Sudan war between the army and the RSF

On April 15, 2023, fighting broke out in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The two men had worked together to overthrow President Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and to seize power from a civilian-military government in a coup in October 2021. A dispute over merging the RSF into the army and over who would lead it was the immediate trigger.²

The RSF had grown out of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the Darfur atrocities in the 2000s. The war spread from Khartoum to Darfur and other regions, with heavy shelling, attacks on civilians and reports of ethnic killings, especially in Darfur. The army retook Khartoum in early 2025, while the RSF took El Fasher, the last major army-held city in Darfur, in October 2025 after a long siege. The UN has described one of the world's largest displacement crises, with well over 10 million people displaced, and famine declared in parts of the country.⁵⁴¹

Estimates of the number killed vary widely, from tens of thousands to well over 100,000. Mediation by regional and outside powers has produced no lasting ceasefire, and reporting through 2026 describes continuing fighting. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, and the UN and human rights groups have accused the RSF in particular of ethnic killings in Darfur.¹³⁴