Somalia on Steroids’: Sudan Conflict Escalates

Robbie Gramer

A top U.S. official in Africa is cautioning that Sudan’s civil war could spiral into a full-blown regional conflict or a failed state absent a lasting peace deal and path toward a political transition to a civilian-led government.

“I think the worst-case scenario in Sudan is a 20-, 25-year version of Somalia on steroids,” Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy for Sudan, said in an interview with Foreign Policy. He warned of “the speed with which this [conflict] could go from a two-sided war to a seven- or eight-sided war where neighboring countries are pulled in” and said it could become “even worse than a Libya 2.0.” Somalia and Libya have both suffered chronic instability and conflict.

Perriello painted a dire picture of the current state of the civil war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a rival militia group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that has pushed the country to the brink of humanitarian collapse and famine after a year of war. Sudanese analysts and outside experts have long warned that the war is largely being ignoredby the world as conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine overshadow it. But Perriello’s comments offer some of the starkest warnings yet from Western officials about the long-term geopolitical fallout that could result if Sudan’s civil war drags on.

U.S. President Joe Biden tapped Perriello, a former diplomat and Democratic member of Congress, to lead U.S. efforts to address the crisis in Sudan in February. Since then, Perriello has tried to revive peace talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but has so far been unsuccessful. “We are actively engaged with all sides in trying to end this war every day,” he said. “There are some days where it feels like we’re very close—and other days that are less so.”

The prospect of peace talks, however far off, has become more urgent as the RSF tightens its noose around El Fasher, a heavily populated SAF stronghold in the Darfur region of western Sudan. With a population that has swelled to as many as 2.8 million as people flee the violence elsewhere in the country, El Fasher is now nearly surrounded by RSF fighters, and aid groups fear the RSF will carry out widespread atrocities, including mass rape, torture, and massacres, if it seizes control of the city, as it has done in other cities it has captured. The U.S. State Department in December concluded that both sides in the conflict had committed war crimes and that the RSF and its allied militias had committed ethnic cleansing.

Perriello didn’t give specifics on when, or if, peace talks in Jeddah would resume. “We must exhaust every option, but the Sudanese will award no points for exhaustion. We need a major diplomatic breakthrough, and we need it now,” he said.

The consequences of Sudan collapsing into a failed state would be far-reaching, experts say. The conflict in neighboring Libya, with a population of more than 6 million, had wide-reaching effects on the flow of extremist fighters and guns to other parts of the continent, including the Sahel region, and major impacts on the flow of refugees attempting to cross to Europe. Sudan has a population of around 50 million by comparison, and its instability could easily spill over into neighboring countries already grappling with chronic instability, such as South Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic.

“We’re talking about something 10 times the size of the Libya crisis,” said Cameron Hudson, an expert on U.S. Africa policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The prospects of controlling illegal flow of drugs, weapons, migrants, fighters across unstable regions in Africa, you can kiss all of that goodbye if Sudan collapses,” he added. “There are huge consequences to us ignoring Sudan or getting it wrong, which many people aren’t fully attuned to.”

In the early 1990s, under then-dictator Omar al-Bashir, Sudan served as a refuge for Osama bin Laden, who used his base there to build up al Qaeda into a global terrorist network before the 9/11 attacks. Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militant groups were also active there during this time, enjoying safe haven from Bashir, who had allied with the country’s influential Islamists to shore up power following his 1989 military coup. A failed state in Sudan could give terrorist groups a new foothold in the region, officials and experts warn. Those same experts and officials also fear that as the SAF grows more desperate in its fight against the RSF, it will increasingly turn to powerful old-guard Islamist elements that once helped rule the country for more support.

“The Sudanese people I think are very united in not wanting to see a failed state and not wanting to see Islamic extremists set up shop there,” Perriello said. “But there is a history of it, having been a breeding ground for that kind of terrorism.”

Sudan began what looked like a promising, if tenuous, path toward democracy after Bashir was overthrown in 2019 following mass protests. But in late 2021, the head of the SAF, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, jointly seized control from a civilian transitional government in a coup. Relations between the two sides steadily deteriorated as both rival factions jockeyed for power until they erupted into war in April 2023—a crisis that experts attribute in part to missteps from the Biden administration’s Africa policy.

