EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
Khartoum is free. Those were the words of Sudan's military leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, after his forces said they'd recaptured the capital last week. It's the latest development in the country's civil war that's pitted the Sudanese army against a powerful paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. After two years of fighting, the United Nations says that Sudan is the world's largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis. Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology in African studies at the University of Toronto in Canada, and she joins us now. Welcome.
NISRIN ELAMIN: Thank you so much for having me and for covering what's happening in Sudan.
PERALTA: So Nisrin, how significant is it that government forces have retaken the capital, Khartoum?
ELAMIN: I mean, it's a pretty significant development in this war. It's kind of a turning point in the sense that, you know, recapturing the capital city for the army is a kind of symbolic and strategic victory. But I would also say that the war is far from over, especially because the RSF still retains control of large parts of Darfur, parts of Kordofan, right? About a quarter of the country is still under RSF control, and, you know, there's, of course, fears that there could be attacks on Khartoum in the future, as well.
PERALTA: So if you can, I mean, remind us how this conflict began.
ELAMIN: Sure, so I mean, it started on April 15 of 2023, so we're almost two years into this war when essentially the Sudanese Armed Forces, SAF, and the RSF, a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces - who are kind of known to have been responsible for the genocide in Darfur that started about two decades ago - began fighting over political and economic control of the country. And mind you, they had staged a coup two years earlier in October of 2021, kind of upending a popular revolution, if you will, or a process, at least, that would have led us towards elections and hopefully civilian rule.
PERALTA: The humanitarian needs in Sudan are enormous. What have you been hearing from people there?
ELAMIN: Well, I'll tell you that, you know, I have my aunts and uncles in the village right now that is no longer under RSF control. The RSF recently left. They're in a village about one hour south of Khartoum in the Jazirah, and the entire village - every single household of 12,000 people - is impacted by a dengue epidemic. And there are no medications. There's no running water. There's no electricity. And we've been trying to get medications in, but there needs to be a permit from the Ministry of Health, which hasn't been responding.
PERALTA: How have President Donald Trump's cuts to USAID affected people in the country?
ELAMIN: It's unfortunately had a major impact, right? If you take the emergency response rooms, for example, 80% of their food security work, their communal kitchens, were funded by USAID. Many of them have had to shut down their kitchens. Famine has been declared in an IDP camp in North Darfur, and there is no food aid coming in. And so it has had a significant impact.
PERALTA: So we tend to want to boil down conflicts into good and bad. And as you laid out, both of the main belligerents in this conflict have a checkered history. I mean, the army put down a youth-led democratic revolution, and the RSF, as you mentioned, comes from a group that committed genocide. Is there actually any palatable solution to this conflict?
ELAMIN: I think, for me, what gives me hope in this moment is the local responders on the ground. What we saw immediately as the war started was the emergence of this network of emergency response rooms that kind of developed out of the resistance committees. There are about 8,000 resistance committees across the country. These are neighborhood-based prodemocracy groups that have been the backbone of the popular revolution that overthrew Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power - right? - in 2019. And so it's from that network that these local responders have set up these mutual aid programs, if you will.
And these are, you know, young people that are doing this as volunteers, who themselves are getting targeted by both sides. And so to me, what has been quite incredible actually to watch is that with very little resources - most of it coming from the diaspora and before the Trump administration took over from USAID as well - have really been running an entire country in the absence of a state. And so for me, it is - in some ways, one could look at this as a continuation of the revolution.
Obviously, there needs to be a cessation of violence. I don't think that is going to happen until we put pressure on the external actors in this war, namely the United Arab Emirates who are supporting the RSF, and then on the other side, we have Egypt supporting the army. But the United Arab Emirates in particular have been probably the most harmful external actor in this war by kind of pumping in weapons to support the RSF and extracting Sudanese gold in exchange. And I think if the international community doesn't put more pressure on them to stop that kind of harmful intervention, we're not going to get closer to a cessation of violence.
PERALTA: That's the University of Toronto's Nisrin Elamin. Nisrin, thank you for joining us.
ELAMIN: Thank you so much for having me.
PERALTA: We should add that the United Arab Emirates has repeatedly denied arming the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, despite evidence to the contrary.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
