Sudans

Sudan’s collective memory has long carried stories of famine-induced tragedies. Now, as war pushes the country deeper into a catastrophic food crisis, historians and humanitarian activists fear that some of those horrors are being repeated.

The ongoing war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which erupted in April 2023, has plunged the country into one of its worst modern food crises, with conditions deteriorating sharply since 2024.

Sudan has endured severe famines before, often triggered or made worse by drought and other environmental shocks. However, the current hunger crisis, which has triggered famines in Sudan in 2024 and 2025, has been brought on by a man-made factor: war.

Past starvation

One of the earliest recorded major food crises in what is now Sudan occurred in 1684, during the Funj Sultanate. The crisis, which lasted several years, brought severe grain shortages across central Sudan. Historical accounts describe people driven to desperation, and in some cases forced to eat dog meat. The hunger triggered mass displacement, as well as a deadly smallpox outbreak.

Similar climate-driven crises were recorded in 1750 and again between 1835 and 1838 during a period of Ottoman-Egyptian rule, exacerbated by severe drought and low water levels in the River Nile.

The famine most deeply embedded in Sudanese popular memory occurred between 1888 and 1889, during the rule of Khalifa Abdullahi al-Taashi.

Drought, locust infestations and conflict combined to cause widespread hunger and death. Some historical estimates put the death toll at more than one million people, although precise figures from the period are difficult to establish. The crisis was reported to have been so severe that some families shut themselves inside their homes to die rather than going out to beg for food.

Sudan experienced more periods of food shortages during the 20th century. Droughts and poor harvests during the colonial period of the first half of the century forced the authorities at times to import grain from abroad.

Then, in 1984, during the rule of President Jaafar Nimeiri, a devastating drought hit western Sudan, including Darfur and Kordofan, where there were widespread crop and livestock losses, displacing hundreds of thousands of people from rural areas to the capital, Khartoum.

Man-made catastrophe

Unlike many of those historical crises, the current famine is distinctly man-made.

War has disrupted agricultural production and trade, forced farmers to leave their land, and made it difficult to move food and humanitarian aid across the country.

Abdullah al-Tijani, a social historian and humanitarian activist, noted the unprecedented scale of the current disaster.

“Most previous famines were often confined to specific regions, as happened in 1984, or areas in southern Sudan before its secession in [2011], while the capital and major cities continued to have the necessities of life and services,” al-Tijani told Al Jazeera.

This time, he said, hunger and the collapse of basic services have spread across the entire country.

“A comprehensive food crisis has struck the heart of major urban and agricultural centres in the states of Khartoum, Gezira, Sennar, Darfur, and Kordofan, causing millions of citizens to be displaced inside and outside the country,” al-Tijani added.

He pointed to what he described as the “systematic destruction of infrastructure, disruption of large agricultural projects, and targeting of markets, bakeries, and crops, along with disrupting the banking system and communication networks, which isolated entire regions”.

Al-Tijani also cited the “restrictions on humanitarian access and delays in granting transit permits for relief workers”. He accused the warring parties of using control over food supplies as a tool of war, while warning that international funding has fallen short of the size of the crisis.

Lost agricultural potential

The scale of the crisis is stark because of Sudan’s agricultural potential. The country has immense resources, including roughly 200 million acres (81 million hectares) of arable land, abundant water from the Nile, and extensive livestock resources, but Sudan’s potential as a global breadbasket remains unfulfilled.

Mohammed Abdul Rahman, an economic researcher, explained that the current food security crisis reflects a clear development gap, and a longstanding weakness in Sudan’s agricultural sector compounded by war.

“Wars and armed conflicts are among the most influential factors on food production,” Abdul Rahman said, “along with the displacement of farmers from their lands, the absence of political stability and agricultural policies, weak funding and government guarantees, and reliance on traditional farming methods.”

OMDURMAN: For almost a year, Randa al-Mansour, a 31-year-old Sudanese housewife, has relied on solar energy panels installed on the rooftop of her building to survive the recurrent blackouts triggered by the war-torn country’s deteriorating electricity grid.

“We are suffering big time,” said al-Mansour, who lives with her three children in Omdurman, just outside the capital of Khartoum.

“When kids arrive at school in the morning, they find no electricity there, so they are forced to head back home, where there is none either. It is very hard for them to study under such a high temperature.”

The Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been fighting since April 2023, killing at least 59,000 people, though aid groups say the number could be higher, and displacing some 13 million.

