Sudan: a barbaric war fed by wider imperialist appetites

The International Criminal Court, that bastion of bourgeois morality, rational control and ‘human-rights’ along with countless other empty fetishes of bourgeois ideology, is currently hearing a case to decide, in their august opinion, whether or not genocide was officially committed in Darfur, in 2003, when at least 300,000 people were killed. The people of Sudan are most probably not holding their breath for being informed about any great discoveries from the mouths of this imperial talking shop.

After all, this deliberation takes place as one example of “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world”, which has cost the lives of up to 150,000 [1] people since 15 April 2023 and displaced between 12-14 million people, rages across the very same region.  While this orgy of bloodletting shows no signs of abetting, the vacuity of bourgeois ‘justice’ and international ‘rule of law’ is shown for the fraud it always was and always will be.

The world is simultaneously watching in live-stream the disgusting spectacle of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the ongoing killings in other parts of the world. The suffering of the people in Gaza saturates the wide variety of propaganda and the smart surveillance devices offered us by the world bourgeoisie, but the suffering of the Sudanese people is kept largely out of view. The main reasons for this forgotten war is probably that it lacks the compelling factor of easily discernible and ideologically ‘appealing’ sides, with which sympathies and ideological commitment can be manipulated towards nationalistic fervour in either direction.

Descent into chaos

Since violent clashes broke out on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) [2], both gangs have engaged in a so-called civil war, assisted by armed militias from across Sudan and several other countries. Sudan today is fractured into a multi-layered conflict that involves a bewildering array of smaller armies, who are not really controlled by either of the main military forces. The country offers us a pattern of insanity in which alliances across the board contain inherent contradictions from their inception, and thus shift at the drop of the bourgeoisie’s hypocritical hat.

There are no front lines in this bloody conflict and civilians are caught in the crossfire. Both parties conduct indiscriminate attacks against civilian infrastructure such as hospitals [3], against civilians in densely populated areas such as refugee camps, and make widespread use of sexual violence. The RSF in particular utilises the conflict to intensify ethnic cleansing, targeting non-Arab communities. A last major horrific expression of this civil war took place in April of this year, when the RSF began a 72-hour ‘genocidal’ massacre in Zamzam refugee camp. The 500,000 residents – predominantly women and children – were defenceless, and about 1,500 of them were killed in one of the bloodiest war crimes in this conflict so far. Famine has the population increasingly in its grip. It has spread to 10 areas of the country, with another 17 at risk. Nearly one million are faced with imminent starvation. For lack of better food people are for instance compelled to prepare porridge with ingredients normally fed to animals. The war severely obstructs aid being delivered where it’s needed most. Calculated starvation has become a weapon of war.

Sudan is a clear manifestation of capitalism’s dynamic towards disintegration: “dangerous imperialist fault-lines have opened up and are opening up over the globe with militarism as the main outlet left to the capitalist state”. The outbreak of the civil war “expresses the profound centrifugal tendency towards irrational and militaristic chaos” [4] in the world of today. It shows the future this system has in store for all of us. This future though is not a straightforward descent into chaos; it is a descent which the bourgeoisies of all nations attempt both to exploit for their own ends and to develop plans to counter-act. More and more the outline of this attempt is making itself clear. Vast swathes of chaos and bloodshed surrounding islands of ‘development’ with fortress borders and deportation centers. From Sudan and the Sahel more generally to Gaza, Libya and El Salvador to Calais/Dover and the US/Mexico border, this future is gathering momentum with every passing day. 

Sudan: object of imperialist rivalries

Africa is also an important object of interest for countless imperialist powers in the world who try to conquer a favourable position in order to exploit critical minerals [5]. Alongside the U.S. and China – countries with vast commercial and geopolitical interests in Africa – Turkey, Russia, Japan, Brazil and India have also invested to various degrees in this continent, be it militarily, commercially or only diplomatically.  The increasing chaos, marked by the social, environmental and economic break-down of entire regions, is seen by many other nations as a useful occasion to loot resources. This modern scramble for Africa is more than ever before accompanied by the organised violence perpetrated by the most ruthless and brutal militias.

