Sudan’s war is not “Army vs. Militia” — It is the Collapse of a Rotten State

By Dr.Waleed A.Madibo, Fulbright Scholar. Government and International Development Expert.

”The story of Sudan, as told in much of the Western press, has been reduced to a hollow binary: a “national army” battling a “rogue militia.” This lazy shorthand is worse than inaccurate; it is dangerous. It grants the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) a veneer of legitimacy, portrays their generals as guardians of order, and frames the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the sole perpetrators of violence. In doing so, it erases decades of state-sponsored atrocities and silences the political demands of Sudan’s marginalized majority.

Western reporting treats the war as if it erupted in a vacuum. It does not. Since independence in 1956, the SAF has waged relentless campaigns against Sudan’s Black indigenous populations — in the South, in Darfur, in the Nuba Mountains, and in Blue Nile. These were not mere “excesses of war,” but systematic state policy: scorched-earth campaigns, engineered famines, aerial bombardments of villages, and mass displacement. To call the SAF a “national army” is to sanitize an institution built on racial hierarchy and sustained by structural violence.

By contrast, the RSF’s crimes are real but crudely visible: looting, rape, killings committed by fighters on the ground. Yet to describe this as uniquely barbaric while ignoring the institutional violence of the SAF is to punish the foot soldier while absolving the general. It is moral hypocrisy disguised as analysis.

The second omission is the Islamist legacy. In the 1990s, Khartoum was the world’s terrorist sanctuary. Osama bin Laden lived openly in the city. Sudanese intelligence facilitated the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The regime plotted the assassination of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. And yet, today’s Western coverage rarely mentions this history. Instead, the same Islamist elite who sheltered terrorists are now rebranded as “nationalists” in Port Sudan, lobbying their way into Western headlines as a legitimate political force.

The Western press, entranced by elite propaganda, fails to acknowledge that the generals now posing as defenders of the republic are the masterminds of Sudan’s darkest crimes. They presided over genocide in Darfur. They ordered the massacre of peaceful protesters at Khartoum’s sit-in in June 2019, killing over 1,700 young men and women. They murdered at least 122 more after the coup of 2021. They targeted displaced Western Sudanese who had sought refuge in the North. These are not patriots — they are warlords in uniform.

The SAF does not monopolize violence. It outsources it. The RSF was not an aberration but a state creation, subcontracted to do the dirty work in Darfur until it became too powerful to control. To reduce today’s war to “SAF vs. RSF” is to ignore this fact: the generals birthed the very monster they now claim to fight.

Much commentary obsesses over who shot the first bullet. The question is irrelevant. War was inevitable, because the generals embodied irreconcilable visions. Burhan clung to the Islamist, centralist state. Hemedti, opportunistic though he may be, aligned himself with revolutionary youth demanding freedom, equality, and justice — ideals that threatened the very foundations of Sudan’s racist, Islamist order.

The Islamists miscalculated catastrophically. They believed the war would end in six hours. For decades, they exported conflict to the periphery, confident that Khartoum itself was immune. But when the RSF entered the capital, their illusion of fortress privilege collapsed. The price of that misjudgment has been borne not by the elites, but by ordinary Sudanese families — displaced, starved, and slaughtered.

The West must reckon with its own failures here. By clinging to a reductive binary, it has not only misunderstood Sudan’s war but also reinforced the very structures of power that caused it. Until the historical violence of the SAF and its Islamist patrons is acknowledged, Sudan’s peripheries will remain trapped: not in rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but in an unfinished struggle for the most basic human dignity.”