The conflict also has strained an already weak power infrastructure, forcing many Sudanese to seek alternative energy sources, especially during scorching summer heat. The United Nations Development Program has estimated the damage inflicted on the electricity grid at $3 billion.

“We resorted to solar energy as a way of adapting to this situation. However, not everyone in Sudan can afford this solution,” said al-Mansour, who supports her family with remittances from her husband working in Saudi Arabia.

In recent months, billboards advertising solar panels, batteries, and inverters have expanded in the capital as more Sudanese consider transitioning to solar energy.

“For a low-income family, installing a solar panel system is a huge sacrifice but an inevitable choice,” said Mohey Eddin Abu-Bark, owner of a solar systems business in Khartoum, adding that a typical household 10-kilowatt solar system costs nearly $5,000.

Manahel Madany, a 43-year-old diabetic civil servant, cannot afford the transition, despite needing steady electricity for her fridge for her insulin.

“Every three to four days, I am forced to throw away all my insulin stock after it goes bad due to heat and power outages,” said Madany.

She lives in a two-bedroom house with her mother and sister in Omdurman, and like many Sudanese, the three are forced to sleep in their house courtyard to escape the searing heat indoors.

“Not all pharmacies can afford to install solar panels for medical storage, and that’s why most medications have become unavailable,” Madany said.

The Sudan Doctors’ Network, which tracks violence across the country, warned that the continued electricity cuts could impact patients in hospitals, especially kidney patients who need constant care.

At least 30% of Sudan’s population has no access to electricity, with rural areas bearing the brunt, according to the World Bank. Conditions in grid-connected urban centers have also deteriorated, with power outages reaching up to 16 hours in many parts of the country in recent months, according to two electricity department officials who spoke to The Associated Press.

Electricity production has dropped from 4,400 megawatts before the war to 1,100 megawatts as many power plants were hit by drones launched by the RSF, while nearly half of Sudan’s best electricity engineers and technicians have also left the country since 2023, the officials said, citing a survey by a local labor union.

The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Sudan has limitless potential to generate solar energy given the long hours of sunshine that often exceed 4,000 hours per year, according to the U.N. However, the high upfront cost of imported solar energy systems and a depreciating local currency derail the transition to clean energy.

Sudan’s army has had a good summer. Last month, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) recaptured several towns along the strategic Export Road, known locally as Sadirat, which connects the central Nile valley to the country’s west, and pushed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into a defensive crouch across much of the centre of the country.

On the back of these gains, SAF leaders are now speaking more confidently of defeating the RSF entirely, rather than merely containing it.

But look east, to Sudan’s Blue Nile state, and the picture inverts. In mid-August, the RSF and its ally, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (led by Abdulaziz al-Hilu), retook Kurmuk and seized Geisan within days, in attacks that Sudanese military sources said were launched from across the border in Ethiopia. Drone attacks on multiple army-controlled cities this month also showed that the RSF’s reach extends well beyond Darfur, its main territorial stronghold.

The lesson of the summer, then, is not that the SAF is on the verge of decisive victory. It is that military victory and political resolution are becoming two very different things. Even a full RSF defeat may not end Sudan’s war so much as fracture it into several smaller conflicts.

A look at the coalitions doing the fighting helps explain why. The anti-RSF coalition is coordinated and led by the SAF, but the army also relies on allied armed movements, including Darfuri factions that signed the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement (JPA). These include Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement, led by Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi. The JPA required their forces to be integrated into Sudan’s military and security services, but they have been reluctant to give up the military autonomy that underpins their political leverage.

Yasser al-Atta, then assistant commander-in-chief and now army chief of staff, announced in March that the army would activate mechanisms to organise and integrate allied irregular groups into the formal military and security services, but little has happened since.

Al-Atta wasn’t even the first to promise to address the problems of the proliferation of weapons and armed groups. Two years earlier, deputy commander-in-chief Shams al-Din Kabbashi told a graduation ceremony for Minni Minnawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement fighters that the army had “begun enacting a law and structures to control the many popular resistance groups”, warning that the array of semi-autonomous militias, tribal coalitions and volunteers backing the SAF’s war efforts, the “popular resistance” as it is called, would “become the next danger if we continue this way”.

More than two years on from Kabbashi’s speech, the underlying problem remains largely unresolved.

Then there is the RSF’s own coalition, which is actively fragmenting. A string of senior figures, al-Nour al-Qubba, al-Savanna, and more recently, the RSF-appointed governor for the Kordofan region, Hamad Khalifa, have defected, amid reports of Saudi financial inducements as well as tribal grievances.

