Sudan’s Humanitarian Emergency

Panelists discuss the status of the conflict in Sudan, including the deteriorating condition of civilians, the prospect for regional stability, and the options for an international response.

GAVIN: Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for joining us virtually today to talk about “Sudan’s Humanitarian Crisis.” I’m Michelle Gavin. I’m the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies here at the Council.

And we are—we really kind of have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to expertise today.

We’re joined by Declan Walsh, who’s the chief Africa correspondent for the New York Times, and whose reporting on the crisis in Sudan won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize.

We have Kholood Khair. She’s the founding director of Confluence Advisory, and one of the most respected analysts and most insightful commentators on what is happening in Sudan today.

And we have Cameron Hudson as well, who’s an independent consultant. He has a wealth of experience in the U.S. government. Knows the region incredibly well. And I have benefited from his wisdom many times.

And so we have a great panel to talk about a really, really difficult issue. As people know, the crisis in Sudan, this is a war that’s been going on for over two and a half years now. It is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Over twelve million people have been displaced from their homes, some across borders, some to other parts of Sudan. This conflict has been characterized by mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing and genocide, sexual violence, torture, the targeting of medical facilities, manmade famine, a lack of humanitarian access that is very much by design. It’s also been characterized by remarkable civilian bravery, humanitarian efforts on the ground too, as Sudanese citizens try to help each other through this catastrophe. And it’s a war that’s been fueled by outside powers, and now gold as well as oil. It’s a war that is destabilizing an already fragile region. And it has been met with international indifference and ineffective diplomatic strategies.

So to kick us off, give us a sense of what’s happening on the ground right now, I will turn it over to Declan.

WALSH: Hey, Michelle. Thank you very much for that introduction. So I’ll just very briefly outline, you know, how things have unfurled in Sudan, really over the last six months. I think, you know, this year—the conflict this year for me really started with the fall of Khartoum. I happened to be there with our photographer Ivor Prickett just at the moment when the Sudanese military was sweeping across the city and pushing out the RSF. At that time, it seemed to be really, potentially, a major turning point in the war. After two years of intense fighting for control of the capital, you suddenly had this huge push by the military. You know, we were kind of going into one neighborhood after another at the RSF we’re leaving, and often, it has to be said, hearing these very horrific stories from residents about what had happened under RSF control. People talking about detention, and torture, and killing, and so on.

But nevertheless, we saw this very dramatic scene, the RSF being pushed out. And, you know, I remember having a lot of conversations with folks at that time about what this was going to mean for the state of play of the war. And of course, there was a real sense of optimism from the Sudanese military and its supporters that they had the wind behind their backs and that they finally had managed turned the tide. It only took really a matter of weeks before that optimism was completely—was largely dashed, when the RSF carried out a series of absolutely stunning drone strikes on the military’s de facto headquarters in Port Sudan, on another important strategic military bases in the eastern part of the country. And notably, these drones, it appears, had come from the RSF bases in the west of the country. And this was really an astonishing development in Africa’s third-largest country, that, you know, you have a force in a war that’s able to reach across the entire span of the country and make its intentions—and change the order of battle.

That’s effectively what happened. And at the same time, we saw the RSF, you know, turn back on its home area of Darfur, and redouble its efforts to capture the city of el-Fasher, which had been the last remaining major urban holdout for the Sudanese military in Darfur since the start of the war. The siege had been underway since April of 2024, but it was really in about May of this year that we saw the RSF really press in on the city. They started to build this what eventually became a forty-mile long earthen berm that encircled the city. And they pressed what effectively was a starvation siege on the Sudanese military forces and their allied—and allied groups that were fighting inside el-Fasher, but also, notably, on hundreds of thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city.

That siege—the tightening of the siege went through the summer, became progressively worse. I remember reaching out to several people in the city who were able to communicate via the kind of handful of Starlink terminals that were still working. And they just painted this terrible picture of the conditions for civilians. And, notably, the fact that food had become so scarce at the height of this siege that people had resorted to eating animal feed to survive. That came to a climax in October, when the Sudanese—when the RSF finally broke the siege, or ended the siege. They captured the city. And that really, I think, was—in many ways, I think will be seen as one of the big turning points of this war because, firstly, the capture of the city gave the RSF territorially dominance over Darfur—not complete control, it has to be said. There are other groups that still control large parts of Darfur. But all of the major cities and, you know, the control of the area is largely in RSF control.

But it also led to, really, even by the standards of an absolutely brutal civil war, this, you know, widespread committal of atrocities by the RSF forces, that were reported by people who were fleeing largely to a refugee camp about forty miles away. And they just, you know, told these terrible stories of massacres, of torture, of people who were fleeing being hunted down and shot as they tried to escape the city. We don’t know how many people died, but, you know, it certainly, at the very least, seems to be a total that’s in the thousands. And I think what’s also important about the fall of Fasher, apart from, you know, the fate—the terrible fate of those civilians in itself, is that to my—in my sense, for one of the first times really since this war started, you know, it really—the horror of the images that we saw, particularly videos that were being filmed by the fighters themselves showing what was happening, really seemed to capture international imagination. It seemed to capture headlines in a way that the war has really struggled to over the last two and a half years.

So it certainly seemed to force the politics of it a little bit as well. I mean, we heard from sources, or even from, you know, on-record American officials, that President Trump himself had seen these images. He’d been apparently certainly affected by them and asked whether there was anything the U.S. could do to help. And it coincided with a diplomatic effort, that I’m sure some of the other speakers will talk about, but briefly led by Massad Boulos,, his senior African advisor, to try and sort of restart diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. Since the fall of Fasher, the action has really moved to the Kordofan region, in the sort of Western and—or, sorry—in the sort of southwestern and center of the country. Kordofan now is become the part of Sudan that separates these two large blocs, one dominated by the RSF, the other dominated by the Sudanese military in the east of the country.

