Dissecting the Soft War in Sudan and the Maps of Future Exhaustion

Dr Mohamed Awad Mohamed Metwally
Sudan today is fighting two parallel battles.
The first is visible, fought with bullets, artillery and drones, while its tragic images are broadcast across television screens.
The second is a silent, subtle and intelligent war. It slips like a snake into homes, schools, markets and the collective memory, without requiring declarations of mobilisation or military communiqués.
The danger of this soft war lies in the fact that it seeks not merely to occupy territory, but to occupy and weaken the national will. Its objective is not so much to defeat conventional armies as to destroy society’s capacity to endure, recover and rebuild after the guns eventually fall silent.
It is a long-term war of attrition that invests in time, accumulation, and despair, transforming every citizen, often without their knowledge, into a target on the battlefield.
What Sudan is experiencing is not merely a conventional armed conflict or a temporary dispute. It represents a fully developed model of what national security and international strategy literature describes as the “systematic exhaustion of the State”.
This is a psychological and material strategy that transforms the ordinary details of everyday life into an unbearable burden and gradually erodes every foundation of resilience until simply remaining alive becomes a temporary and exhausting victory.
This comprehensive exhaustion is neither the spontaneous consequence of conflict nor the purely the product of domestic circumstances.
Rather, it is an operational instrument serving a carefully designed master plan, prepared in strategic planning rooms and the centres of soft warfare long before the first bullet was fired.
The objective of this plan is to break the backbone of the Sudanese State and dismantle its principal sources of strength—the Sudanese Armed Forces and Sudanese society—in order to serve broader projects aimed at politically, socially and economically re-engineering Sudan.
It seeks to reshape the country’s vast geographical space, stretching from the Red Sea through the African Sahel to the Atlantic Ocean, and to create a controlled strategic vacuum filled by private security companies and transnational resource networks that regard an exhausted Sudanese State as an open, unprotected market stripped of sovereignty.
The mechanisms of this plan were activated long before the outbreak of military operations.
They began with intensive international and regional diplomatic and media preparations aimed at shaping public opinion.
Once the conflict erupted, it was immediately marketed internationally as nothing more than “an internal conflict between two generals” within a carefully constructed narrative that concealed what the author regards as the true demographic and geopolitical dimensions of the plan.
The strategy began by targeting the weakest yet most vital component of Sudanese society: young people, who constitute the foundation of any future recovery and reconstruction project.
According to the author, internationally and locally documented field reports have pointed to systematic and large-scale recruitment operations targeting minors and young people of both sexes by exploiting their material needs in an environment where personal security has collapsed.
This has coincided with an unprecedented influx of highly destructive narcotics, including crystal methamphetamine, commonly known as “ice”, and narcotic pills, used as instruments for destroying the psychological and intellectual foundations of young people and removing them from meaningful political, social and productive participation.
The third component of this destructive triangle is the information war.
Thousands of coordinated social-media accounts disseminate hate speech, deepen divisions within Sudan’s social fabric, amplify rumours and falsify events in order to destroy what remains of trust among the country’s national communities.
These operations exploit the algorithms of global social-media platforms, which, according to the author, amplify divisive and racist content at six times the rate of inclusive national discourse.
At the same time, restrictions on reach are allegedly used to suppress Sudanese national narratives, leaving the information space open to externally directed accounts.
Young people are consequently pushed towards two increasingly desperate alternatives: forced migration at any cost or involvement in cycles of violence as their only means of survival.
The economy has not been spared from this strategy.
A soft economic war has struck at the heart of the Sudanese State, paralysing economic activity after the national currency lost more than 80 per cent of its value.
The productive sector has suffered severe damage through the systematic disruption of supply chains, the looting and paralysis of major agricultural projects in Al-Jazira, Sennar, Al-Managil and Greater Kordofan, and the destruction of industrial areas in Khartoum State that once played a central role in supplying food and medicine.
The result has been sharp increases in the prices of essential commodities, transforming the simple task of obtaining bread into a daily struggle for survival.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s borders with seven neighbouring countries have become open arteries for smuggling gold, agricultural commodities and fuel, depriving the State treasury of billions of dollars that could otherwise have financed imports and alleviated the humanitarian catastrophe.
The strangulation of these economic arteries has coincided with repeated attacks on infrastructure and essential public services.
Water and electricity facilities have been damaged or rendered inoperable, while hospitals, schools and universities have been disrupted.
According to World Health Organisation documentation cited by the author, more than 70 per cent of medical facilities in conflict-affected areas have ceased functioning.
The closure of schools and universities threatens to create an educational gap that will affect an entire generation, with millions of children remaining outside classrooms.
This systematic destruction extends to Sudan’s cultural symbols and national memory through attacks on museums, libraries and the National Archives in Khartoum.
Such destruction, the author argues, represents a strategic attempt to sever future generations from their past and erase legal and historical evidence of property ownership and rights, making the future reconstruction of the State significantly more difficult than building it for the first time.
The cumulative consequence of these interconnected strategies is not merely territorial control.
It is the production of what social psychology describes as “learned helplessness” and the “death of the future”.
Under the relentless pressure of recurring crises, citizens become conditioned to believe that nothing will improve.
They stop investing, saving and resisting.
Society’s collective time horizon becomes paralysed, increasing its willingness to accept any political settlement or externally imposed political restructuring, regardless of how unjust its conditions may be.
The ultimate objective of this cantonisation scenario, according to the author, is the practical dismantling of the Sudanese State, the disappearance of the Sudan that previously existed, and its replacement with a model resembling Somalia in earlier decades or the contemporary situations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen and Libya.
Under such a scenario, the central State would lose effective sovereignty over its national territory.
The country would fragment into isolated cantons and security zones occupied by armed mercenary groups controlling areas rich in gold and other natural resources.
These groups would determine the country’s future and administer its resources for the benefit of external powers, while indigenous communities would be oppressed and marginalised, forced into remote corners of their own homeland after its demographic and social identity had been fundamentally transformed.
In light of this strategic analysis, victory in the military war would become meaningless if Sudan were to lose the soft war.
Sudanese society therefore requires an advanced form of collective awareness that recognises that the threat is no longer confined to military fronts.
It also exists in the rumour that is circulated without verification, the narcotics allowed to enter communities, the school left closed and the national history that is allowed to disappear.
Because waiting for solutions imposed from above may take too long, a national resilience protocol must begin immediately from the grassroots through three simultaneous and interconnected levels.
First, there must be family resilience as an alternative source of knowledge, including adopting home-based education, even for one hour each day, and establishing small mutual-support networks.
Second, there must be neighbourhood resilience, organised through voluntary service committees that protect, maintain and repair water facilities, electricity systems and essential public infrastructure with whatever resources are available.
Third, there must be resilience of memory, through the decentralised digital preservation of documents, property records and family histories before they are destroyed by fire or conflict.
Sudan will not be defeated by bullets alone.
But it may be defeated by despair and erasure.
The most urgent and sacred strategic task is therefore to create hope and protect public awareness amid the devastation.
For nations that lose their memory and their future and fall into the trap of helplessness do not need to be conquered militarily.
They collapse and disappear of their own accord.
Analyst, Academic and Economic Expert affiliated with the Experts Centre for Development Studies

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=15852