But these testimonies reveal a larger machinery at work. The RSF and the SAF, once aligned in their appetite to crush civilian dissent, now wage war on each other with modern and barbaric technology—and the cost falls on those caught between them: children, women, the weakest and most vulnerable. Gold and weapons flow across borders; neighboring states position themselves for profit and control. Thousands flee burned cities and villages. And the world, watching or not watching, remains silent to the crimes.

The Unraveling

There isn’t an easy answer as to why Sudan has descended once again into civil war. But to understand this moment, it’s useful to look at Sudan’s bloody past. The country’s first civil war began on the eve of independence and lasted from 1955 until 1972, when the southerners, who were largely Christian or animists, revolted against the repressive and exploitative control of the government in Khartoum. “The country has always been ruled by the riverine Arab elites. They built and maintained their government by exploiting the resources and people of the peripheries, farmers and nomads from many diverse Indigenous African and Arab tribes,” Jehanne Henry, the Sudan director of the war documentation unit The Reckoning Project, says. There was relative peace for 11 years, until a second civil war erupted in 1983, when leaders in Khartoum imposed sharia (Islamic) law and accelerated repression of the southern Christian rebels, which ultimately allowed a ruthless military officer, Omar al-Bashir, to come to power in 1989. He would come to be known for many crimes and human rights abuses, the most notable of which was the use of the military and recruitment of Darfuri Arabs to form the Janjaweed militia, or “devils on horseback” as the locals called them, in 2003 to quash the rebel movements at the heart of the first Darfur war, which ignited in the midst of the second civil war and lasted decades. They would ride through villages killing, burning, looting, sparing no one. Women were raped as they went to gather food or firewood. Babies were killed while sleeping on their mother’s backs. An estimated 2 million people had died by the time the second civil war ended in 2005, which paved the way for the south to become an independent country in 2011. But that didn’t stop the fighting in Sudan. Technically, experts say that the Darfur wars ended in 2020 with a death toll of 300,000. But despite a series of well-intended peace deals, “the war in Darfur never ended,” says Henry.

For the next few years, wars broke out in the southern regions near the new border with South Sudan, adding to ongoing violence in parts of Darfur. This time, al-Bashir decided to outsource his counterinsurgency to an entrepreneurial Darfuri militia leader named Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti. Al-Bashir gave his protégé carte blanche to form a paramilitary group, the RSF, using militias drawn from the same Arab communities as the notorious Janjaweed. Well after the first Darfur war had faded from headlines, this duo continued to put down rebel groups throughout the country through brutal methods. But al-Bashir had other problems: Along with its autonomy, South Sudan took 75 percent of the oil economy, and Sudan’s economy tanked, catalyzing frustrated civilians to take to the streets in unprecedented numbers in hopes that civilian democracy might emerge, a delayed Arab Spring of sorts.