You know, we’ve seen a string of significant advances by the RSF in that area. They’ve captured cities like Babanusa and Kadugli. Most recently, they captured the oil facility at Heglig on the border with South Sudan, which is Sudan’s largest oil facility. You know, the RSF is this group that, to some extent, built its strength and its power on its ability to profit from Sudan’s gold trade before the war started. They’ve ramped up the gold trade during the war. And now they have at least nominal control over this enormous oil facility, even though in recent days we’ve seen South Sudanese troops move in there under sort of an agreement with both of these warring parties to try and keep this facility—this important facility going. But, you know, we’re heading—the RSF now appears to be heading towards el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, and is really consolidating its control over a large part of the country, where it has also declared its own parallel government.

What I think has really been notable in recent weeks, or months, certainly, is seeing how the order of battle is being shaped ever more by drones. Both sides are using very powerful—what Sudanese calls strategic drones. Those are the long-range, high-altitude drones. For the Sudanese military, they’re made by Turkey. For the RSF, many of them appear to be made by China. But, again, the drones are highlighting, you know, I think, a new form—or, certainly a new scale of drone warfare in Africa. But they’re also highlighting the importance of foreign countries, that you alluded to, in this war. Our own reporting, as well as U.N. inspectors or testimony from American lawmakers, have shown that the UAE is, obviously, the RSF’s main foreign backer, and has supplied many of these Chinese drones to the RSF, as well, probably, as some very sophisticated drone jamming equipment that we’ve seen evidence of in recent weeks. And similarly, for the Sudanese military, it’s acquired these Turkish drones it appears, certainly, probably on a more commercial basis, rather than having them handed to them, but, you know, that’s certainly become a big part of their—of their battle as well.

And then lastly I’ll just say, on the humanitarian front amid all of this, we’re seeing what’s, you know, by now long been described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, you know, suddenly turn, if it’s even possible, you know, several notches worse. You know, the famine—the IPC, the group that certifies famine, effectively, in the world, issued its latest update just last month, where it confirmed that famine conditions persist in in el-Fasher and in the city of Kadugli in Kordofan. But they say—they’re warning that it could very quickly spread to another twenty areas inside Sudan. And at the same time, we’re seeing the international aid mechanisms running into huge resistance as a result of cuts by the U.S. and by other Western donors. The World Food Program just announced a few days ago that aid cuts mean that they—within the next couple of weeks they’re going to be forced to reduce rations to Sudanese in famine-hit areas to 70 percent of what they currently are. And they warned that—they’ve warned that within a matter of months after that they may be forced to reduce those rations even further.

GAVIN: Thank you so much. Yes, and, yeah, the appeals for Sudan are less than 40 percent funded here at the end of the year.

Kholood, can you—Declan gave us a flavor for some of the intersection between this conflict in Sudan and South Sudan, but can you give us a broader regional perspective about how this persistent instability and the role of these outside powers are affecting the region as a whole?

KHAIR: Sure. I think it’s worth pointing out that this war is playing out at three levels simultaneously. It’s playing out at the—sort of at the national level, which, I think, is the one that we have seen for the past two and a half years, chiefly between SAF and RSF, but by no means exclusively by SAF and the RSF. They both have armed groups on either side, and some who are fighting for their own needs, even if they are somewhat tethered or allied to the two main actors, the SAF and the RSF. But the SAF has about fifteen—excuse me—seventeen different militias fighting alongside it, and the RSF around seven. And these include ethnic militias, armed groups that were part of previous conflicts, et cetera.

But there are also civilian actors who are, you know, sort of part and parcel of this conflict at the national level. You have civilians who joined, as Declan said, the RSF, or Tasis government, as it’s known, out of Nyala. You have civilians who have joined the SAF government out of Port Sudan. And especially you have the Islamists from the former Bashir regime, who are very active in that. And we can see them particularly in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice, and the military intelligence, and sort of domestic intelligence, GIS.

So there are—that’s sort of the national-level conflict, if you will. There are also these regional issues, which I’ll come to in a second. And that’s more about sort of Gulf middle-power competition, but also how this war is reverberating and being simultaneously impacted by the dynamics in Sudan’s neighboring countries. But most important for me, in many ways it is driving a lot of this conflict, are the local dynamics. And I think that is often overshadowed because it’s so much more—it requires so much more granular knowledge to get a sense of who—you know, which groups are in competition with whom, and how old some of those grievances are, particularly those that are related to the political dispensations of previous peace agreements.

But if you look at the way that the war is unfolding beyond the battlefield, the different changes that are happening between—you know, sort of in terms of loyalties, or in terms of the intra-group dynamics that are taking place, those are much more informed by local dynamics. You know, the level of violence that Declan described in el-Fasher can only be partially explained by the national and regional level interference. It’s a lot more rooted in local grievances. You know, when we look at what is happening in places like Kordofan, a lot of that is also informed by tensions within, for example, the RSF alliance, between the Nurba and the Misseriya, but also outside of that alliance.

So I think we need to take this—you know, this war in its totality and look at all these three levels simultaneously. And of course, apropos, it will require some kind of political dispensation or accommodation across those three levels—local, national, and regional—to be able to find a resolution for Sudan. And I think oftentimes that is missed by mediators, to the detriment of the peacemaking efforts. But let me just go back to the sort of regional picture.

