The Rapid Support Forces announced Thursday their agreement to a humanitarian truce proposed by the so-called Quad—the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The timing is instructive. The RSF's acceptance comes nearly a week after their forces seized El Fasher, the last bastion of the Sudanese Armed Forces in Darfur, following an 18-month siege marked by what survivors and satellite imagery confirm as mass atrocities: systematic killings, sexual violence weaponized as terror, and the deliberate starvation of an entire city.
The proposed three-month ceasefire, ostensibly a pathway to negotiations for a transitional civilian government, arrives not as prevention but as ratification. It comes after the consolidation of RSF control across most of Darfur, after the humanitarian catastrophe has already unfolded, after the engineered famine has done its work. The Sudanese Armed Forces' response—insisting on RSF withdrawal from civilian areas and disarmament as preconditions—is militarily logical but practically ensures the truce will fail, prolonging civilian suffering while both sides prepare for the next phase of a war that has already displaced 12 million people.
The question that hangs over this latest diplomatic gesture is not whether it will bring peace—previous Quad-mediated attempts have collapsed with grim predictability—but rather what it reveals about the international architecture of complicity that has allowed Sudan's civil war to metastasize into what UN officials now call the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe. When the mediators include the very powers arming the warring parties, can we call it mediation at all?
The fall of El Fasher: Atrocity as strategy
El Fasher's capitulation after 18 months under siege represents more than a tactical military victory for the RSF. It marks the culmination of a deliberate strategy of civilian devastation that aid workers and human rights monitors describe with unambiguous language: calculated brutality, engineered starvation, systematic sexual violence. The siege wasn't merely a military operation—it was the weaponization of every essential human need.
Satellite imagery analyzed by independent monitors reveals the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure: water facilities targeted, agricultural areas rendered unusable, health centers reduced to rubble. Eyewitness accounts, when they could be gathered from those who escaped, describe RSF forces conducting house-to-house killings, abducting women and girls, looting everything of value. The International Criminal Court has begun collecting evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, though whether such documentation will ever translate into accountability remains an open question in a world where international justice institutions struggle to hold powerful actors accountable.
What unfolded in El Fasher follows a pattern established across Darfur over two years of fighting, but also echoes the 2003-2004 genocide that drew international condemnation but insufficient action. The RSF—direct descendants of the Janjaweed militias that perpetrated that earlier genocide—have refined their methods. The current siege warfare combined medieval tactics of starvation with modern precision: using control of supply routes not just to weaken military resistance but to systematically displace populations, erase communities, and consolidate territorial control through demographic transformation.
The humanitarian consequences are staggering. Beyond El Fasher itself, the Darfur region faces what multiple aid organizations characterize as famine conditions deliberately engineered by military strategy. In areas under RSF control, agricultural production has collapsed not through incidental damage but through systematic targeting. Food stocks have been looted or destroyed. Markets cannot function. The civilian population faces a choice between starvation and displacement—which is to say, no choice at all.
Members are reading: Why the Quad mediators' own arms transfers to warring parties guarantee their diplomatic efforts will fail—revealing peacemaking as performance.
De facto partition and the specter of state collapse
The RSF's control over Darfur following El Fasher's capture fundamentally alters Sudan's political geography. What emerges is not the temporary territorial control common in civil wars, but the outline of de facto partition—a Sudan divided between an SAF-controlled center and east, and an RSF-dominated west, with contested borderlands in Kordofan.
This emerging partition carries profound implications. In Darfur, the RSF now controls not just territory but the infrastructure of governance: what remains of administrative systems, border crossings with Libya and Chad, whatever economic activity hasn't been destroyed by two years of warfare. The RSF's governance model, such as it is, centers on extraction and patronage rather than service delivery—a system that benefits militia commanders and their external sponsors while offering little to civilian populations beyond the bare minimum needed to prevent complete collapse.
