Told through a personal lens, Ahmed Ismat explains why Sudan cannot achieve peace without confronting the RSF’s violent origins.
For millions of Sudanese, the war has reduced life to one agonising question: when will it end? Peace is no longer a political luxury but an urgent necessity. It is the only thing that matters to families who lost their homes, to communities pushed into mass displacement, and to all those wondering whether their relatives are still alive.
I could feel the heaviness of our reality when Mahmoud and I met in Gallal café in Madinaty, Cairo. We chose the location simply because he lives in Badr and we wanted to head to Downtown Cairo eventually, so it made sense to meet near my place. It was the first time I had seen Mahmoud in three years.
The way we greeted each other was so intense that it made an Egyptian woman at the next table start crying.
Mahmoud was instantly embarrassed. He doesn’t know how to navigate a crying stranger, or emotions in general, so he simply stared at his phone. He muttered that she must be crying over a relationship as he watched a video of Khartoum burning on his social media feed.
We didn’t talk much after that. We have become exceptionally good at silence.
Certainly, the war in Sudan did not appear out of nowhere on 15 April 2023. It was a long, carefully constructed project of violence becoming visible.
Before the first shot was even fired, politicians and elites spent years trying to reduce everything to a simple conflict between power blocs, or a transitional crisis that could be neatly resolved with yet another framework agreement.
Many external observers also tried to explain it away as two generals fighting over a shrinking pie. But for us, the real story was about a state that spent years systematically allowing more than one armed power to exist within its borders.
When I trace back to the exact moment I first noticed the collapse of our state’s institutions, my mind goes to May 2019, just after then-President Omar al-Bashir fell. It was the prelude to what would be known years later as the 8th of Ramadan massacre. I remember how we stood out there, trying to protect the sit-in with nothing but rocks.
We were acting as the neighbourhood committees, desperately trying to hold the fabric of our streets together, while the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) turned violence into a lucrative business.
I recall that day with brutal clarity because that is when they killed Ali Kisketa, a friend from my neighbourhood. Then my memory drags me to the aftermath, when they also killed Abdul Salam Kisha and Qusai Hammadtto.
I also lost loved ones indirectly. My friend Ali, who was a maxillofacial surgeon, died of a heart defect following three consecutive days of intensively treating injured migrants fleeing Khartoum in Atbara’s general hospital.
Another friend, Mazen, took his own life last year.
There is a deep, structural flaw in how the army has communicated the meaning of this war. By framing its position around aggressive slogans like "no negotiation," the army has allowed the RSF — a force intrinsically built on violence — to absurdly pose as the side offering peace.
The army hasn’t just lost a media battle; it has ceded the moral language of the war itself. And that language matters, because the RSF’s violence is not incidental.
Those sitting in displacement tents, uprooted from their entire lives, don’t just want to know who will win; they need to know why all of this happened in the first place, and exactly what will take place after the shooting finally stops.
War requires clear communication, not hollow slogans. It requires a discourse that tells people: we fight because we had absolutely no choice when your existence was threatened, and if they put down their weapons today, peace will be our immediate priority.
The purpose of any legitimate army is not to perpetuate conflict, but to protect its people and end the war as soon as possible. For Sudan, the army must clearly position itself in stark contrast to the RSF.
For us, the RSF was never just an acronym in a geopolitical report. They were in our streets, occupying our neighbourhoods, sleeping in our houses. We watched first-hand how they turned the Khartoum we knew and loved into a place of total fear.
Compared to the army – which included individuals who chose to stand with the people when that choice carried genuine, fatal risk – the RSF has historically been intrinsically linked to violence against civilians.
Indeed, this was the role it was designed to play from its inception in the early 2000s when the state was facing a dilemma over how to deploy extreme violence with the least political cost. Given the formal army could theoretically be held accountable for every battle, a model was developed in which forces operated completely outside the traditional structure of the state.
These forces were given weapons and a mandate to carry out the brutal tasks the central authority sought to distance itself from.
The Janjaweed were used as a specific method of governance, produced by the centre and deployed whenever convenient. Yet many still make the fatal mistake of portraying the RSF as a marginal, rogue force that suddenly rose to power.
After Bashir fell, this force didn’t vanish with the regime that birthed it; it metastasised. It inherited the state's sprawling security networks, acquired massive corporate holdings, and cultivated its own external relations. It evolved into a fully realised political and economic project, fighting solely to protect its own interests.
In the case of the RSF, its weaponry was closely linked to money, gold smuggling, cross-border trade, and mercenaryism.
Gold became the ultimate source of power in a collapsed economy. Armed forces were able to translate physical resources directly into political influence, perfectly illustrating what Alex de Waal described as a “political marketplace” where loyalties are bought, and alliances are structured using raw capital.
In this marketplace, true power comes from the ability to finance weapons and turn immense wealth into regional influence.
When central state resources declined following South Sudan's secession, the RSF capitalised on the vacuum. They achieved financial independence, making them less reliant on the state and far more capable of challenging it. Even their deployment in the war in Yemen was part of a new political economy, in which exporting fighters abroad became a lucrative source of financing and regional leverage.
