried the historical memory of Sudan’s marginalization, militarization and ethnic conflict. The RSF’s capture of El Fasher in October 2025 transformed the military map and strengthened its hold over much of Darfur. It also created the possibility that the region could become the territorial and political foundation of a de facto autonomous western Sudan.

But Darfur cannot be understood simply as an RSF stronghold. It is a region of communities, ethnicities, historical grievances and competing armed interests. Nor is the RSF itself a completely coherent political organization. Like the SAF, it depends upon alliances and affiliated forces whose interests do not always coincide perfectly with those of the central leadership. The fragmentation of command and the reliance of both camps on allied armed groups make the eventual political settlement even more complicated.

This is why the language of “victory” can be misleading. The SAF has important advantages. It controls Khartoum and much of the country’s eastern and northern territory. It retains the formal institutions of the Sudanese state and enjoys the advantages that come with being recognised internationally as the national army and the principal state authority.

But the RSF retains substantial territorial depth in Darfur, significant military resources and networks that extend beyond the immediate battlefield. Its survival after losing important positions demonstrates that territorial setbacks do not necessarily translate into strategic collapse.

The result is neither victory nor defeat. It is attrition. And attrition is often the most expensive form of war because it consumes the country while leaving the principal protagonists sufficiently intact to continue fighting.

The Sudanese people pay the price. The numbers are staggering, although even the numbers must be treated cautiously because the war has made reliable reporting extraordinarily difficult. Between January 2024 and April 2026, ACLED recorded 10,749 organised political-violence events and 42,346 combined civilian and combatant fatalities. It separately recorded 14,563 fatalities from incidents specifically targeting civilians. ACLED itself describes these figures as conservative estimates.

But statistics can become dangerous when they become too familiar. Forty thousand deaths can be read as a number. Forty thousand individual lives cannot. Behind every death is a family. Behind every displaced family is a destroyed home, interrupted education, abandoned livelihood and broken social network. Behind every destroyed community lies an economic relationship that may have taken generations to build. This is why the humanitarian crisis cannot be treated as an unfortunate side effect of the military struggle.

It is the military struggle. A farmer who cannot cultivate his land is part of the economic consequences of the war. A trader who cannot move goods is part of the war. A child who cannot attend school is part of the war. A hospital without medicines is part of the war. A family that abandons its ancestral home and crosses a border is part of the war. War destroys economies long before economists begin calculating reconstruction costs.

Sudan’s economic geography is already being dismantled. The country’s internal markets have been disrupted. Roads and transport corridors have become military assets. Agricultural production has been interrupted. Financial institutions have been displaced or divided. Trade is increasingly shaped by security considerations rather than commercial efficiency. Gold and other valuable commodities move through competing networks, while millions of people have been uprooted from the places where they produced, traded and consumed.

The danger is therefore not simply that Sudan will emerge from the war poorer. It is that Sudan may emerge economically fragmented. A national economy can be reconstructed. Regional war economies are much harder to dismantle because they create interests that depend upon continued fragmentation. Once commanders, traders, smugglers, local authorities and armed groups begin making money from the war, peace itself becomes an economic threat to those who have learned to profit from disorder.

This is one of the least understood dimensions of the Sudanese crisis. The war has created not only political interests in continued conflict but economic interests as well. That means that any serious peace settlement must eventually confront the war economy itself.

A ceasefire alone will not be enough. Indeed, Sudan’s history since April 2023 demonstrates the weakness of ceasefires that are not connected to a larger political settlement. International and regional initiatives have repeatedly attempted to halt the fighting, but negotiations have struggled against mutual distrust, violations, competing mediation tracks and the unwillingness of the combatants to surrender the advantages they believe continued fighting may deliver.

The lesson is becoming increasingly clear. Sudan does not suffer from a shortage of peace proposals. It suffers from a shortage of political conditions under which the protagonists believe peace is preferable to war. That is a much more difficult problem. The generals must eventually reach the conclusion that another military offensive will not produce the decisive victory they seek, while the cost of continuing the war will become greater than the concessions required for a settlement.

But that calculation cannot be left entirely to the battlefield. The international community has a responsibility to change the incentives. The first requirement must be an immediate and genuinely monitored humanitarian cessation of hostilities. Not another vague declaration that allows the combatants to interpret the agreement according to convenience, but an arrangement linked to verification, humanitarian access and consequences for violations.

That humanitarian pause should then become the bridge towards a broader cessation of hostilities. The next step must be the withdrawal of heavy weapons and armed formations from major civilian centres and humanitarian corridors. Sudan’s cities cannot continue to function as battlefields while the world waits for the combatants to reach a political understanding. But military disengagement by itself would still leave the central political question unresolved.

