Play as · WW3 2026 · L1 · Civil War · Famine

Sudan - 2026

Sudan is in the third year of the catastrophic civil war that began on April 15, 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) - the partner-and-rival coups of 2019 and 2021 having broken down into open military confrontation. Population about 49M (with substantial internal displacement and refugee outflow). The Khartoum metropolitan area has been substantially destroyed; Darfur has experienced the most acute renewed crisis since the 2003-2005 violence including formally declared famine across multiple states; the displaced population has exceeded 12 million in internal-and-external categories. The strategic identity is the active civil-war state with the multi-actor proxy involvement - UAE-aligned support to the RSF (the most-documented external sponsorship of the conflict), Egyptian-and-Saudi-aligned support to the SAF, Russian Africa Corps presence with both sides at different periods, Turkish drones to the SAF, Iranian-aligned support to the SAF.

Starting position

The military situation has been the dominant fact of Sudanese existence since April 2023. The SAF retains formal sovereign-state recognition, controls Port Sudan as the principal political-administrative center after the Khartoum collapse, holds the eastern and northern territory broadly, and operates the conventional-military instruments (combat aircraft, armor, artillery). The RSF emerged from the Janjaweed Arab-tribal militias of the Darfur conflict, retains Darfur and substantial portions of central Sudan including Khartoum-suburbs, controls the Hemedti-family gold-mining operations in Jebel Amer, and has demonstrated capacity for sustained urban warfare. The UAE-aligned air-and-logistics support to the RSF (extensively documented through UN expert-panel reports), the Egyptian aerial-support to the SAF, and the multi-actor pattern make a single negotiated settlement structurally difficult.

What turns the campaign

What each Sudanese actor wants is different. The SAF wants the international recognition consolidated, the RSF politically-and-militarily defeated through the war's continuation, the UAE-Egyptian-Russian-Saudi diplomatic-and-material flows continued in its favor, and the post-victory civilian-political transition managed on terms that preserve the SAF's institutional position. The RSF wants the territorial control institutionalized into a political-territorial settlement that produces de facto partition or federal recognition, the UAE-aligned support sustained, and the international engagement (the Hemedti diaspora-diplomacy travel, the partial recognition signals) deepened. What both sides fear, with different priorities, is a regional-actor military intervention that decisively recalibrates (Egyptian, Eritrean, Ethiopian moves have all been conceivable), a famine-and-humanitarian outcome that produces UN-Security-Council coordinated pressure beyond rhetorical condemnation, and a domestic-political crisis that the prolonged-civil-war dynamics could produce on either side.

Signature challenge