Therefore, framing the RSF as a "revolution of the marginalised" is a dangerous fallacy. There is a profound difference between acknowledging the tragic recruitment conditions of people from impoverished environments, and excusing a heavily armed project that weaponised this marginalisation to serve a new network of elite interests.
The Janjaweed were not outside the state; they were its harshest, most cynical product — and when this force grew large enough, it naturally wanted to consume the state entirely. For the RSF, the war was an existential battle over the very shape of that state.
How could a force that sprouted from an economy of violence turn, in the eyes of some politicians, into a potential democratic partner? Societies deep in crisis often delude themselves into believing they can control a violent force by pointing it at a specific opponent.
Karl Marx vividly described how a fractured society can produce a force that benefits from everyone’s collective fear. Elites, terrified of their rivals, look for an armed shortcut, convinced they hold the leash.
But a force that derives its legitimacy entirely from the barrel of a gun enters politics with a logic of coercion, not persuasion. Those who saw the RSF as a convenient tool to balance the army or bypass Islamists wilfully ignored the entire history of this weapon.
An entity accustomed to deriving its immense power from the informal economy and the active bypassing of institutions will never magically transform into a democratic national institution simply by signing a piece of paper.
This does not absolve the Sudanese army. Its long, troubled history of political intervention and systemic participation in authoritarian regimes demands sweeping reform of all state institutions. However, there is a fundamental, unbridgeable difference between an institution that desperately requires reform, and a militia whose very existence is predicated on undermining the concept of an institution itself.
An institution, regardless of its deep flaws, inherently assumes the existence of rules, structure, and a relationship between state power and the law. A militia represents an inverted reality where the law is entirely subordinate to brute force, and state institutions become mere tools in the hands of whoever possesses the most money and weapons.
Hence, this war was the violent expression of a state wrestling with what it seeks to be.
When military control is accompanied by the systematic looting and deliberate destruction of civil institutions, war becomes a calculated means to permanently rearrange who owns and who loses.
In Sudan, the war was engineered through the systematic dismantling of daily life. Crimes were deliberately filmed and broadcast to break the collective will of the people. The ultimate goal was total control over citizens’ sense of belonging.
After all, when a man loses his home, he loses his memory, his anchor, and his sense of the future.
As Lebanese psychologist Mustafa Hijazi pointed out, an oppressed individual who has been severely marginalised can, when suddenly handed absolute, unchecked authority, turn into a monster who practices the exact same logic of cruelty he once suffered from.
The true danger emerges when a deep-seated sense of historical injustice meets high-calibre weapons, a total absence of law, and a toxic discourse that reduces human beings to abstract enemies. Violence simply becomes a way to prove oneself.
Without an institution to hold the fighter accountable, the "other" transitions from a human being into a disposable object. This is exactly what we witnessed with the gleeful documentation of crimes and the online publication of civilian humiliation, framed as if it were a military victory.
We heard comfortable, lazy classifications that "the army are all kizan (a derogatory nickname for Islamists loyal to al-Bashir's National Congress Party)," that "the RSF are all gharaba (people from west Sudan)," and that "northerners are just local informants for the coloniser." These broad strokes make societies entirely incapable of seeing the complex, agonising truth.
It is entirely possible – and important – to acknowledge that deep corruption and the attempts of Islamists to return to power exist at the same time as an armed militia representing a parasitic project that actively wants to devour the state. Choosing the easier, binary explanation exempts us from facing our crushing reality.
Sudan reached this horrific moment due to decades of building a weak state, a hollowed-out economy, and the treatment of national institutions as disposable tools for personal conflict.
Nevertheless, the question now is what will become of Sudan after the war. Because for the side theoretically protecting the state, if it continues to refuse to recognise the nature of the project that dragged us into this catastrophe in the first place, there is little chance that our fractured country can be rebuilt.
But defending the state does not, and will not, justify repeating the catastrophic mistakes of the past. Sudan desperately needs a different kind of state—one where the military institution is firmly situated below society, and where a militia is never again viewed as a viable alternative.
Furthermore, we must be honest with ourselves that defeating the militia terrorising the people does not mean the end of Sudan’s problems. The hardest battle will be what follows this stage, including rebuilding legitimate institutions, holding the perpetrators of atrocities accountable, and permanently ending the politicisation of the army.
The message to the Sudanese people must not be one of blind hatred or endless revenge. It must be expressed with uncompromising honesty—that we will absolutely not accept armed aggression as a legitimate way to rule.
Peace will be possible if weapons are laid down, justice isn’t bypassed, and blanket amnesties are not granted. And certainly, whilst peace is the ultimate goal, it must never be left as a cynical political tool for those who invaded our houses and looted our cities.
Before we can move forward, Sudan needs to permanently destroy the idea that made this war possible in the first place.
Ahmed Ismat is a Sudanese writer, researcher and political activist currently based in Cairo. He previously served as a spokesperson for Khartoum resistance committees in Sudan. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book, The Republic of the Unimportant.
Follow Ahmed on X: @A_socialist1
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab.
