How coordinated international pressure can change the course of Sudan’s war

Gashaw Ayferam Endaylalu (PhD) 

Sudan’s war, which began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has shown no sustained trend toward de-escalation.

Neither battlefield gains by the warring parties, nor multiple peace initiatives, nor selective targeted sanctions have ended the war or produced a permanent ceasefire or cessation of hostilities.

Each side still believes time is on its side.

That (mis)calculation is unlikely to change until the supply lines that sustain its war effort, and the patrons behind those lines, face a credible and collective cost.

On the morning of 24 September, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who commands SAF, was due to address the UN General Assembly. He was in Khartoum instead.

Washington had reportedly made his visa conditional on accepting a 90-day ceasefire, which he declined.

Two days later, he told a stadium crowd that the army would eliminate the RSF whatever the cost and clear Sudan all the way to Darfur.

The RSF, for its part, accepted a three-month humanitarian truce in July but refused to withdraw from the territory it holds.

Each side is fighting the war it thinks it can still win.

Their calculations are shaped by perceived advantages in air power, ground forces, drone technology, allied militias, logistics routes, foreign backing, recruitment and mercenaries, as well as the financial resources needed to sustain the fight.

The objective, therefore, appears to be military victory rather than a negotiated balance between two armed parties—a victory in which the other side is defeated and forced to surrender.

Nonetheless, given the many actors involved in Sudan’s war, a victor’s peace is hard to achieve and may itself be a miscalculation by both sides.

The international response has not changed this dynamic.

Selective targeted sanctions and repeated diplomatic efforts have not altered the parties’ ability or willingness to continue fighting.

After three and a half years, the challenge for major powers and other influential international actors is therefore not simply to persuade the belligerents to stop fighting, but to raise the costs of sustaining the war.

The war persists for three related reasons. Both belligerents can still finance themselves. Both have external networks that replenish money, weapons, technology, and personnel. And the diplomacy intended to end the war remains fragmented and, in important respects, overlaps with the networks that sustain it.

The remedy is therefore not another isolated sanction or another competing peace track. It is coordinated pressure on the money, logistics, and external support that make continued fighting possible.

A war sustained by revenue, external support, and fragmentation

The war continues not because the belligerents lack opportunities to negotiate, but because both retain the resources and armed networks needed to keep fighting.

Three sources of resilience matter most: domestic revenue, external patronage, and the fragmented coalitions behind the two main camps.

The first source of resilience is domestic revenue.

The warring parties can sustain the fighting, pay and feed their forces, and replenish their war effort through several sources, including revenues from territories they control.

Gold is a major source of income for both sides.

In 2024, about 28 tonnes of gold worth roughly $1.6 billion were officially exported from SAF-held areas, while nearly half of the year’s output is believed to have been smuggled out.

Gum arabic is another source.

The RSF looted at least 3,700 tonnes in the first half of 2024 and used the commodity in place of salaries, while the SAF routes harvests from territory it controls through Port Sudan.

Other minerals, such as metal, are also extracted and smuggled from RSF-controlled areas.

Chad, South Sudan, Kenya, Libya, and Egypt are major smuggling and transit routes for Sudanese commodities.

Neither side, therefore, appears to face an immediate shortage of the financial resources needed to sustain the war.

The second source of resilience is external patronage.

Both sides have built networks of foreign political, financial, military, and logistical support that let them replenish what the war consumes.

Egypt has provided the SAF with political, military, and diplomatic support, while Saudi Arabia has emerged as a key financial backer.

Turkey has supplied arms and drones to the SAF and maintained links with SAF-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood networks, while Iran has provided weapons and support to Islamist elements aligned with the SAF.

Pakistan has also emerged as a more recent arms supplier.

The RSF, meanwhile, has received substantial support from the United Arab Emirates, which Abu Dhabi denies, while Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, Bosaso port city-Somalia, and South Sudan have figured in different ways in the movement of personnel, arms, and supplies to or through RSF-linked networks.

UN investigators have also documented transnational networks that recruit, train, and deploy foreign personnel for the warring parties.

External support can therefore reduce the pressure that battlefield losses and domestic resource constraints might otherwise place on the belligerents.

As long as outside networks keep supplying money, weapons, technology, and personnel, battlefield losses need not translate into a decision to negotiate.

The third source of resilience is fragmentation within the two coalitions.

Even if one side defeated the other, victory would not necessarily produce a stable order.

Neither the SAF nor the RSF commands a fully unified force pursuing a single political objective.

An estimated 150 armed groups are now involved in Sudan’s conflict.

Both SAF and RSF are coalitions of regular forces, armed movements, militias, tribal forces, and other armed groups with different political interests, ideological commitments, economic interests, and external relationships.

The SAF coalition includes, among others, Islamist armed groups and several former rebel movements and communal forces, while the RSF operates alongside a range of tribal, communal, and regional armed groups.