Who governs Sudan? The answer cannot ultimately be determined by whichever armed group happens to control the largest territory at a particular moment. Sudan needs a political transition in which civilian authority is restored and the country moves towards legitimate constitutional government. The objective cannot simply be to replace one military-dominated arrangement with another. Nor can a peace agreement become a mechanism for dividing state power between armed factions according to their battlefield strength. Sudan needs something more difficult and more fundamental: the rebuilding of a national political order in which the armed forces are instruments of the state rather than substitutes for the state. That means security-sector reform will eventually become unavoidable.

The existence of multiple armed centres of power is not compatible with a stable Sudan. But the integration of forces cannot be approached as a technical exercise in merging uniforms and command structures. It must be part of a broader political settlement that establishes civilian supremacy, professional military institutions and a clear constitutional framework for the security sector. The same principle must apply to the economy. A post-war Sudan cannot simply pour reconstruction money into the same structures that helped sustain the conflict.

The country’s reconstruction must be designed to reconnect its regions economically. Roads, railways, agricultural corridors, energy infrastructure, ports, telecommunications, health facilities and financial systems must be treated not merely as reconstruction projects but as instruments of national reunification.

This is where the international community could make an extraordinary difference. Instead of waiting until peace arrives before discussing reconstruction, it should begin preparing a Sudan Reconstruction Compact now. Such a compact could establish the framework for restoring infrastructure, agriculture, healthcare, education, financial institutions and internal trade once a credible political settlement is reached.

The objective should be clear: make peace economically more valuable than war. That may ultimately be more powerful than another declaration from another diplomatic conference.

There is also the question of accountability. Sudan cannot build a durable peace by pretending that atrocities did not occur. Civilians have been subjected to killings, sexual violence, displacement, looting and attacks on civilian infrastructure. Both major sides and allied armed groups have been accused of serious violations. Any settlement that simply grants blanket impunity to perpetrators risks planting the seeds of the next conflict.

Accountability therefore has to be part of the peace architecture, even if justice must be sequenced carefully to prevent it from becoming an obstacle to an immediate cessation of violence.

There is a difficult balance to strike. Peace cannot mean impunity. But justice must not become an excuse for postponing peace. Sudan needs both. Most importantly, Sudanese civilians must return to the centre of the process.

Too much of the diplomatic conversation has been conducted around generals, armed groups, foreign governments and geopolitical interests. Yet Sudan does not belong to its generals. It belongs to its people.

The Sudanese civilian movement that existed before the war represented a remarkable reservoir of political imagination. Its destruction or marginalization should not be allowed to become one of the war’s permanent consequences.

A future Sudan cannot simply be negotiated between men with guns. It must eventually be constructed with the participation of those who have paid the highest price for the war. That is why the ultimate question is not whether the SAF can retake more territory, or whether the RSF can hold Darfur and break through Kordofan.

The ultimate question is whether Sudan can still be imagined as a single political community. The answer, despite everything, should be yes. Sudan is divided, but it is not yet broken beyond repair.

Its institutions have been damaged. Its economy has been devastated. Its cities have been scarred. Millions have been displaced. Its social fabric has been torn by violence and distrust. Yet the idea of Sudan as a shared national home has not disappeared.

That idea must now become the foundation of the peace process. The international community should therefore stop measuring success merely by the number of ceasefire declarations issued or diplomatic meetings convened. Success should be measured by whether the guns become silent, whether civilians can return home, whether markets reopen, whether farmers can cultivate their land, whether children can return to school and whether Sudan’s regions can once again trade with one another without passing through the logic of war.

The choice before Sudan is becoming stark. It can continue down the path of military exhaustion, territorial fragmentation and parallel institutions until partition becomes a practical reality even if nobody formally declares it. Or it can begin the much harder journey towards rebuilding a national state.

That journey will not begin with another slogan. It will begin when the principal actors, Sudan’s neighbors and the wider international community accept a simple truth: there will be no military solution capable of restoring the Sudan that existed before the war.

The country that emerges from this conflict will have to be rebuilt politically, economically and morally. And the longer that rebuilding is postponed, the more difficult it will become. Sudan therefore needs more than peace. It needs a settlement capable of making peace endure.

That means a humanitarian truce, a monitored cessation of hostilities, civilian protection, withdrawal from population centres, humanitarian access, negotiated security arrangements, dismantling the war economy, accountability for atrocities, restoration of civilian political authority, unified national security institutions and, ultimately, a reconstruction compact capable of reconnecting the country economically.

The objective should not be to determine which armed faction deserves to inherit Sudan. The objective should be to ensure that Sudan itself survives to inherit its own future. That is the real meaning of ending this war.

Baba Yunus Muhammad is President of the Africa Islamic Economic Forum (AFRIEF), an intellectual, writer and policy advocate whose work spans Islamic economics, governance, political thought and ethical development. His writings focus particularly on Africa, the Muslim world and the relationship between leadership, economic justice and civilizational renewal. He has engaged with public affairs and political leadership for several decades.