Comment: Why has Sudan descended into mass slaughter? Published on: 11 November 2025 Writing for The Conversation, Willow Berridge and colleague Justin Willis discuss the roots of the war in Sudan and why it goes far beyond simple ethnic conflict. The recent capture of the western Sudanese city of El Fasher by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has been followed by allegations of appalling war crimes: massacres, looting and rapes. There is much reason to believe the allegations from are credible. , most and the have acknowledged reports of the atrocities and condemned the killing of civilians as a potential war crimes. Formerly a government-sponsored militia, since April 2023 the RSF with its former allies in the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). Throughout its existence the RSF has been notorious for violence, and every RSF military success has been . Less credible are the claims of the RSF leader, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo – better known in Sudan as Hemedti – who has any of his followers found to be responsible for any of these atrocities. Recent reporting of these terrible abuses has presented them as part of an ethnic conflict, with the RSF portrayed as an . There is much truth in this. But there are other drivers of the . The RSF itself is the terrible creation of a history of . Its origins are usually traced to the , a militia drawn from Arab communities that was armed by the then president of Sudan, , to suppress an insurgency in the region early in the 21st century. In raising the Janjaweed, Bahir’s regime exploited tensions between Arabs and other communities in Darfur, a large region of western Sudan region of which El Fasher is the historical capital. It was therefore tempting for audiences in North America and Europe to see the conflict – like the long-running war in what was then southern Sudan (now the independent country of South Sudan) in simple racial terms: Arabs against Africans. That narrative has given strength to the international campaign to end the violence in Darfur. But that narrative was always , and certainly does not explain the current war. The RSF also has other origins. It exploited a long-term sense of economic and political exclusion felt by people in Darfur – both Arabs and non-Arabs. It fed off and was partly funded by that has thrived on the margins of a state whose leaders have ruthlessly used office to prey on their people. And it arose in a political system that has rewarded those who seize office by violence, partly thanks to the meddling of external powers who seek political or economic gain by supporting rivals for power in Sudan. Rise of Hemedti Hemedti was a relatively minor figure in the Janjaweed. But Bashir created the RSF in 2013, under his leadership, as part of a complicated balancing of multiple militias and security agencies. These competing forces violently repressed challenges to the regime while keeping one another in check through their rivalry. In 2019, that system broke down in the face of popular unrest in the regime’s political heartland, in central riverain Sudan – the area stretching along the Nile, roughly from Atbara, north of Khartoum to Wad Medani, about 85 miles to the southeast. This has been the since colonial rule began. Sudan: power has traditionally been focused on the central region aroiund the Nile. , Bashir was and, after internal army power struggles, Lt Gen Abdel Fattah Burhan emerged as leader and named Hemedti as his deputy. The pair were key figures in the “transitional” government that was supposed to take Sudan back to civilian rule. But they represented very different constituencies, in a way that demonstrates that Arab identity can take many forms. Affluent urban Arabs from Khartoum have often looked down on the nomadic lifestyle of the communities Hemedti and the RSF have mobilised and sometimes belittle them as “Chadian” on account of their ties to the wider Sahelian region. Arabs from Darfur, such as Hemedti, can see themselves as long-term victims of what they call the . This is the political and economic system inherited from colonial rule, which favoured the riverain centre. Both Hemedti and Burhan insist that they are fighting for all Sudan, and all Sudanese. Yet both have been entirely willing to appeal to ethnic and religious sentiment when it suits them. That has repeatedly added an extra, vicious dynamic to the conflict – from the recent massacres in El Fasher to the reported violence against people from South Sudan in Khartoum when SAF in March 2025. The real reasons for the conflict Ethnicity is not the basis of the conflict. This instead lies in an embedded culture of political violence, complicated by a shifting power balance between central and western Sudan and by international meddling. Some Arab nations – particularly – back the army. While the UAE’s enabling of RSF violence has been widely , prominent governments have also . Hemedti has also made alliances of convenience with groups such as , which principally draws support from the non-Arab communities in the southern Sudanese region of South Kordofan and, like Hemedti, aims to dismantle the “1956 state”. For Sudanese observers, the tension between central and western Sudan is more recognisable. Both before and after his role in the 2023 ransacking of Khartoum, Hemedti has been – the western Sudanese successor to Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi. It was al-Mahdi who to found the Mahdist state in the late 19th century. Since the 1950s, those seeking to seize control of the Sudanese state have among disaffected groups in western Sudan – sometimes combining Arab and non-Arab communities, sometimes turning them against one another. Hemedti’s claims to represent the marginalised communities of the west are opportunistic and mendacious, but far from unprecedented. This war is not a simple Arab-African conflict. But its viciousness reflects the willingness of both RSF and SAF to turn multiple societal fault lines into tools for mobilisation. They have created a context in which ethnic polarisation has been driven by wars for control of the state – rather than vice versa. , Professor of History, and , Lecturer in History, This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . 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