New alliances in Sudan’s civil war risk sparking a regional conflict by drawing in neighbouring South Sudan, analysts tell Al Jazeera.
The biggest development was an alliance in February between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who established a government to rival Sudan’s current de facto leadership.
The RSF has been at war with Sudan’s army since April 2023 and seeks to increase its control and influence in central and eastern Sudan to expand its operational theatre.
SPLM-N is an armed movement headed by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, which has been fighting Sudan’s army for decades and controls swaths of the states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, both on the border with South Sudan.
Analysts said Sudan’s army is responding by backing South Sudanese militias to fight the SPLM-N and the RSF along their shared 2,000km (1,240-mile) border.
South Sudan is already dealing with its own political crisis, which could tip the country back into an all-out civil war.
“If things fall apart in South Sudan, then that would make it very difficult to separate the war in Sudan from the war in South Sudan,” Alan Boswell, an expert on South Sudan and Sudan for the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.
Strategic alliance
SPLM-N has been criticised for allying with the RSF, which is accused of committing numerous atrocities by the United Nations and other observers.
Al-Hilu likely chose the alliance because he couldn’t afford to stay neutral any longer, said Kholood Khair, an expert on Sudan and the founding director of the Confluence Advisory think tank.
“Abdel Aziz realised the RSF will soon be his neighbour [next to South Kordofan state] and he can’t fight both the army and the RSF at the same time,” she told Al Jazeera.
On March 23, the RSF captured West Kordofan state, which borders South Kordofan
South Kordofan also shares borders with North Kordofan and White Nile states. The latter serves as a major strategic point to reach central Sudan, including the country’s breadbasket state known as Gezira, which the RSF recently lost to the army.
Blue Nile state is also a strategic point because it shares an international border with Ethiopia.
Partnering with SPLM-N gives the RSF a much larger operational theatre to smuggle in supplies from South Sudan and Ethiopia and plot new attacks against the army – and civilians – in central and northern Sudan, Boswell said.
“The army wanted to push RSF west of the Nile [towards the western region of Darfur] by basically capturing all the bridges [in Khartoum],” he told Al Jazeera.
“But if RSF can go back and forth through [South Sudan] from South Kordofan and if it can go through Blue Nile and into Ethiopia, that poses a major threat and makes the army’s containment strategy that much more difficult,” he said.
War by proxy
During Sudan’s second north-south civil war from 1983 to 2005, before South Sudan became independent, Khartoum sought to undermine the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the main group fighting for the south’s liberation. To do so, it supported southern militias against it.
The war ended with a peace agreement that gave southerners the right to vote in an independence referendum, and in 2011, South Sudan became the newest country in the world.
SPLM-N, which grew out of the SPLM, shares the South Sudanese ruling elite’s history of fighting the Sudanese army.
During the civil war, the Nuba tribespeople of South Kordofan and Blue Nile fought as part of the SPLM while the government “normally relied on proxies to fight its wars”, said Hafez Mohamed, who is originally from the Nuba Mountains and heads the human rights group Justice Africa.
In 1987, the government began arming nomads and pastoralists referred to as “Arabs” to fight against sedentary farmers in the south who are seen as “non-Arabs”.
For years to come, this divide-and-conquer approach would be the army’s modus operandi to combat rebellions across the country, most famously birthing in the early 2000s what would later become the RSF.
When President Omar al-Bashir came to power through a bloodless military coup in 1989, he doubled down on this strategy by forming the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) – an instrument for the then-National Islamic Front ruling party to politically and militarily mobilise young men.
The “Arab” PDF forces became notorious for setting entire villages on fire and carrying out summary killings.
The terrifying abuses often exacerbated local competition for farmland, which stems from decades of aggressive state-backed land policies that enriched national elites and uprooted local communities for industrial farming.
Guilty by affiliation
After South Sudan seceded, the Nuba felt left behind in Sudan.
According to the peace agreement that ended the civil war, the Nuba in Blue Nile and South Kordofan would engage in vaguely worded “popular consultations” with the central government to address the root causes of conflict.
However, the consultations never materialised due to a lack of political will from Khartoum and the Nuba fighters.
