What Comes After the Collapse of the Rapid Support Forces’ Political and Military Project? (2–2)

Obeid A. Murawih
In the first part of this article, I said that when the leadership of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) decided to seize power on 15 April 2023 through a swift military coup, it was not merely pursuing a domestic project to rule Sudan. Its project also had a regional and international dimension. I argued that the Western countries — foremost among them the United States and Britain — which had cheered the fall of President Omar al-Bashir’s regime and promised Sudanese people a new era of freedom, peace and justice, had thought and calculated, and then entrusted the task of “democratic transition” in Sudan to a state whose rulers inherit power from father to son, and which has had no recognised foreign-policy success other than its role in leading the counter-revolutions against what became known as the Arab Spring!
Hardly had the ink on that article dried when Africa Intelligence, in its issue published on 28 August, published a new document on the foreign actors involved in engineering the situation in Sudan after the fall of the Salvation regime. It detailed the relationship and overt contacts between the RSF and Israel since the fall of the former regime.
What particularly caught my attention in the newspaper’s lengthy report was the following passage:
“However, the relationship with Tel Aviv is not limited to equipment and logistical services. Sources familiar with discussions held in Washington reported that the United States strongly opposed Israeli plans to deploy intelligence officers inside Sudan before the outbreak of the war. These officers were expected to work closely with the RSF.”
The newspaper’s report, which is closely connected to intelligence circles, is saying, in other words, that Sudanese affairs, before the war, were the subject of discussions and on-the-ground activity involving the United States and Israel. It does not take much effort for an analyst to conclude that the new proxy in Sudan — the sponsor of the Abraham Accords — was the third side of this equation!
In the previous article, we concluded that the RSF had completely lost the political project through which it sought to present itself as a force capable of ruling Sudan. The image it had sought to establish among ordinary Sudanese people, and which those external powers had sought to construct for it as part of their investment in the force, collapsed with unexpected speed after the outbreak of war.
The RSF was transformed from a force portrayed as supporting the transition and democratic transformation and protecting civilians into a brutal force committing all manner of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including abduction, killing, enforced disappearance and rape. Whenever it enters a town — or even threatens to enter one — its residents, including women, children and the elderly, flee to areas under the control of the Sudanese Army.
Although its sponsors have so far succeeded in preventing it from being designated a terrorist organisation, in the eyes of free people around the world it has come to deserve that designation and more; and, in the eyes of the Sudanese people, it has become like a “disease” from which people must flee and whose contagion must be contained!
We also concluded that the RSF’s “military project”, which Yasser Arman had promoted — namely, that the army would be restructured and the RSF would become its foundation under the framework agreement then being engineered — had also failed.
After the swift coup attempt failed and the war broke out, the RSF, which had previously controlled or maintained a military presence in 14 of Sudan’s 18 states, has now been pushed back to a presence in eight states without full control, including two states where its new ally, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North, led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, is fighting the war.
More importantly, influential field commanders who had been part of the RSF concluded it had no future and returned to the opposing side, taking part in military operations against it. The supply of recruits from within Sudan has also almost come to a halt, after tribes whose leaders sided with the RSF lost tens of thousands of young men. Those tribes came to realise that their young people had been dying for an illusory project that had brought them nothing but death and destruction.
The RSF has been transformed from a quasi-parallel military force that dominated almost every aspect of the state — from the economy, trade and banking to security services — with its camps spread across strategic locations in Khartoum State and on its outskirts, and prominent headquarters in every other state, while its commander occupied, in protocol terms, the position of the second man in the state, into groups of rebel fighters lacking effective command and control, wandering through deserts and valleys and engaging in killing and looting without any clear objective.
No two reasonable people can disagree now that the RSF has lost the lofty position it enjoyed before the war, as well as the future it aspired to. No matter how much support and patronage it receives, it will not be able to regain any of its previous positions — even those it enjoyed during the years of the Salvation regime.
Given this situation, the greatest mistake the authorities currently in power, and Sudanese people in general, could make would be to believe that Sudan’s problems will be resolved simply by defeating the RSF and consigning its political and military project to the dustbin of history.
The current war is merely one of the most visible manifestations of the crisis that accompanied the emergence of the Sudanese state and remained with it throughout its journey since independence.
Here, I would like to remind the esteemed reader of a two-part article I wrote last March entitled “The Sudan Earthquake: Are We Approaching the Formation of the Largest Bloc?” In it, I argued that the earthquake that struck Sudan with the outbreak of war on 15 April 2023 was merely an expression of the imbalances that had accompanied the construction of the Sudanese state from its formation in 1821 to the present day.
The aftershocks of that earthquake will continue unless the “volcanic activity” beneath the surface ends and compatible social and political forces draw closer together to form the largest bloc.
The crisis of political instability in Sudan has manifested itself in the fact that whenever a regime comes to power, whether through elections or a coup, opponents immediately emerge whose sole objective is to overthrow it so that they can reach the same seat of power to which it had ascended — as though power itself had become the ultimate objective.
This has been the defining feature of the post-independence Sudanese state.
For stability to replace turmoil, and development to replace devastation and destruction, this equation must change. Sudanese elites must diagnose the national crisis through a different methodology and approach from those adopted in the past: one based on consensus rather than confrontation; one that recognises that belonging to Sudan must be primary rather than secondary, and must stand above party, regional, and tribal affiliations.
At the same time, such an approach must acknowledge that Sudan is a country of diverse cultures and ethnicities. Yet its people have no option but to formulate a social compact for peaceful coexistence, one that establishes the country’s fundamental values and national identity and makes these the basis of the constitution by which the country is governed.
There is no doubt that this requires a new awareness and a new political will. We can only hope that the unprecedented war we are living through will become the catalyst for bringing that awareness to life and giving it concrete form.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=18271