Sudan is a country that has, you know, borders with seven different countries, all very porous borders. Eight countries if you find the—if you count the maritime border with Saudi Arabia. And almost every single country around Sudan is very much involved in this war right now, either benefiting financially, or engaged politically, or being used as a transit, for example, for weapons, et cetera. Transit out also of key strategic goods, like gum arabic, cattle, and gold. And all of them have, to some degree, become part of the war economy of Sudan, which has very quickly taken root.

And so if we look at—I think, one easy way or one useful way I have found to organize how a lot of these countries fit into the conflict logics of Sudan is to look at the two waterways, the Nile and the Red Sea. Sudan has a long Red Sea coastline. It is, of course, the place where the Niles meet. And the politics of countries that are linked to those waterways massively impact the extent to which they are, A, involved in the war in Sudan, but, B, are also impacted by what happens in Sudan. So if we look at the main—one of the main tensions, sort of, in the north Horn of Africa region right now between Egypt and Ethiopia, that absolutely are involved in this war, you know, to a greater or lesser degree, that is about, you know, preserving the Nile waters in the way that they are for Egypt, and for maximizing use of the Nile waters in the case of Ethiopia. And those two interests run counter to each other. And Sudan is, literally and figuratively, in the middle.

What we have seen is that for Egypt, for example, Khartoum remains a red line. And some people will have seen today’s statement by the Egyptians that very much, you know, sort of stresses this point, which says that there are red lines that Egypt will not tolerate once they are crossed. And here they mean specifically if the RSF come near Khartoum, of course, again, the place where the Niles meet, and therefore they would have some kind of potential impact on water flow, which Egypt sees as its main foreign, sort of, national security issue. Then the Egyptians would want to intervene. Now, the Egyptians have a problem. They don’t know how long they would need to intervene for if they were forced into, you know, sort of more support than they’re currently providing to the Sudanese Armed Forces. And they don’t know how much that will cost. And, of course, they are not currently in a position to afford that.

Now, Egypt and Turkey have struck up a sort of a security strategic alliance that is going to function both in the Mediterranean and on the Red Sea. Sudan and Somalia will be sort of test cases for this alliance. But the Turks also, while they have a lot of military capacity, do not have the funds to keep it going. So they have to look further afield, perhaps to Saudi or Qatar. But in the meantime, Egypt is making it very clear that they want to see what they call state institutions, i.e., the Sudanese Armed Forces, as intact as possible. They don’t want to see a dismantling or a reform right now because they sense the weakness, effectively, of the Sudanese Armed Forces. And that they perhaps will not be able to survive in the way that the Egyptians want any kind of lengthy or deep reform process.

Ethiopia, similarly, has been, you know, very much a part of the sort of the spillover of the conflict, but also is very much going to be impacted by what happens in Sudan in its own conflict vis-à-vis Eritrea. Very much something that is—has been bubbling underneath the surface for some time. And unfortunately, by all accounts, we could see a confrontation there, maybe even quite soon. And if that happens, then what happens in Sudan, just across the border from both Ethiopia and Eritrea, and what happens in places like particularly the north of Ethiopia with the Fano militias in the Amhara region, with some of the Gumuz militias in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, of course, which is where the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is, those dynamics will absolutely be impacted by and impact the war in Sudan. So you’d get this almost immediate regionalization.

Here, of course, it’s also worth noting the role of Eritrea. Eritrea has been arming and training ethnic groups and militias in eastern Sudan, as well as some from Darfur, for some time now. And, of course, last year—exactly a year ago, the Egyptians, the Eritreans, and the Somalis created this—if you will, an anti-Ethiopian alliance in the Horn of Africa region. What they’re afraid of is the sort of Ethiopian-Somaliland alliance, very much underwritten by the United Arab Emirates, within which the RSF would also feature as a large part. So we’re seeing this entrenchment, if you will, of these cleavages around the region that very much have to do with a—to a great degree, the Nile. But the Ethiopia-Somaliland link also involves, of course, the Red Sea region and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and into the Indian Ocean.

That is a huge thoroughfare for commercial interests, which means Egypt, Saudi, and other countries are very much interested about what happens there. But the UAE has also been, in recent years, threatened by the prospect of this Red Sea Council that’s been in the works for some time. And the Red Sea Council, of course, itself is plagued by some issues, notably the fact that both Egypt and Saudi, who came together to host this, to sort of create this council, want to be the hegemon in the region. Of course, both can’t be at the same time. Egypt and Saudi also have issues related to two islands in the Red Sea that they have been fighting over, Tiran and Sanafir, and specifically security issues around those two islands. So you have this—you know, these intersecting, if you will, competitions in the region, sort of washing up on the western coast of the Red Sea.

And here I think it’s also worth briefly noting the role of what’s happening in Yemen. We have seen, you know, sort of this broader Saudi-Emirati competition playing out in various parts of Africa, notably now, of course, in Sudan, but it has been playing out in Yemen for some time, for over a decade. And the recent movement of the STC, the Southern Transitional Council, backed by the Emiratis, against the Saudi troops in the north and the in the west of the country also indicate, you know, sort of how this is playing out in a country very much on their side, if you will, of the Red Sea. And watching what happens there, I think, is going to be very instructive for us in Sudan. And it’s not a coincidence that the Emirati-backed forces in southern Yemen made their move against the Saudi-backed troops straight after Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, went to Washington, D.C., and effectively asked Trump not only to get involved in the war in Sudan but also to take a much more sort of, if not a punitive stance, then certainly a harder stance towards the UAE.