The former was looking to consolidate control over what remained of Sudan through force. The latter, rebranded as the SPLM-N, continued their rebellion with limited political and logistical help from South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, according to a report by Small Arms Survey from March 2013.
These historical ties, Boswell said, make Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, believe Kiir is quietly backing the RSF and SPLM-N alliance.
“Kiir has always been close with SPLM-N,” he told Al Jazeera. “And from the [army’s] perspective, it holds [South Sudan] accountable for anything SPLM-N does.”
Kiir may even be surprised that his old comrades have inked a partnership with the RSF. In 2015, the army had dispatched the RSF to the Nuba Mountains to battle al-Hilu’s fighters.
However, the RSF suffered a humiliating defeat largely because it was more accustomed to fighting in the sprawling desert of Darfur than the green uplands of the Nuba Mountains.
The origins of the RSF date back to the first Darfur war in 2003, in which “Arab” tribal militias were recruited by the army to crush a mainly “non-Arab” rebellion against state neglect and lack of representation in the central government.
The “Arab” militias committed countless atrocities, such as summary killings and systematic rape, earning them the name the “Janjaweed”, meaning “Devils on Horseback” in Sudanese Arabic.
In 2013, al-Bashir repackaged the Janjaweed into the RSF to help his regime and fight counterinsurgencies across the country, not just Darfur.
Little did he know that the RSF would rebel against the army years later.
Divide and rule again?
The army now appears to be activating other old proxies in South Sudan to counter the new partnership.
South Sudan is loosely split politically between militia and regular forces loyal to Kiir and an array of militias nominally aligned with Vice President Riek Machar.
Kiir belongs to the Dinka, South Sudan’s largest ethnic group, while Machar is a Nuer, the second largest tribe.
Their rivalry dates back to the pre-independence civil war, which saw Machar accept help from Khartoum’s government to fight against the SPLM in an attempt to overthrow its then-leader John Garang.
In July 2005, seven months after the war came to an end, Garang died in a helicopter crash. Kiir, who was his deputy, quickly assumed control of the SPLM.
In 2013, two years after South Sudan gained independence, a power struggle between Machar and Kiir descended into a civil war.
Most Nuer forces loosely aligned with Machar coalesced into the SPLM-In Opposition (SPLM-IO) to differentiate themselves from Kiir’s SPLM.
The violence killed about 400,000 people before a shaky power-sharing agreement was signed five years later.
While violence in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, calmed down after the peace deal, atrocities continued in the peripheries due to the government’s practices of appointing corrupt governors, coopting local militias and extracting resources, according to Joshua Craze, an independent expert on South Sudan and Sudan.
He added that Sudan’s current war has been spilling into the conflict-ridden peripheries of South Sudan, referencing clashes between some SPLM-IO commanders and the RSF this month. The RSF and SPLM-N are present along the shared border with South Kordofan running next to South Sudan’s Unity and Upper Nile states.
Some of the clashes with the RSF reportedly took place with an SPLM-IO armed group in Upper Nile. More fighting reportedly took place in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.
“[Sudan’s army] pretty much wants to disrupt RSF’s movements along the [South Sudan-Sudan border] …by supporting some SPLM-IO commanders,” Craze told Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera sent written questions to Sudanese army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah asking if the army was providing logistical and material support to SPLM-IO factions. He had not responded by the time of publication.
Integrated conflict?
On Thursday, Kiir sent his security forces to place Machar under house arrest, a move that now pushes South Sudan closer to the brink of an all-out civil war, according to the UN.
Kiir accuses Machar of supporting the Nuer community militias that fought with government forces this month.
But Craze said Machar has no command over these militias and added that they are responding to the government’s predatory and oppressive behaviour in their regions.
“What we are facing is very disturbing and dangerous. We are facing the total fragmentation of South Sudan,” Craze told Al Jazeera.
If this forecast is true, then many young South Sudanese men may end up fighting as mercenaries in Sudan, Boswell said, noting that army-backed groups and the RSF are already recruiting South Sudanese and “recruitment could pick up.”
He warned that if South Sudan slips back into civil war, the RSF would likely benefit.
“I don’t think a collapse in Juba plays into the interest of [Sudan’s army],” he said. “Even if the army thinks Juba helps the RSF, the collapse of South Sudan would give the RSF a much greater operational theatre than it already has.”