Sudan's forgotten war remains the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and the partition dynamic ensures it will continue. Neither the SAF nor RSF has demonstrated capacity or interest in genuine civilian governance. Both rely on external support that comes with strings attached: expectations of strategic access, economic concessions, alignment in regional competitions. A fragmented Sudan serves certain external actors' interests precisely because it remains weak, dependent, and unable to assert sovereignty.
The historical parallels are grimly instructive. South Sudan's separation from Sudan in 2011 was supposed to end decades of civil war; instead, it created two unstable states, both plagued by internal conflict and external interference. Libya's fragmentation after 2011 produced competing governments, militias, and foreign military bases rather than the democratic transition Western interveners promised. Somalia's state collapse in the 1990s created conditions that persist three decades later despite billions in international assistance.
Sudan appears headed toward a similar trajectory: formal sovereignty maintained at the UN but practical authority fragmented among armed groups, each backed by external sponsors pursuing their own regional agendas. This serves almost no one's interests except those who profit from permanent instability—arms dealers, smugglers, extractive industries that prefer weak states unable to enforce regulations or demand fair terms.
Kordofan's silent catastrophe
While international attention such as it exists focuses on Darfur, the humanitarian catastrophe in South Kordofan and West Kordofan unfolds with even less scrutiny. These regions, contested between SAF and RSF control, face the worst of all possible conditions: active combat that prevents aid delivery, displacement that scatters populations beyond help's reach, and agricultural collapse during planting season that guarantees future famine.
Reports from humanitarian organizations that maintain access—increasingly rare as both SAF and RSF restrict aid worker movement—describe apocalyptic conditions. Entire villages emptied through a combination of violence, fear, and starvation. Hospitals without supplies, staff, or patients (because no one can reach them). Markets that haven't functioned in months. Water systems destroyed or contaminated.
The engineered starvation of Darfur shows how famine became a weapon of war, but Kordofan faces the same deliberate tactics with even less international attention. The region's agricultural potential—historically a breadbasket for Sudan—means its destruction carries consequences beyond immediate suffering. Without Kordofan's agricultural production, Sudan cannot feed itself even in peacetime, creating permanent dependency on food imports and aid.
Both warring parties have targeted agricultural infrastructure systematically: burning granaries, destroying irrigation systems, mining fields, and preventing farmers from planting or harvesting. This isn't collateral damage; it's strategy. Controlling food means controlling populations. Creating dependency means ensuring compliance. Destroying productive capacity means rivals cannot benefit from territorial control.
Members are reading: How the ICC's Sudan record reveals international justice's limits when perpetrators' sponsors control enforcement mechanisms—documentation without accountability.
External interference and African agency
The narrative of Sudan's civil war as "internal conflict" collapses under examination. This is regional proxy warfare conducted through Sudanese armed groups, fueled by external weapons, financed by Gulf money, and enabled by international diplomatic paralysis. The Sudanese people are dying in a war that serves primarily non-Sudanese interests.
Yet framing Sudan's crisis solely through external interference risks reproducing colonial-era narratives that deny African agency. The RSF and SAF aren't passive instruments of foreign powers; they're sophisticated military-political organizations pursuing their own interests that sometimes align with and sometimes diverge from their external sponsors. Hemedti, the RSF commander, and Burhan, the SAF leader, make strategic calculations based on Sudanese political dynamics, even as they accept foreign support.
The challenge is holding both truths simultaneously: acknowledging genuine Sudanese agency and political competition while recognizing that external intervention shapes, constrains, and often determines the parameters within which that competition occurs. A conflict that might have resolved through negotiation instead continues because external arms flows ensure neither side faces decisive military defeat. Diplomatic initiatives that could pressure warring parties fail because key mediators have interests in continued fragmentation.
African Union responses have been characteristically weak—statements of concern, calls for dialogue, but no meaningful intervention to protect civilians or impose costs on external sponsors fueling the violence. IGAD (the Intergovernmental Authority on Development), the regional bloc most directly concerned, has been paralyzed by member states' competing interests. Egypt, Sudan's neighbor and IGAD member, backs the SAF. The UAE, while not a member, has sufficient economic leverage over multiple regional states to prevent unified action.