And then you have, of course, the issues happening to the south and to the west—to the west of the country. And here specifically Libya, particularly southern Libya, and the role of the Libyan National Army, the UAE-backed Haftar regime in the East, and the groups in the south, particularly some of the Salafist groups backed by the LNA government. And how they have helped the RSF with fuel, with supply lines, and to smuggle out gold, cattle, gum arabic, some of which goes into Egypt, ironically, and some of which goes elsewhere, further afield into the Gulf. And Chad, of course, plays a huge role in some of these supply chains. And, of course, initially, also in the supply lines for weapons coming in from the UAE. They would come straight to a camp in the east of Chad called Amdjarass, which is where Deby’s mother’s family is from, and so he was able to create that sort of ecosystem there to have these flights come in regularly. And those would then be trucked into Darfur for the RSF’s use.

Now, Chad has gone through a lot of tumult itself, and not unrelated at times to the war going on, particularly in Darfur. Because, of course, some of the ethnic groups in Darfur are also shared across not just Chad but the Sahel. Central African Republic, similarly. We have had security issues around particularly the Um Dafuq border region between the Central African Republic and Sudan. And there too we have seen recruits from across the Sahel and also from Central. African Republic, as well as other sort of supplies coming in. So effectively what is happening around the countries around Sudan is an ecosystem of alliances, supply chains, et cetera, both in and out of the country, that will keep this war going for some time, even if the regional level, Gulf level, conflict is somewhat, sort of, you know, deconflicted, which is—to me, seems to be quite a long way away.

But I think one thing to note is, when we look at the Sahel in the western part of the country, is that the only thing currently standing between some of the sort of extremist activity going on in the Sahel, in the Lake Chad Basin, and the conflict that’s in Sudan—which would be a magnet to some of those groups—is Chad. And so with Chad being increasingly, you know, unstable, and the potential coup that we heard of in the past twenty-four hours or so, if that is actually, you know, a coup—a real-life coup and rather than some kind of false flag, you know, that spells a lot of concern for Sudan which, you know, as we know, there’s nothing that extremist groups love more than an already active conflict within which they can go and ensconce themselves, and sort of feed off that conflict too. So there’s a real issue here in Sudan in that the porousness of its borders, the complete proliferation of arms, small arms, light arms, et cetera, is not helping the dynamics that the Declan described earlier.

You know, what we’re seeing in Sudan is both sort of medieval siege tactics, starvation being used as a weapon of war, et cetera, predominantly by the RSF but of course, also by the Sudanese Armed Forces that’s been doing this, as you know, Michelle, for decades. But we’re also seeing, at the same time, all these new-age drone warfare playing out. And so you have in Sudan, I think, not just a globalized war that has all these different countries involved in it, but also one that is temporally sort of working across time and space as well. And what that means is that when we think about how this war ends, there are lots of different pieces that need to be lined up. And that’s not happening at all.

GAVIN: Yes. Thank you so much. I think it’s really important for people to understand that, despite the sometimes lack of attention to this crisis, it’s not as if what’s happening in Sudan is purely a matter for the Sudanese.

Cameron Hudson, can you please talk to us—Kholood teed it up so nicely—what’s going on with international efforts to try to stabilize this situation, and what’s not going on?

HUDSON: Yeah. Thanks, Michelle. And thanks everybody, for joining.

I think, sadly, you kind of hit it. What’s not going on I think has outweighed what has gone on in terms of—in terms of outside mediation. I would just sort of remind people, though, that, you know, this war is, you know, virtually three years old now. And so it spans two U.S. administrations, right? So this started in the last year of the Biden administration. And we saw, I think, from the Biden administration, a kind of traditional approach to crisis response, right? A lot of statements, the appointment of a special envoy, in keeping with a long tradition of seeing the kind of U.S. as the principal, you know, diplomatic heavyweight with respect to Sudan over the past, you know, two decades. We’ve been at the center of, you know, peace processes, both in the North-South civil war and in Darfur, but really didn’t play very much of a role in the 2019 popular revolution that led to the removal of President Bashir and the ending of his personal, you know, hold on power.

But nonetheless, I think Washington saw an opportunity, at least in the early phases of the war, to align with the Saudis in particular to launch what they called this Jeddah process, which was an early effort to try to achieve a ceasefire. I look a little bit, you know, sort of sideways at that effort, because I think it was much more about an opportunity for the Biden administration to look for a common project that they could undertake with the Saudis, rather than a real, genuine effort to achieve a lasting peace in the country. And it was always used as a talking point by a lot of Biden administration officials, when there was a very tense relationship between Biden and MBS. And there was an effort to kind of paper over or smooth over those tensions, Sudan was an opportunity for them to do that. Similarly, I think we had an envoy who, unlike some past approaches, was not fully empowered, I think, to speak on behalf of the president and to really engage in a meaningful mediation that at least had the confidence of either the belligerents on the ground or the regional actors who we’ve heard about are fueling this conflict.

So that was an initial effort. Similarly, I think, you know, we can talk about kind of the changing geopolitical nature of the international system right now. And the fact that the United Nations has not played the role, again, that it would traditionally play. You know, what I tell people often though is—and what you hear whenever you talk to people at the U.N., the U.N. is made up of member states. And if the member states aren’t driving the agenda, then the Secretariat of the United Nations isn’t going to do it in place of them. And I think that is—you know, the breakdowns that we have seen in the use of the Security Council across a whole host of conflicts around the world, I think is really stark in a place like Sudan, where for so long the U.N. was a driving force, at least a convener of the conversations that were being had around things like protection of civilians, accountability, even punitive measures. You know, and you saw countries like the United States and the United Kingdom really using the venue of the U.N., and the tools and resources that came with a U.N. involvement, whether that’s peacekeeping operations or humanitarian access—using it as a kind of a cudgel, parallel to other diplomatic efforts.