Some of these groups have their own commanders, interests, and external links.

Defections can therefore change the balance between the two main camps without resolving the fragmentation within them.

Abu Aqla Keikel’s experience is illustrative: after moving from the SAF to the RSF and later returning to the army, his Sudan Shield Forces remained under his command in practice.

A battlefield victory by either side could therefore end one phase of the war without ending competition among the armed actors that make up the victorious coalition.

The sanctions paradox: Many designations but limited leverage

The sanctions record shows a widening list of commanders, companies, banks, gold traders, procurement networks, and recruitment actors targeted by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United Nations.

Table 1 shows that sanctions have increasingly moved beyond individual commanders to financial and commercial entities, including recent measures targeting gold and recruitment networks.

Yet the expansion of designations has not produced comparable pressure on the external networks that refuel the war.

Most measures continue to target Sudanese individuals and entities rather than the sources of arms and drones, the financiers, suppliers, recruiters, carriers, and transit routes through which external support reaches the belligerents.

This creates a substitution problem: sanctioning one commander, procurement company, or recruiter may raise the cost of operating without closing the supply chain behind them.

It may also impose wider compliance and economic costs without sufficiently changing the behaviour of those sustaining the war.

The main weakness, therefore, is not the number of sanctions, but their limited reach into the networks and jurisdictions that keep the war supplied.

Table: Selected targeted measures on Sudan, 2023–2026

This gap matters because the states with the most leverage over the warring parties are also central to the main diplomatic effort.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt form the Quad, seeking a humanitarian truce and a path to end the war.

The United States in particular has substantial financial, diplomatic, and sanctions leverage, yet its recent measures have continued to focus heavily on SAF- and RSF-linked individuals, companies, procurement networks, and recruiters rather than applying comparable pressure to the external actors and transit networks that sustain them.

This does not mean that all Quad members provide the same form or level of support to either side, or that allegations of external backing are uncontested.

It means sanctions and diplomacy operate on different levels: the former largely targets downstream Sudanese actors, while the latter engages states with relationships and influence over the networks sustaining the war.

A more effective sanctions strategy would connect the two by targeting the financial, arms, recruitment, logistics, and transit networks behind both SAF and RSF, including the external actors where evidence establishes a material role.

Otherwise, selective sanctions risk penalizing individuals without changing the supply system that allows the war to continue.

A coordinated pressure strategy

The way forward is to make the war harder to finance, supply, and sustain while creating a single diplomatic channel through which the parties can negotiate.

Pressure should follow the war economy across borders, not stop at Sudan’s borders or at the names already on sanctions lists.

Other major markets and refining centres should match the EU’s restrictions on Sudanese gold, and pressure should extend to traders, intermediaries, refiners, aircraft operators, insurers, and transit states.

The N’Djamena-Nyala corridor and other documented routes provide concrete points of intervention.

The same principle should apply to arms, drones, mercenary recruitment, and financial transfers: identify the suppliers and intermediaries, then target the networks that move them into Sudan.

This requires the United States, EU, AU, IGAD, and other sanctioning jurisdictions to coordinate designations and enforcement, and to investigate how actors sustaining the war use their financial, corporate, aviation, and commercial systems.

At the same time, the states with influence over the SAF and RSF should be pressed to use that leverage to stop the flows they can control.

The overlap between external backers and the diplomatic Quad makes this difficult, but it also creates an opportunity.

Rather than treating mediation and sanctions as separate instruments, the same actors should use their political relationships to secure reciprocal restraint and verify compliance.

A single AU-endorsed regional process, supported by IGAD and other relevant institutions, would reduce the belligerents’ and their patrons’ ability to move between competing diplomatic tracks.

Pressure, however, will work only if paired with a credible political process.

A ceasefire should precede an inclusive civilian-led dialogue rather than being treated as an outcome that can follow indefinitely from battlefield negotiations.

The process should address not only the SAF and RSF but also the armed groups and militias within their respective coalitions, whose interests and chains of command will shape any postwar order.

Economic measures should include meaningful and independently monitored humanitarian exemptions so that pressure on the war economy does not fall disproportionately on civilians.

The objective is therefore not sanctions for their own sake, nor another peace initiative alongside the existing ones.

It is coordinated international pressure that changes the material conditions of the war, constrains the networks that sustain it, and gives diplomacy greater leverage to secure a ceasefire and a political settlement.

Sudan’s war has lasted in part because the resources that sustain it remain available.

Changing those conditions is a more viable way to change the war’s course.

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Gashaw Ayferam Endaylalu (PhD) is a senior researcher and policy analyst specializing in the Horn of Africa, Red Sea geopolitics, hydro-politics, and regional security. He is currently Director General for African Affairs at the Institute of Foreign Affairs, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He can be reached via mugashawbzu@gmail.com