The African Union's weakness here reflects broader limitations of continental institutions when facing conflicts involving major external powers. The AU can manage crises in states without powerful sponsors—as demonstrated in recent interventions in West Africa—but struggles when regional powers or Gulf states have direct interests. This isn't failure of will but structural reality: continental institutions lack enforcement mechanisms when powerful states oppose their intervention.
What would genuine African agency look like in Sudan? A continental response that treated external arms flows as violations of sovereignty requiring coordinated diplomatic and economic pressure. Regional economic powers like Nigeria or South Africa using their leverage to impose costs on the UAE and other states fueling the conflict. IGAD coordination that prevented member states from serving as weapons transit routes. None of this has occurred, revealing how deeply external interference has penetrated African regional politics.
The civilians' war: Survival under perpetual crisis
Behind statistics measuring displacement in millions and food insecurity in percentages are individual experiences of unimaginable suffering. Families that fled fighting in Khartoum in 2023, found temporary refuge in Darfur, then fled again when the RSF siege began. Women and girls subjected to systematic sexual violence used as both individual terror and collective punishment. Children who've spent their entire conscious lives knowing only war, displacement, hunger.
The psychological toll of sustained humanitarian catastrophe extends beyond immediate trauma. An entire generation is growing up without education—schools closed, teachers displaced, families struggling to survive rather than prioritize learning. Health systems have collapsed beyond COVID-era stress into non-functionality, meaning treatable conditions become death sentences. Malnutrition affects cognitive development in ways that persist even if food security eventually improves.
Displacement itself creates cascading vulnerabilities. Refugee camps and displacement sites become targets for recruitment by armed groups, trafficking networks, and predatory actors. Women and girls face heightened risks of sexual violence, forced marriage, and exploitation. Men and boys face forced conscription by whichever armed group controls their location. Extended families fracture as members scatter to different regions or countries, destroying social support networks that traditionally provided resilience.
The economic devastation will take decades to reverse even if fighting stopped tomorrow. Sudan's professional class—doctors, engineers, teachers, civil servants—has fled to Egypt, Chad, or further abroad, creating a brain drain that will hamper any reconstruction. Productive infrastructure from factories to farms has been systematically destroyed. Even basic commercial activity has collapsed in conflict zones as traders cannot move goods and markets cannot function.
International humanitarian response, while genuine in its personnel's commitment, remains grossly inadequate to the scale of need. The UN's Sudan humanitarian appeal for 2024 is less than 5% funded as of the truce announcement—a catastrophic shortfall that means aid organizations must make impossible triage decisions about who receives assistance and who doesn't. Food aid reaches a fraction of those facing famine. Medical care is available only sporadically. Shelter materials cannot reach the millions living in makeshift displacement camps.
This chronic underfunding isn't accidental but reflects broader international priorities. Sudan competes for humanitarian funding with Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, and a dozen other crises—a grotesque global triage where Sudanese lives are systematically devalued compared to European ones, where African suffering generates less donor concern than Middle Eastern conflicts. The racism embedded in humanitarian funding allocation couldn't be clearer.
What comes after the truce fails
The proposed humanitarian truce will likely follow the pattern of its predecessors: announced with diplomatic fanfare, partially implemented in limited areas for brief periods, violated repeatedly by both sides, then quietly abandoned as fighting resumes. Humanitarian workers will gain brief windows to deliver aid in some areas before access closes again. Civilians will experience temporary respites from bombing before the next offensive begins. International media will move on to newer crises while Sudan's war grinds forward.
The SAF's preconditions—RSF withdrawal from civilian areas and disarmament—are military non-starters that the RSF will never accept after consolidating territorial control. The RSF has no incentive to disarm when their military position has strengthened and their external sponsors continue providing support. The SAF cannot credibly commit to power-sharing when their military defeats have weakened their negotiating position. Both sides view military victory as achievable given continued external support, removing incentive for genuine negotiation.