So the breakdown of the U.N. system, and the Security Council in particular, I think has had a marked effect on our ability to advance peace solutions, or even to maintain the kind of humanitarian access, and to rally, you know, donor funds to go to this. I mean, you said earlier that the donor response is woefully inadequate. And this stands, I think, in stark contracts, again, to times past in Sudan, where the donor response was over-subscribed, right, to Darfur twenty years ago. So I think we haven’t seen the same response from the United Nations. The secretary-general has, I think, very personally been quite lackluster in his own personal diplomacy and using the bully pulpit of the Secretary-General’s Office to shine a light on what’s been going on there. Again, I hate, the excuse that there have been other things going on in the world, but the fact is that the crisis in Gaza, the crisis in Ukraine, I think, have drained a lot of limited attention, and limited bandwidth from the international community, and from even from the humanitarian community. They have, you know, diverted a lot of what would normally have, I think, gone to the conflict in Sudan.

You know, similarly the African Union, I think, is ripe for some consternation as well. I remind people that in the early 2000s, when the United States took a very strong stand on the genocide in Darfur, it was dragged into that by the African Union. It was Nigeria and Rwanda, under an African Union umbrella, that deployed the very first peace support operation into Darfur in the very early days. That gave the United States and the international community something to support. This was one of these African solutions to an African problem. And it was much easier for us to support an African-led approach, which we ultimately, I think, you know, augmented to the point of taking over through the Security Council and the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping operation. But, again, the absence of a strong African Union, or even regional organization like IGAD, which played a role in previous peace support efforts in Sudan, their absence has been notable. And it has not given us anything to pick up and support.

And so, you know, where does that leave us now? The Biden administration left, obviously, in January. In the days—literally, the days before it left, it sanctioned a number of actors in this conflict, notably the main general running Sudan’s Army, General Burhan. And they called the crimes that the RSF are committing genocide. Those sanctions from the Biden administration remain in place, as does the executive order creating a new sanctions regime for Sudan. The Trump administration has taken some modest efforts, I think, on the sanctions front. Just doing so recently, sanctioning the use of Colombian mercenaries that have been deployed into this conflict. And over the summer, we saw the first efforts of the Trump administration to articulate a potential mediation plan for itself. I think this—you know, I think we can—we can look at this in the broader context of the kind of Trump as peacemaker, and, of course, have some skepticism about what that might entail.

But I would say that in the last, I would say, month or so, we have seen a real acceleration of the diplomacy. You know, much of it not visible, but through visits and phone calls—and, again, not just driven by the Trump administration, but you’re seeing—you know, you’re seeing visits by the Sudanese Army to Egypt, to Eritrea, to Saudi Arabia. You’re seeing back and forth visits among all of the cast of characters that Kholood talked about. There is a great kind of orchestration of bilateral diplomacy that is going on right now. What is missing, by and large, is a kind of umbrella effort to bring all of these threads together. So the U.N. has some limited engagement through the special representative around civilian voices. The AU, similarly, has its own effort to engage civilian voices. And then you have this mechanism of the Quad, which has been talked about, which the United States stood up this summer, informally, including the Egyptians, the Saudis, and the Emiratis.

They were seen and have been seen as, again, the countries with the most influence in Sudan, most influence but also the most kind of skin in the game, because they are all three, providing some measure of support to the two belligerents. That effort has resulted, in September, around the time of the U.N. General Assembly, in a joint statement from these countries, essentially saying, you know, that they expected to see an immediate ceasefire among the parties, that they expected to see a nine-month transition to civilian rule, and ultimately, you know, a new transitional government. So they laid down, I think, some very high-level markers, without a lot of detail about how they would get from here to there. And I think they’ve been struggling to get from here to there. There’s been a lot of reported disagreement within the Quad, primarily because you have, on one side, the UAE backing the Rapid Support Forces, and on the other side the Egyptians and the Saudis, which I think are much more inclined, and are explicitly backing, the SAF right now.

So this has left the United States as the power that needs to moderate the behaviors and the ambitions of their allies. And I think that the Quad, in my view, has become much more about doing just that, moderating the behavior of American allies, rather than intervening between the belligerents to end this conflict, right? So I think what we are—what we are poised to get is a kind of elite bargain among influential outside states, but very little in terms of addressing the drivers of conflict in Sudan and breaking the cycles of violence, the coups, counter-coups, and civil wars that have plagued, you know, much of Sudan’s modern history. So that’s a little bit of the mediation standpoint right now.

GAVIN: That’s really helpful. OK. So we have about twenty-two minutes. I want to be able to give people an opportunity to ask questions. I’m going to ask a couple kind of quick ones. But, Cameron, I just want to follow-up and ask you, is it possible that, to some extent, the Quad format simply becomes a shield for the most important external supporters of this conflict? As long as they’re participating in the Quad, and endorsing these, as you say, very high-level ideas that were—that are quite distant, does that just sort of absolve them of accountability for continuing to—you know, in the case of the UAE—supply arms to a genocidal force whose atrocities—you know, everyone who was watching el-Fasher, knew what would happen when el-Fasher fell. It was not a surprise. There was no prevention. There was—you know, everyone said that it would be a horror show, and indeed it was. And so do you buy into that, this is really quite convenient for the external supporters?

