New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan

A truck carrying gunmen affiliated with Sudan's army drives on a street in the eastern city of Gedaref on November 11, 2024. [AFP]

Mohamed Idris, 27, has despaired of ever finding a job in war-torn Sudan. Instead, he's now set his sights on a training camp on the Eritrean border, hoping to join a militia.

"I got my university degree but there aren't any job opportunities, if I get into a training camp I can at least defend my country and my people," he told AFP from Kassala in Sudan, the nearest city to the border.

Analysts say the growing role such militias and armed groups are playing in the war will only prolong the country's suffering.

Sudan's war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, sparking what the UN calls the world's worst displacement crisis.

More than eight million people have been uprooted internally and more than three million have fled abroad.

The northeast African country is on the brink of famine, according to aid agencies, and a UN investigation found both sides committed rights abuses with the RSF particularly implicated in sexual violence.

In Sudan's east, Kassala and Gedaref have so far been spared the chaos of war, but host more than a million people who have fled fighting elsewhere.

In both cities, AFP correspondents have seen convoys of four-wheel drives mounted with anti-aircraft weapons speed through the streets.

Each vehicle, blasting its horn as it went, was manned by a handful of young men waving assault rifles -- though the nearest battles are hundreds of kilometres (miles) away.

The men, like Idris, are part of a generation who have lost their futures to the flames of Sudan's war.

'Tribe and family'

Now, they represent recruiting potential for new armed groups being formed, particularly along ethnic and tribal lines in the country's army-controlled east.

"The forces I want to join are from my tribe and my family," said Idris.

According to Sudanese analyst and former culture and information minister Faisal Mohammed Saleh, "these groups haven't yet joined the fray in the current war".

"But the fear is that they could be preparing for future rounds," he told AFP.

Sudan, which has only known brief interludes of civilian rule since independence from Britain in 1956, is rife with armed groups, some with the capacity of small armies.

For decades, many were locked in wars with the central government, claiming to champion the rights of marginalised ethnic minorities or regions.

In 2020, most signed a peace agreement with the government in Khartoum, and several rebel leaders subsequently became senior officials in the government of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

"In the first months of the war, many of these groups were neutral, but have since declared allegiance to the army," Sudanese policy researcher Qusay Hamrour told AFP.

They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army's side, while other groups "wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF", Hamrour said.

According to former information minister Saleh, "what's new now is the eastern Sudanese groups, most of which are training inside Eritrea".

Eyewitnesses told AFP earlier this year that they saw Sudanese fighters being trained in at least five locations in neighbouring Eritrea, which has not commented on the allegations.

The witnesses said the camps were linked to Burhan's army or to figures from the former Islamist-backed regime of ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Loyal to no one

Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups "may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent", according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book "Sudan's Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies".

Khartoum has long relied on armed groups to fight its wars in other parts of Sudan.

In response to an uprising in Darfur in 2003, Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militia, leading to war crimes charges against him and others.

The RSF, formalised by Bashir in 2013, is descended from the Janjaweed.

In 2021, army chief Burhan led a coup that derailed a fragile civilian transition that followed Bashir's own ouster.

By April 2023, a long-running power struggle between Burhan and his deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, erupted into all-out war.

Now, what Babiker calls "the weakness of the Sudanese state" has compelled it to again to depend on militias to secure territory.

He said this strategy would "only lead to these groups growing stronger, making them impossible to bypass in the future".

Already, there have emerged "multiple centres of decision-making within the army", he told AFP.

According to a May report from the International Crisis Group think tank, "both main belligerents are struggling with command and control".

Burhan, increasingly reliant on powers from the Bashir regime "as well as communal militias and other armed groups ... risks losing his hold on the various factions."

Meanwhile, the RSF is "an ever more motley assortment of tribal militias and warlords", according to Crisis Group, which says that both wartime coalitions have become more unwieldy.