Yesterday’s Enemies, Today’s Allies: “Tasis” Between RSF Pragmatism and SPLM-North’s Core Principles

Atar – Mohamed Al-Kamil

In July, the Sudan Founding Alliance (Tasis) established a 15-member Presidential Council headed by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with Abdelaziz al-Hilu, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North (SPLM-North, al-Hilu faction), as his deputy. The alliance also named a prime minister tasked with forming an executive government within a month. This development coincided with the creation of the “Government of Hope” under the authority of Sudan’s Armed Forces, leaving both the RSF and the army with parallel governments ruling the areas under their respective military control.

This came after the army recaptured several central Sudanese states, beginning with Sennar, followed by Al-Jazira, and eventually the capital, Khartoum. The outcome was a military map where each side held vast, clearly demarcated territories, while active frontlines remained in Kordofan and North Darfur, now major theaters of war.

For the RSF, these shifts narrowed its options for nationwide domination. The group now faced a choice: attempt once again to expand eastward from its western strongholds, or consolidate power in Darfur and Kordofan to build a stable authority there. Either path required more money, arms, allies, internal cohesion—and a return to politics.

Indeed, the RSF began political maneuvers, first by drawing defectors from the civilian Democratic Civil Forces Coordination (Taqaddum) into a formal alliance—forming the nucleus of Tasis. The major breakthrough came in February 2025, when SPLM-North (al-Hilu) signed the alliance charter.

The SPLM-North, once a fierce adversary of the RSF both ideologically and on the battlefield, became a heavyweight partner. The delay in finalizing the charter was largely due to negotiations with al-Hilu’s movement. The eventual power-sharing deal reflected a balance: al-Hilu was named deputy head of the council, while the alliance’s constitution enshrined principles the SPLM-North had long sought in vain from Sudanese governments—self-determination, supra-constitutional guarantees of secularism, and a long transition period during which the movement retains its arms.

This alignment followed decades of hostility. The RSF had spearheaded counterinsurgency campaigns against SPLM-North in South Kordofan under the Bashir regime. While the SPLM-North remained at war with Khartoum, the RSF was a creation of the state’s security apparatus and its instrument against rebellions. So what, today, has brought them together?

The RSF’s motives are clearer. Militarily, SPLM-North’s entry opens a new southern front from South Kordofan, while expanding RSF’s border access to South Sudan—facilitating arms and fuel supplies, and trade flows into its territories. This could even allow the RSF to channel goods to wealthy Gulf markets through Mombasa, bypassing Sudan’s ports, since Darfur is landlocked and economically peripheral. Politically, SPLM-North bolsters the RSF’s narrative of a “revolution of the marginalized,” framing its war as a struggle to rebuild Sudan on fairer terms for its neglected peripheries.

Initially, SPLM-North hesitated, refusing to side with either the army or the RSF despite both courting it. Limited coordination with the army soon collapsed, and hopes of alignment ended entirely with the Tasis charter.

The move appeared to contradict SPLM-North’s past positions and ideological steadfastness. Yet sharp political and military shifts have long defined the SPLM’s history, particularly the parent movement, which repeatedly reinvented itself under pressure.

In 1983, the SPLM’s first manifesto called for a “united socialist Sudan” and framed its struggle as part of global anti-imperialism. Backed by Mengistu’s Ethiopia, it fought through the Cold War. But the collapse of the USSR and the rise of Bashir’s Islamist regime in Khartoum, which cast the war as jihad, forced the SPLM to pivot toward Western ties and U.S. advocacy groups. The conflict took on the contours of an identity war: Christian African South versus Arab Muslim North. After the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and especially after John Garang’s death, self-determination took precedence, codified in the 2008 manifesto.

In South Kordofan, the Nuba people—dispossessed by state land seizures for mechanized farming projects awarded to elites and neighboring Arab tribes—joined the SPLM’s fight from the 1980s. While South Sudan secured independence, the “Two Areas” (South Kordofan and Blue Nile) were relegated to vague “popular consultations.” Disputes over the 2011 South Kordofan elections between Ahmed Haroun and Abdelaziz al-Hilu sparked renewed war, soon spreading to Blue Nile.

Thus SPLM-North emerged after South Sudan’s secession, representing 1.97 million people in the Two Areas (4.1% of Sudan’s population). Rich in farmland and gold but trapped in economic marginalization and dependency on Khartoum, the regions lacked the basis for true autonomy. Geography, as with the RSF, imposed limits: full independence proved unworkable, while full integration was elusive. The movement oscillated between negotiating with Khartoum, joining opposition alliances, or waiting for new opportunities.

By 2017, internal rifts led to a split between Malik Agar’s and al-Hilu’s factions, the latter refusing to abandon core principles: secularism, self-determination, and the right to bear arms. In 2020, Agar’s wing signed the Juba Peace Agreement with Sudan’s transitional government, gaining governorship of Blue Nile and partial power-sharing. Today, it fights alongside the army. Al-Hilu, meanwhile, remained committed to his demands—until the war with the RSF offered a chance to entrench them.

In Tasis, al-Hilu has secured unprecedented space: extreme decentralization bordering on independence, and explicit concessions on secularism. Weakening Khartoum suits both partners, deepening Sudan’s fragmentation while expanding SPLM-North’s authority.

The Tasis alliance, then, is a marriage of convenience forged by war and geography. Its survival depends on military resilience against the army, the ability to articulate a coherent political vision, and effective governance of its disparate territories. Otherwise, it risks becoming just another short-lived alliance in Sudan’s long history of fragile coalitions, perpetuating rather than resolving the country’s crisis.