HUDSON: Well, I think more important than me buying into it, Secretary Rubio has gone on the record to say that the Quad cannot be a vehicle for absolving the sins of the people supporting this war, right? And that those members of the Quad cannot hide behind the Quad and its statements to camouflage their support to this war. And I think that—

GAVIN: And yet, what consequence is there? (Laughs.)

HUDSON: Right. And I think this is—I think, you know, this is the question. And it’s really the crux of the matter when it comes to—comes to Sudan, right? And, you know, I’ve bemoaned this with Kholood and many—and many others. That, you know, at the end of the day there’s always going to be some greater national security interest to the United States than Sudan. And Sudan becomes a kind of tradable commodity for U.S. diplomats. And that, you know, the UAE and the Saudis, the Egyptians, they have more at stake in Sudan than we do, although I would argue that there’s plenty of U.S. national security interests at stake in a destabilized Sudan on the Red Sea hosting, you know, extremist groups and the like, right? So I think—but I think that those concerns are kind of more medium- to long-term concerns than near term. And so it creates an opportunity for kind of elite bargaining, and us being able to tradeoff our interests for Saudi advancing their interests, or the UAE advancing their interests.

And the question ultimately becomes, when will—or, whether the Trump administration will draw a line in the sand with the UAE and say, we are not going to allow this to happen anymore. We are not going to accept your argument that you are simply not involved. This was a question that was posed to the Biden administration, and they sort of answered it through half measures. You know, privately rebuking the Emiratis, but not really taking any kind of public stand. Think we know from the Trump administration they have even more at stake. The president himself has personal economic stakes with the Emirates. So I think it’s a big question as to whether or not he will draw that line in the sand. My sense is that what they would prefer to do is find a face-saving way out for the Emiratis, and to not get into a kind of public naming and shaming of them, but to, you know, as the Chinese would say, build them a golden bridge to retreat across, and find them a way to deescalate this conflict in a way that preserves the alliance structure that the United States has built up with the Emiratis, but also allows us to find a way forward in this conflict.

GAVIN: And, Kholood, I just quickly ask you your views? On Capitol Hill there’s been a movement to urge the administration to designate the RSF as a terrorist organization, with the idea that this would somehow change the dynamic, make it more difficult for its primary backers in the Emirates to continue their support. What’s your view?

KHAIR: I doubt that it would make it difficult for the Emirates to support the RSF, just because they have an FTO designation. And I think there’s a worrying reliance on sanctions and FTO designations in lieu of actual proper foreign policy at the moment. And so what we’re seeing is that, you know, there’s an executive order that came out designating the Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO, and this congressional wording that might come out soon to basically do the same thing. But that doesn’t necessarily help us get anywhere. Do the RSF and the Muslim Brotherhood qualify for, you know, FTO designation? Absolutely. Does that actually help us advance anything? Probably not. Will it help us get aid into some of these areas, particularly RSF areas? Absolutely not. I mean, Syria and other places have shown that.

I think an FTO designation for the Muslim Brotherhood operating out of Port Sudan looks slightly differently. They have worked with such kind of designations before, et cetera. With the RSF, it’s brand new territory. And I think most—the people who will be impacted are, for example, mutual aid groups, who are at the crux of the humanitarian response, who will be impacted by that. But the West, and not just the United States but also Europe, can’t just continue to sanction, especially without a political strategy, different political actors, and hope that that brings about change. Certainly, for the civilians in Sudan who are impacted by this war more than anyone else, sanctions and FTO designations don’t actually mean anything materially on the ground.

GAVIN: Right. And then, super quickly, Declan, can you just give me your sense of do you think the U.S. is seen as a good faith actor by the parties on the ground, by Sudanese civilians on the ground? What is the perception of U.S. efforts thus far, as far as you can tell?

WALSH: Well, I think certainly for some civilians—I mean, those civilians who’ve been leading the aid response, notably the emergency response rooms, you know, they were very much on the sharp end of policy changes earlier this year when USAID was effectively collapsed. And, you know, a pipeline of money that had been used to pay for food kitchens in Khartoum and elsewhere in the country abruptly came to a halt. And we were there and we could see the material effects of that. So those kind of folks certainly feel very disillusioned, I think, with the U.S.

You know, I think when you talk to Sudanese within the political system, you know, they’re really—you know, they’re really caught between a rock and a hard place. I mean, they recognize that, you know, the dynamics of this war, as the other speakers have elaborated, are really being driven particularly from the Gulf. And there’s a lack of leadership to try and bring those forces together, as well as the Sudanese belligerents, to try and get this towards some sort of a deal. But, you know, folks are also looking at the progress from what diplomacy there’s been so far.

And, you know, Massad Boulos, as well as the Biden administration and many other officials, they’ve promised to, at the least, deliver a humanitarian pause or ceasefire. They haven’t even delivered that. At one point during the siege of Fasher they were supposed to be organizing and negotiating for a delivery of aid through RSF lines to starving people. That didn’t happen. So I suppose Sudanese would probably be forgiven for feeling pretty cynical about whatever efforts they see happening in Doha, or Cairo, or wherever else, or Washington for that matter, because, you know, it—frankly, they seem to have, at least so far, have had really negligible impact on the ground.

GAVIN: Yeah. And I think that’s an important trend that we’re seeing in other places as well, where you have sort of what appears to be diplomatic progress in fancy meeting rooms and continued tremendous civilian suffering and fighting on the ground.

Let’s open it up now very quickly to questions. And I just want to remind everyone, keep your question concise so we can maximize our time with these brilliant panelists.

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.)

We will take the first question from Kate Hixon.

Q: Hi. Thanks so much, everyone, for taking the time today. Kate Hixon, advocacy director for Africa at Amnesty USA, although on maternity leave for another month.

