Fears remain that Sudan – riven by fighting between the Sudanese army and its paramilitary rival, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – could plunge into a protracted crisis, prompting a humanitarian disaster with broad geopolitical implications.
A string of failed or divided states already exist on Europe’s peripheries, a crescent of instability that stretches from the African Sahel, Libya, through to Yemen, Syria, and north into Ukraine, three countries where extended wars have been raging.
After the disaster of Iraq and the chaotic Joe Biden-led retreat from Afghanistan, the days of significant direct western interventions are over, although arms are being supplied in volume to.Ukraine. In Sudan, the US has been notably reluctant to deploy its military even to rescue an estimated 16,000 of its civilians.
Washington’s efforts have been largely diplomatic, although its principal security concern has been to avoid a repeat of the 2012 Benghazi disaster, where US diplomatic buildings were attacked and the ambassador killed, by rescuing its embassy staff from Khartoum last weekend.
Elsewhere, France and Britain retreated from Mali last November, where they had been trying to stabilise the country and prevent the spread of Islamist extremism, complaining that the west African country’s government had chosen instead to align itself with Russia’s mercenary and natural resource-hungry Wagner Group.
Many Sudanese people have already begun fleeing the fighting, with vast queues at border points with Egypt, an estimated 20,000 people entering Chad; while the UN’s refugee agency, the UNCHR, reporting at least 40,000 fleeing the capital, Khartoum, the scene of the some of the fiercest fighting between government and paramilitary forces.
“Sudan has a sizeable population of 45 million,” said Ahmed Soliman, a senior research fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, “so the potential for people leaving in larger numbers if there is a protracted conflict has to be considered. Most of the migration will be internal and to neighbouring countries.”
Inevitably, however, people will also try to go further into Europe as happened in Syria and Ukraine. People have long fled the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, where paramilitaries have been accused of waging a genocide against local people – but a new feature of the outbreak of fighting has been to bring conflict to Khartoum.
In the UK, however, the policy response was already, in the government’s proposed illegal migration bill, to criminalise people making small boats and other irregular crossings to the UK. Yet Home Office figures for the year to September 2022 already show that people from Sudan represented the 8th largest country for asylum claims to the UK – and that 84% of them were granted.
This week, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, said the UK had no plans to introduce any safe route for Sudanese people to enter the country, in contrast to Ukraine and Afghanistan, where Britain sought to extend some help to people fleeing as fighting broke out.
“The government’s plans seems to criminalise individuals,” fleeing from Sudan said Maddy Crowther, an executive director of NGO Waging Peace.
It is also unclear whether it will be possible for Britain to completely export any migration problems to continental Europe, when Germany and France already receive triple and double the asylum applications of the UK.
It is a long time since Osama bin Laden was based in Sudan (he spent five formative years in the country before being expelled 1996). Islamism in the government has been mostly in retreat since the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and the RSF paramilitaries have sought to portray themselves as anti-Islamist.
Experts believe there is little immediate prospect of an extended crisis creating an opportunity for terror groups to strengthen, but a long conflict creates unwanted uncertainties. “If this conflict continues, then we risk a whole generation becoming traumatised. That can lead to radicalisation,” said May Darwich, an associate professor at Birmingham University.
A more likely negative scenario is a Yemen or Syria-style situation, where an initial conflict deteriorates into increasingly protracted fighting, and a range of international powers pick sides and seek to exploit the country’s weakness. Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said he had “deep concern” about Russia’s Wagner group becoming embroiled in the conflict.
For now the situation remains ambiguous, amid reports that Wagner has offered the RSF rebels weapons, but Hemedti has turned the mercenaries down. Wagner, through a subsidiary, is already involved in goldmining in the county, the EU said in February as it levied sanctions on subsidiaries of the group.
“What you have seen in the past in the region, is that as the US has gradually disengaged that other actors have sought to enter the space,” Darwich said.