When al-Nour al-Qubba left, he took dozens of combat vehicles and a large contingent of fighters with him. Given that the RSF is a franchise more than a unified fighting force, these defections should worry the SAF as much as they comfort it: defectors often arrive as intact forces loyal to their commanders, not soldiers used to reporting to a chain of command. In a way, the SAF inherits the RSF’s structural weakness with each defection.

Another example is Abu Aqla Keikel, an SAF-trained officer who initially fought on the army’s side after the war erupted in 2023, before defecting to the RSF later that year and then back to the SAF in October 2024. His Sudan Shield Forces remain, in practice, more under his own command than the army’s, even as he appears alongside SAF leadership and Darfuri commanders at recent battlefield-victory photo ops.

Many commanders inside the anti-RSF camp maintain a fairly wide margin of operational independence and consequently their own political calculations. This will become far more apparent once the war ends and there is no longer a common enemy to paper over the differences.

Sudan’s Islamists, meanwhile, occupy a strange position. Brigades like al-Baraa ibn Malik, affiliated with Sudan’s Islamic Movement, which underpinned Omar al-Bashir’s former ruling National Congress Party (NCP), supplied thousands of fighters and were instrumental in retaking Khartoum from the RSF. The United States has sanctioned al-Baraa ibn Malik, while the European Union has sanctioned its leader, al-Misbah Abu Zaid. Amid this international pressure and SAF battlefield gains, some Islamist fighters and leaders have begun pulling back, in what one Sudan Tribune report described as a “tactical withdrawal”. Al-Misbah recently posted that “we have returned to our civilian lives”.

But retreating from the battlefield is not the same as retreating from politics. Ahmed Haroun, chairman of the former ruling NCP, told Reuters news agency last year that the Islamic Movement could support an extended period of army rule, with an eye towards returning to government through “the ballot box”, as Haroun put it.

Indeed, another potential flashpoint for the SAF is that the war has given fighters in Islamist brigades like al-Baraa ibn Malik years of battlefield experience. There is little reason to think fighters who helped recapture the capital will disarm and disband the moment the war is over, at least not without a political settlement that creates a path for demobilisation.

This is the context in which SAF chief and de facto president General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s recently announced national dialogue should be read, less as a comprehensive resolution to the country’s militia problem than as a political process that could convert the army’s wartime alliances into post-war influence.

Burhan has explicitly ruled out the return of RSF leaders to power, promising there would be no “incomplete peace” that allowed Hemedti or other RSF leaders back into government. Given the RSF’s abysmal human rights record during the war, the exclusion is defensible, but the broader armed-group problem remains unresolved: namely, how the RSF’s remaining forces would actually be dismantled or integrated, particularly in Darfur, and how the SAF’s own allied militias would be brought under a single chain of command once the shooting slows down.

Another structural problem that is older than this war reinforces why claims of total victory remain elusive. The Sudanese army has long struggled to project sustained power across the country’s peripheries. Under Omar al-Bashir, the government relied on Janjaweed militias to help the army fight the rebellion in Darfur. In 2013, many Janjaweed fighters were brought into the newly created RSF.

There is little reason to think a hollowed-out, cash-poor SAF, dependent on volunteer recruits, Islamist militias and Juba Peace Agreement signatory forces, can now succeed where the pre-war state repeatedly struggled: in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France, where the RSF continues to use cross-border supply routes.

Even if the RSF is somehow eventually broken, its weapons and its fighters will not simply disappear. They will pass to whichever political entrepreneur is best positioned to pick them up. Meanwhile, in Khartoum, the questions of the day after will pry open conflicts that the war has, for now, kept closed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Sudan’s war is showing signs of a changing dynamic. Sudanese armed forces (SAF) have made a series of gains in North Kordofan state; the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is facing a new wave of defections; and army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is opening a political track while insisting the military campaign will continue.

Army advances are putting pressure on RSF supply lines; defections are raising questions about the force’s cohesion; and al-Burhan, who also heads the Transitional Sovereignty Council, is seeking to shape a political process from a position strengthened by developments on the battlefield.

But the wider battlefield remains contested. Together, the military pressure, defections and political outreach point to a potentially important shift: battlefield developments may be starting to affect the political balance.

What has the army gained?

The clearest recent gains have come in North Kordofan, a state in central Sudan that links the capital, Khartoum, with the country’s western regions.

In late July, the army announced that it had retaken Bara, Jabra al-Sheikh and Umm Sayala, along with other positions in the state. Al Jazeera reported that the advances also secured the national Exports Road, a key route linking Khartoum, through Omdurman, with el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan.

