NAIROBI, Kenya — While discussing peace, Sudan’s generals prepared for war.
In the days before Sudan plunged into disastrous conflict, its two most powerful generals came tantalizingly close to a deal that American and British mediators hoped would defuse their explosive rivalry and even lead the vast African nation to democracy.
The stakes were enormous. Since 2019, when a popular revolution toppled Sudan’s 30-year dictator, the transition to democracy has been blocked by this pair of ruthless, bickering generals. Now a single issue was hampering an agreement to get them to hand over power.
Foreign envoys held lengthy meetings with the two generals — army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary leader Lt-Gen Mohamed Hamdan — to reach an agreement. Promises were made, concessions extorted. They even ate at the house of a high-ranking general.
But on the streets, the rival military machines were preparing for a fight.
At night, troops quietly poured into rival military camps in the capital, Khartoum, where they tagged one another like opposing players on a soccer field. Paramilitary fighters surrounded a base housing warplanes from Egypt, a powerful neighbor who had sided with the Sudanese army.
And when the first shots rang out on Saturday morning, the semblance of dialogue was immediately destroyed.
Now fighting rages in Khartoum and across Sudan, already claiming hundreds of lives and opening a volatile and unpredictable chapter for Africa’s third largest country. A fresh barrage of explosions rocked the main airport on Wednesday, and residents said they were running out of food amid growing fears regional powers could be drawn into the conflict.
The violence has sparked debate and allegations about how it happened. Some in Sudan and Washington are wondering if the foreign powers that have tried to remove the generals from power — the United States and Britain, but also the United Nations and African and Arab governments — are also to blame for the mess.
Since the generals seized power in a coup 18 months ago, they said, foreign officials have caved in to their intransigence and threats while sidelining Sudan’s beleaguered pro-democracy forces.
“The generals have not been held accountable,” said Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political scientist. “The kidnappings, enforced disappearances, sham trials, unlawful detentions – the internationals have turned a blind eye to it all for the sake of a political process that has now gone horribly wrong.”
Though strikingly different, the two generals marched in lockstep for years.
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, 62, is a staid four-star general who was trained in Egypt and Jordan and has commanded troops in Sudan’s grueling counterinsurgency campaigns in the south and west of the country. Born in a village on the Nile, he embodies the officer class of the riverside Arab tribes that have ruled Sudan since independence in 1956.
Mohamed Hamdan, commonly known as Hemeti, is in his late 40s and a camel trader turned militia commander known for his ruthlessness that steadily gained wealth and influence.
The two generals made their careers in the early 2000s in the violent melting pot of Darfur, the western region ravaged by tribal rebellion. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, then the autocratic ruler of Sudan, sent General al-Burhan to help quell the uprising.
He selected General Hamdan, then leader of the notorious Janjaweed militia, to help in the battle.
General Hamdan did the job so well that Mr al-Bashir adopted him as his personal enforcer, jokingly referred to the commander as “my protector” and appointed him head of the newly formed fast support forces. General Hamdan grew rich from lucrative gold mining concessions and his commission to send thousands of troops to Yemen, where the United Arab Emirates were well paid for his services.
With the support of the European Union, his troops prevented migrants from crossing Sudan’s long borders – even though General Hamdan was himself suspected of profiting from people smuggling. According to the Sudan expert Alex de Waal, his career has become “a lesson in political entrepreneurship from a violence specialist”.
The two generals turned against Mr al-Bashir in April 2019 as protesters called for his ouster in a revolution that raised heady hopes for democracy.
But two months later, the generals sent their soldiers to eliminate the remaining protesters, killing at least 120 people, a grisly sign that the military would not relinquish power as easily as Mr al-Bashir did.
That message sounded even louder in October 2021, when the two generals joined forces to seize power and oust the country’s civilian prime minister.
The coup came as a nasty surprise for an American envoy, Jeffrey Feltman, who had met with General al-Burhan and General Hamdan just hours earlier, and they had assured him that they would not take over.
But her deception cost her little. Instead of being ostracized, the generals were soon being courted by Western officials hoping to remove them from power. Sanctions that the United States had tacitly threatened General Hamdan with, targeting his financial interests in the Persian Gulf, were never imposed, said a former US official with knowledge of the talks, who, like other officials in this article, is on condition who expressed anonymity Discuss sensitive politics.
Some began to treat the generals as statesmen. In February, the head of the World Food Program, former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, caused quiet consternation among Western embassies in Sudan when he was a guest at two consecutive public ceremonies. First General al-Burhan awarded him Sudan’s highest civilian honor, the Order of the Two Niles; The next evening he was the smiling guest of honor at a dinner hosted by General Hamdan.
But then the generals began to fall apart.
General Hamdan fears the army is being infiltrated by Islamists, including former loyalists to the al-Bashir regime, his sworn enemies.
Military intelligence, controlled by General al-Burhan, began telling foreign officials that its rival had tried to secretly import armed drones from Turkey to bolster its armed forces.
Their rivalry also reflected deeply felt institutional friction. Regular soldiers looked down on General Hamdan and his paramilitaries as a ragtag force – “a bunch of yahoos jumped off sticks, not real military men,” as one Western ambassador put it.
For their part, the Rapid Support Forces resented the perceived discrimination and believed it was their turn to seize power in Khartoum.
“They had a victim mentality,” said Mohamed Hashim, a journalist who interviewed leaders of the Rapid Support Forces for Sudan’s state broadcaster. “People discriminated against them, mocked them and told them they were not Sudanese.”
General Hamdan began to position himself as a future leader—travelling the country, giving gifts to fellow tribal leaders, and posing as a champion of the marginalized. He allied himself with political parties, advocated elections, and hesitated at any mention of his Janjaweed past or the role his troops played in the Khartoum massacre in June 2019.
In December, Sudan’s National Human Rights Commission named General Hamdan “Person of the Year”, leading to derisive reactions from many citizens.
That same month, under pressure from Western, African and Arab countries, the generals agreed to return power to a civilian-led government later that month. But first they had to agree on key issues, most notably how quickly their forces would merge into a single army – a process General Hamdan had the most to lose from as the Rapid Support Forces would be effectively disbanded.
Army leaders urged the job to be completed in two years. General Hamdan said it would take a decade.
Tensions erupted openly. A senior Western official once said that General Hamdan had been barred from an important meeting chaired by General al-Burhan at the Presidential Palace. He was only allowed in “after standing outside and literally banging on the door,” the officer said.
Egypt entered the battle alongside the army. Critics feared the talks were flawed or moving too quickly. Negotiators said this is Sudan’s best chance for the long-awaited transition to democracy.
“They were the guys with the power and the guns,” the senior Western official said of the generals. “We tried to find a political way to exonerate them.”
According to a senior United Nations official, “We worked with the tools that were on the table.”
Those tensions increased last Wednesday when Rapid Support Forces troops surrounded a military base in Meroe, 125 miles north of Khartoum, where Egypt has deployed several warplanes – a blinking sign that war is looming. But even then, foreign officials were hoping that the two generals would repair fences and hand over power peacefully.
Talks to integrate their armed forces have boiled down to one final key point, the negotiators said — the army’s command structure during a transitional period.
On Friday, Volker Perthes, the UN envoy to Sudan, dined at the home of Lt. Gen. Shams al-Deen al-Kabashi, the army’s deputy leader, for iftar, the food that breaks the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan. There is no indication of an imminent war, UN officials said.
Hours later, at dawn, the first shots rang out over Khartoum.