In Sudan, it is mainly the Gulf States that profit from the country's destabilisation and developing chaos. In addition to securing reliable sources of agricultural produce such as food crops, animal feed, and biofuels, today the focus is in particular on gold mining, counting for about 50% of Sudan’s exports. The conflict has triggered several imperialist powers in the region to support one of the warring camps. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt back the SAF (the so-called “legitimate” government forces) against the UAE, who are more and more openly supporting the RSF. But other imperialist predators also stir up the chaos in the country. Not only Saudi, UAE, Egyptian Turkish, but also Qatari, Russian, Ukrainian and Iranian interests intersect and overlap, turning the conflict into a highly volatile can of worms.

The entire Sahel is increasingly part of what has been referred in some bourgeois papers as an “eco-system” of conflict [6]. It is increasingly part of a general trend towards Balkanisation which, in the final analysis, is one aspect of the larger tendency towards ‘everyman for himself’ at the local level. Thus, one of the dangers of the Sudan war is its extension through the proliferation of small armed conflicts, which cross Sudan’s over-porous borders, leading to a worsening of the situation in a big part of the Sahel and mutating into a regional bloodbath. Darfur is not the only destination for the RSF. Airports in Libya and Chad are already used to supply it with weapons. RSF leader Dagalo has roots in Chad and has expressed his aspiration to extend its influence across the Sahel.

The bourgeoisie is arrogant enough to believe it can control this descent into insanity. It certainly has been a strategy in many respects for various imperialist powers thus far; however this control is and will always be a chimera. It is and can never be truly in control of the all the barbaric expressions of its own social system! It is this which must be kept in mind when analysing the imperialist strategies of the current era. Despite its attempts to use chaos to its advantage and to establish more and more maniacal forms of control to contain this chaos, eventually the bourgeoisie will dig its own grave.

The catastrophic situation in Sudan is generally presented as a “humanitarian crisis”. But the conflict and its dire consequences cannot be resolved by the intervention of charitable organisations or ‘responsible’ countries. The real issue is the internal war between the various gangsters, used by imperialist nations in the region to increase their influence on the African continent. And for many their main interest is not a unified Sudan; a divided Sudan offers them more opportunities to gain a foothold in the country.

The working class solution

The working class and other oppressed strata in Sudan, despite the incredibly unfavourable conditions, have shown incredible resilience and ingenuity to survive the tragedy unfolding all around them. Traditions of social solidarity, including pre-capitalist socio-cultural remnants of mutual aid such as nafir [7] were undoubtedly helpful for communities to endure and even survive. But we should not have any illusions, for they will certainly not be able to contribute to ending capitalisms’ drive towards the destruction of humanity. War in the phase of decomposition is a key danger for workers worldwide. They may be drowned in a sea of rotting phenomena and so lose the ability to act on history, as a class. This is precisely why we must reiterate that our strength lies in internationalist solidarity. We must resist the attempt of capitalism to divide us into ‘citizens’, given more or less comfortable cages, and ‘outcasts’ fed to the idols of militaristic destruction.

The positive outcome of such a resistance will not be achieved through any idealistic notions of brotherhood and unity, but only in the practice of the international struggle against the ruling class, wherever we are. Those fractions of the proletarian class who live in areas of the globe which have not yet been driven into the deepest depths of barbarism awaiting us all must fight all the more determinedly with an eye to the moment when all the struggles of the workers in the world can be united. Everywhere though, the enemy is the same and everywhere the same ultimate stakes remain: the overthrow of capitalism or the destruction of humanity.

JD, August 2025

[1] The death toll is hard to estimate because of the general break-down and lack of hospitals and data. The US envoy to Sudan puts the number at around 150,000 while some estimates are far lower (around 60,000).

[2] The present embodiment of the Janjiweed militias responsible for genocide in 2003, now under scrutiny by the International Criminal Court

[3] At least 119 attacks on health care have been verified between April 2023 and October 2024, but the true figure is likely much higher.  In conflict zones more than 80 per cent of the hospitals are non-operational.

[4] See: Sudan 2023: a vivid illustration of the decomposition of capitalism, ICConline

[5] Critical minerals—including cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements—are vital for modern technologies ranging from electric vehicles (EVs) to renewable energy infrastructure, and they play a key role in the global energy transition.

[6] A conflict that isn't isolated but rather a result of multiple interacting elements.

[7] A traditional practice of communal mobilisation/voluntary gathering of people to help each other with tasks that are too large or challenging for one person or family to handle alone