The gains do not amount to control of the wider Kordofan region. But they have significance beyond the territory captured.

The army’s control of the Exports Road has strengthened its position in North Kordofan and added pressure on RSF supply lines. Al Jazeera reported on August 21 that the army was continuing efforts to cut those supply lines as fighting expanded across Kordofan, Darfur and the Blue Nile region.

What do the RSF defections mean?

The battlefield pressure has coincided with a marked increase in defections from the RSF.

On August 20, the army announced that about 318 people, including four officers, had joined its ranks, arriving in Northern state in about 50 combat vehicles before moving to Omdurman. Al Jazeera also reported separate groups from Kordofan and Khartoum, including 270 people, among them 21 field commanders, as well as 45 fighters and commanders from the Bara area who surrendered to the army.

The numbers alone do not tell the story. The timing does.

Al Jazeera’s August 21 analysis links the growing defections to several factors, including battlefield developments, internal problems within the RSF, social and tribal dynamics, and pressure created by the army’s advances and efforts to disrupt RSF supply lines. It also notes that the trend does not by itself mean the RSF is collapsing.

If the trend continues, it could become increasingly significant, particularly if more commanders and fighters conclude that the battlefield balance is shifting against the RSF.

For now, the more cautious conclusion is that battlefield pressure may be affecting the RSF’s cohesion without yet amounting to a broader breakdown of the organisation.

Why is al-Burhan opening a political track?

The SAF chief’s political initiative is unfolding alongside these military developments.

On August 15, he announced that the state would provide temporary immunity and legal, political and security guarantees to participants in a national dialogue managed by an independent national mechanism. Criminal proceedings against participants facing charges would be suspended during their involvement in the dialogue, without removing the rights of those who had filed complaints.

Al-Burhan said the initiative came from a group of Sudanese who had approached him with a proposal for dialogue. He said the group would independently manage the process and that the state would not determine its agenda or outcomes. He also said he had begun engaging with national forces that had supported the state and its institutions, with the aim of involving them in completing state institutions, including a legislative council.

But this is not a move away from the war.

Al-Burhan said he would not accept what he called a “peace without substance” that would bring RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, and his supporters to power. He also said the path to peace begins with the RSF leaving cities and being gathered in designated areas.

On August 21, Al Jazeera reported that al-Burhan said the fighting would continue until what he described as the rebellion was ended, while the army was working to cut RSF supply lines. He also rejected a truce that would allow the RSF to reorganise, while saying he remained open to a just peace and national dialogue that excluded the RSF.

Al-Burhan is therefore not choosing between war and politics. He is pursuing both, maintaining military pressure while opening a political process he says should preserve the state and its institutions.

What does Malik Agar’s position reveal?

Malik Agar, deputy chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, has made the government’s position even clearer.

In an interview with Al Jazeera on August 22, Agar said the current option was military resolution unless serious conditions for negotiations emerged. He said the RSF would have to withdraw from cities and residential areas before negotiations could begin, stressing that the government remained open to initiatives that preserve Sudan’s unity and state institutions.

In a separate Al Jazeera interview published on August 23, Agar said the army would win but that the war would ultimately end through negotiations.

He argued that Sudan’s crisis was rooted in deeper problems, including the weakness of the state and the failure of political elites to manage the country’s ethnic, cultural, religious and geographic diversity.

His position reflects the government’s broader calculation: maintain military pressure while leaving the door open to negotiations from a stronger position on the battlefield.

Can al-Burhan turn battlefield pressure into political leverage?

The army’s gains in North Kordofan have strengthened its position along a strategically important route. The growing defections from the RSF are raising questions about the force’s cohesion. At the same time, the RSF remains active on several fronts, and the wider battlefield remains contested.

That combination gives the recent developments significance beyond individual battles or defections. The changing military balance may now be beginning to shape the terms of Sudan’s next political phase.

For al-Burhan, the potential advantage is not simply territorial. If military pressure continues to produce defections and weaken RSF cohesion, it could give the SAF greater room to shape who participates in a political process and the conditions under which future negotiations take place.

For the RSF, the challenge is therefore not only to hold territory. It is to prevent battlefield pressure from becoming an internal crisis of cohesion.

That has not happened yet. Military setbacks do not automatically translate into political marginalisation.

The army’s recent gains are best understood not as evidence of a decisive victory, but as a shift in the conditions under which the next phase of the war may be fought, and eventually negotiated.

Can the RSF contain the defections and preserve its bargaining position, or will continued military pressure give al-Burhan greater leverage in Sudan’s next political phase?