A question I wanted to ask to the panelists. You know, we’ve been—had a lot of these discussions. We continue to have the same challenges in terms of diplomatic will, of even kind of just general interests of populations like the general U.S., Europe, whatnot, compared to, say, the mobilization that happened around Darfur twenty years ago, and a real struggle to kind of get the same level of attention using all the same kind of tactics that were used the first time. And so something that I know a couple of people have been working on has been looking a little bit more at the gum arabic supply chain. Obviously, no one’s making a ton of money off of smuggling gum arabic, but it’s something that kind of more directly impacts Western interests in terms of corporations than, say, the gold going to the UAE.

And I think PAX in the Netherlands just put out a report related to this. And it’s something where if companies started to really feel that their due diligence was being questioned, and you couldn’t drink Coke or Diet Coke anymore without directly aiding and abetting, in a way that most people don’t feel kind of tied the same to gold or even the campaigns that are trying to bring in the NBA. So I’m just kind of curious if you see targeting private actors and their complicity around the gum arabic supply chain as a potential new avenue for it. I mean, it was even—it was the one thing that was not sanctioned twenty years ago under Darfur because of the importance of gum arabic. So would love to hear kind of folks’ thoughts on that.

GAVIN: Anybody want to give the gum arabic as point of leverage question a try?

KHAIR: Yeah, sure. I mean, we’ve seen a lot of interest. I’ve personally have been getting a lot of media interest specifically around this gum arabic issue because I think, exactly as Kate said, it is globally important for so many different sectors—pharmaceuticals, food, and et cetera. I think the difficulty with gum arabic is that while we know that over 90 percent of the world’s gum arabic supply comes from Sudan, we now have the situation where you get gum arabic that is stamped “product of Egypt” because of how much of it is smuggled, and how much of it—and, similarly, “product of Chad,” et cetera. And so it’s difficult then to say exactly how the gum arabic got to those countries. It’s difficult to track it in that way, unless you have, for example, whistleblowers or those on the inside to be able to provide some of that concrete, you know, evidence.

But, that being said, I think everything that that can work should be tried. I think we should be firing on all cylinders. Not necessarily because we think there’s going to be the kind of attention, for example, on some of the Arab countries, in particular the UAE, which has shown that it’s reasonably impervious to that kind of critique. But I think because focusing on something that is a shared substance, that is a shared interest, if you will, has proven to be quite successful in other cases. For example on Gaza, where people have—where global solidarity has been precisely because Western countries are implicated and profit from, you know, the violence that’s taking place in Gaza, and, similarly, here. You know, the raw materials that come out of Sudan are part of the global commodity chain.

So I think absolutely worth doing. I think it needs to be looked at from a perspective of, you know, how are you impacted by something that—in the West, let’s say. What is it the housewife in Idaho, or whatever the saying is? But how are you impacted by something that’s going on thousands and thousands of miles away? I think the world has fundamentally changed. The world has shown that it is actually very happy, and by here especially I mean world leaders, to tolerate a great deal of violence against civilians. That the world is not actually leaping towards action when they hear words like “famine” and “genocide.” But we have seen a lot of global solidarity, I think, that is still worth tapping into.

GAVIN: Thank you for that.

Let’s take another question.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Pearl Robinson.

GAVIN: Hi, Pearl. Oh, you’ve disappeared. Let’s take it another one. Oh, no, there she is. You’re muted, Pearl.

Q: Am I unmuted now?

GAVIN: There. Yes. Yes, you are.

Q: Based on this discussion, am I correct in concluding that the peacekeeping capacity of African regional organizations is another casualty of this war in Sudan?

GAVIN: Cameron.

HUDSON: Yes, I would say—I would say that it’s—I would say that it’s bigger than that, though. Obviously the African Union is under great financial strain right now. There was an African Union Peace and Security Council discussion just yesterday in Addis. And I spoke with those who attended that. And there was no discussion at all in that meeting, a thousand days into this conflict, on a protection of civilians, you know, operation inside Sudan. So I think that it goes beyond just the—just the financial component, or the bureaucratic component. It goes back to something I think we’ve touched on—Michelle was touching on earlier, which is I think that there was—you know, twenty years ago when we had the Save Darfur Movement, there was a sense that we could solve these problems.

There was an ambition that we had a responsibility to solve these kinds of crises against civilians, right? Genocides against civilians, right? And that was fed by, you know, Samantha Power’s book on the subject. That was fed by this movement across college campuses. And I think that—I think that the world has changed in that time. I think that the geopolitics have changed. I think America, the role in the world that we see for ourselves and for our country, has changed. And it’s not just a creation of the Trump administration. I think that it was—it was changing well before that. So I just think that this ambition of solving these problems in our time has really been scaled back. And I think you’re seeing that not just from a U.S. domestic standpoint, but you’re seeing it from these institutions that we talk about failing us right now.

GAVIN: Yeah, a particularly toxic combination with a lack of awareness for how this actually does affect us.

I think we can squeeze in one more question.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Rodolphe Constanzo.

Q: Hello. Can you hear me?

GAVIN: Yes.

Q: Yes, hi. Rudy Constanzo from JPMorgan. Thank you for a wonderful panel.

Actually, I have two quick questions—hopefully, quick two questions. One is, how—we mentioned earlier, by Kholood, the risk of expansion into Ethiopia or Eritrea of this conflict. So understand a little bit more, given also the issue with Tigray, what is the probability of this particularly expanding into Eritrea and Ethiopia, trying to get access to the sea again? And second is, in the short to medium term, what are the key inflection points, in either positive or negative direction, that we should be looking for as it relates specifically to the RSF versus SAF conflict? Thank you.