Since then, according to some estimates, as many as 150,000 people have been killed (though the precise numbers are difficult to measure), and nearly 9 million people have been displaced. Nearly half of Sudan’s entire population, 25 million people, require lifesaving humanitarian assistance, according to data from the United Nations.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives are preparing a resolution recognizing that genocide has occurred in Sudan, according to three congressional staffers familiar with the matter, in a bid to call more attention to the conflict and pressure the Biden administration to ramp up diplomatic efforts on a cease-fire.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken phoned Burhan in late May and “discussed the need to urgently end the conflict in Sudan and enable unhindered humanitarian access, including cross border and cross line, to alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people,” according to a readout from the State Department.

The conflict has now morphed into a proxy competition as various regional powers vie for geopolitical influence in Sudan. Egypt and Saudi Arabia back the SAF, while Burhan has also sought to strengthen ties with Russia and Iran to shore up his forces’ flagging war efforts. The United Arab Emirates has been widely accused of funneling arms and resources to the RSF, as have Russian paramilitary groups such as Wagner.

Emirati officials have repeatedly claimed in public that the country does not supply any weapons to the RSF. Yet U.S. lawmakers have been outspoken in condemning the UAE’s covert supplying of munitions and support for the RSF as more evidence mounts of RSF atrocities across Sudan. Rep. Sara Jacobs, a progressive Democrat and ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s panel on Africa, introduced a bill last month that would prohibit U.S. arms sales to the UAE until the Biden administration certifies that the country is no longer providing support to the RSF.

“We need to be working on this at every level, and it’s clearly not getting the attention it deserves,” Jacobs said in an interview. “One of the fastest ways to end this war and end the suffering is to get the UAE to stop supporting the RSF.”

In March, Jacobs traveled as part of a congressional delegation, along with Perriello, to the Chad-Sudan border to visit refugee camps housing Sudanese civilians who had fled the conflict. “I’ve been to my fair share of refugee camps, and I have never seen children so clearly traumatized as they were there,” she said.

There’s an active debate in Washington over how to get the SAF and RSF to the negotiating table, and part of that debate centers on sanctions. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on a batch of Sudanese companies and commanders on both sides of the conflict in an effort to stem the flow of money bankrolling the war, but Washington has yet to sanction Hemeti himself or explicitly criticize the UAE in public to drop its support for the RSF, though Biden’s envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has publicly referenced the UAE’s role in carefully couched language.

Some experts have been critical of U.S. sanctions on Sudan, arguing that they are too sporadic and piecemeal to pack a punch and push both sides to negotiate. “We’re negotiating the imposition of sanctions [when] we should be negotiating the removal of sanctions,” Hudson said. “If we’re serious about holding peace talks, then we either have to incentivize the groups to come to those talks, which we are not doing, or we need to impose such high costs on them for not attending that they’re forced to attend to relieve the pressure.”

Perriello asserts that the United States has “led the way” on Sudan sanctions and that the threat of sanctions alone has helped pressure Hemeti, at least so far, to hold off on launching a full-scale assault on El Fasher. “I think there’s good reason to sanction Hemeti,” he said. “What we have made clear is that any move on El Fasher would really result in immediate sanctions. And I think there are some who think that that has been a significant reason why we have not yet seen a full assault.”

Great-power competition has also clouded the U.S. response to the conflict as it competes with Russia for influence in Africa and across the so-called global south. Burhan’s deputy, Malik Agar, along with other senior Sudanese officials, is traveling to Russia this week to meet with President Vladimir Putin, the SAF-run government said in a recent statement. The meeting comes as Russia looks to open a military fueling station on the Red Sea along Sudan’s SAF-controlled coast to expand its toehold in the strategically important waterway.

“We will be judged very poorly … if we don’t very, very soon see more significant results in terms of a breakthrough on cease-fire, a breakthrough on aid, and a path forward for Sudan,” Perriello said.