This means Sudan's war likely continues through 2025 and beyond, with periodic pauses for failed diplomacy between bouts of fighting. The humanitarian catastrophe deepens as agricultural systems remain destroyed, displacement continues, and aid access shrinks. The death toll—already in the tens of thousands directly from violence and far higher from conflict-induced starvation and disease—will climb into the hundreds of thousands if historical patterns hold.
The most probable outcome is neither side's decisive victory but rather protracted fragmentation: an RSF-controlled Darfur operating as de facto autonomous region with Emirati backing, an SAF-controlled center sustained by Egyptian and Iranian support, and contested borderlands in permanent instability. This serves neither Sudanese interests nor genuine regional stability, but it aligns with certain external actors' preferences for Sudan too weak to assert sovereignty but stable enough to provide strategic access.
Alternative futures exist but require transformations unlikely to occur. Genuine international pressure on external sponsors—including sanctions on the UAE for arms embargo violations, aid conditionality on Egypt regarding weapons transit, UN Security Council consensus on enforcement—could alter warring parties' calculations. Regional coordination through the AU or IGAD that actually imposed costs on intervention could shift dynamics. Internal exhaustion might eventually force negotiations, though typically only after catastrophic death tolls and complete economic collapse.
Conclusion: The architecture of abandonment
The Quad's humanitarian truce proposal for Sudan encapsulates everything dysfunctional about international responses to African conflicts. The mediators are themselves parties to the conflict through their weapons transfers and diplomatic support for warring factions. The timing—after atrocities rather than before them—reveals intervention as crisis management rather than prevention. The terms ignore underlying structural drivers while focusing on temporary tactical pauses. And the entire framework treats Sudanese civilian suffering as regrettable externality to be managed rather than central outrage demanding accountability.
What unfolds in Sudan is not primarily an internal conflict but a proxy war prosecuted by Sudanese armed groups with external weapons, funding, and diplomatic cover. The RSF's control of Darfur owes as much to Emirati support as to their military capacity. The SAF's continued resistance depends on Egyptian, Turkish, and Iranian backing. The diplomatic paralysis reflects great power calculations at the UN Security Council where Russia and China block meaningful action. African regional institutions lack leverage to counteract Gulf and external interference.
The humanitarian catastrophe—12 million displaced, famine spreading, atrocities documented but unpunished—is the direct consequence of this international architecture of enablement. Civilians die from weapons supplied by states claiming to mediate peace. Famine results from deliberate strategies that international law defines as war crimes but that face no enforcement. Documentation of atrocities produces reports that sit in ICC files while perpetrators operate with impunity, protected by sponsors who value their strategic utility.
For observers committed to centering African agency and challenging post-colonial patterns, Sudan poses difficult questions. How do we acknowledge Sudanese actors' genuine political competition while recognizing that external interference has shaped the parameters of that competition? How do we critique Western intervention's failures without endorsing non-Western interference that proves equally destructive? How do we demand accountability through international institutions while recognizing those institutions' selective and often racist enforcement?
The answers require moving beyond false binaries. We can simultaneously recognize that the RSF and SAF pursue their own interests AND that external sponsors enable catastrophic violence those actors couldn't sustain alone. We can acknowledge humanitarian intervention's checkered history AND demand that international law be enforced against war crimes regardless of perpetrators' strategic value. We can critique Western hypocrisy AND hold Gulf states accountable for proxy warfare in Africa.
What's clear is that the current international approach—performative mediation by conflict participants, documentation without accountability, humanitarian aid as substitute for political solutions—guarantees Sudan's suffering continues. The architecture that produces such outcomes requires dismantling, not reform. That means enforcement of arms embargoes, sanctions on external sponsors, genuine regional coordination through African institutions empowered to act, and international justice mechanisms with actual enforcement capacity.
Until such structural changes occur, Sudan's civilians will continue paying the price for a war that serves almost everyone's interests except their own. The Quad's humanitarian truce represents not a pathway to peace but another iteration of the same failed playbook—eloquent in its rhetoric, deadly in its inadequacy.
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