GAVIN: Thank you. On inflection points.

KHAIR: Anyone take the first, and I’ll take the second?

GAVIN: Yeah.

KHAIR: I’ll take the second, anyone want to take the first?

GAVIN: It’s such a big question, because it’s not just the Sudan dynamics that could trigger this war with Ethiopian-Eritrea. So let’s table that. If we have time for it, we’ll get to it. Let’s stick with Sudan.

KHAIR: Sure. Let me start with the inflection points. I mean, I think if el-Obeid, which is the capital of North Kordofan, but also is a historically key commercial part of Kordofan, I think if that falls to the RSF that will put Cairo on high alert, because there’s a road just north of el-Obeid that goes into Omdurman, the western part of the capital, which takes about four hours—to get from Barah to Omdurman is about a four-hour ride. And the RSF have shown their capacity to go over normal roads as well as desert roads. And I think that will set Egypt off. We’re already seeing Egypt position itself in a much more muscular stance when it comes to Sudan and Khartoum. It is and has always remained the red line for them. And therefore, we may see that Egyptian-Turkish alliance really kick into full gear.

We’ve already seen several shipments of arms go into port Sudan by the Turks just in the past week or so. And so I think the fall of el-Obeid will trigger some of those things. It’s also sort of southeastwards, we’re seeing the RSF, along with the allied SPLM-N/al-Hilu group go into Blue Nile a lot more. Now, Blue Nile is interesting because it, of course, borders Benishangul-Gumuz of Ethiopia and opens up that aspect. And, of course, there’s been talk—very sort of good reporting on an RSF training camp in Benishangul-Gumuz, just across the border in Ethiopia. And therefore, if the RSF were to cross into Ethiopia, Blue Nile, they’d be able to much more consolidate their control over the southeastern part.

But Abu Shotal, who is a key commander of the RSF in Blue Nile, is currently being courted, shall we say, by military intelligence. And they’re hoping to flip him in the same way they did another commander in the central part of the country. And so whether or not he flips is also going to be, I think, a key point. And we can discuss offline maybe some of the others, but I thought worth mentioning those two. Tigray is very important, particularly because of the split between—within TDF. But I’ll let Cameron or Declan go into that.

GAVIN: Cameron or Declan, anything to add on what we should be looking for here?

WALSH: Well, maybe—

HUDSON: Well, I’ll just—go ahead. Go ahead, Declan. No, no, please.

WALSH: I mean, only just to say that, you know, there’s been folks who watch Ethiopia closely, as Rodolphe probably knows, have been speaking about imminent possibility of this conflict. And there’s no doubt that if it does erupt that it’s going to have significant impacts inside Sudan. You know, not only has Eritrea been providing—helping to provide training for some of the SAF allies, particularly some of the Darfuri forces in the east of the country, but, you know, you just see—when I look at that map, or that region, you just see this area where all of these trip lines are interconnected with each other now. And it seems if not inevitable, then there’s a real danger that one of them goes off, and it’s going to set off some of the others. And you know, I think probably the most—you know, one is Chad. We’ve spoken about that one. One is South Sudan. Potentially the one in Tigray—with Tigray in the middle, and between Ethiopian and Eritrea, could be the most worrisome, just because the scale will be so large and the stakes are enormous.

HUDSON: Yeah, I would just—I would just add to that, Isaias—President Isaias of Eritrea has really—you know, he signed mutual defense agreements with the Egyptians and with the Sudanese. And so he, I think, has become a real linchpin, and Eritrea has become a real linchpin, in the Horn going forward, with respect to whether or not Ethiopia does try to pursue more aggressively sea access, and aligned himself with Egypt and Sudan. So I think that that’s—as Declan said—that’s all very much intertwined.

But the last thing I wanted to say was just picking up on what Kholood said about kind of some of the inflection points. And just to remind people that the outside support that has been coming into these actors is not the same, right? The UAE has built what I would call the largest, most sophisticated air bridge operation anywhere in the world today. They are delivering weapons—the most sophisticated, advanced, latest-generation weaponry to the RSF, to their doorstep. And they’re doing it through five different countries, right? And they are coordinating this, all with total deniability, through Chad, Libya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Puntland in Somalia. And they have Ethiopia waiting in the wings to be activated again.

So this is a very, very sophisticated operation that is coming at virtually zero cost to the RSF. At the same time, the SAF has been buying on the open market its weapons. It’s not getting free weapons from, you know, Egypt. It doesn’t get a friends and family discount from, you know, Russia or Iran, or any of these places. You know, it is having to do all of this on its own. I’m not trying to, you know, sing a sad song for the army. What I’m saying is it looks to me like Egypt is about to become much more aggressively involved in this. It is about to be become much more kinetic in the role that it plays. And it’s about to be providing more of the kind of weaponry that the UAE has been giving to the RSF.

And I think that if countries believe that a red line has been crossed with the fall of el-Fasher and the potential siege of el-Obeid, then if we see outside actors begin to support the SAF in the same way that the UAE has been supporting the RSF all along, that will trigger, I think, a massive acceleration and expansion of this conflict beyond what we are already seeing today. And I think that will be the ultimate inflection point for this war.

GAVIN: Well, unsurprisingly, sobering conclusions. But I cannot thank the panelists enough for taking the time to share their insights with us. I’m very, very grateful. I hope that people will continue to pay attention to what is happening in Sudan and reflect on some of the worst-case scenarios, and what they might mean for our own security going forward. But thank you all very much for joining us today.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.