Sudan War · 2023 – Present
The Sudan Civil War that erupted in April 2023 is a conflict between two forces that were themselves created by the same political system: the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), the state military, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary established from the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide. Both forces use weapons from multiple sources — Soviet-era SAF equipment, UAE-supplied RSF light vehicles, Libyan arms flows, and captured weapons — in a conflict characterized by urban fighting in population centers, aerial bombardment of cities, and systematic looting and atrocity. The RSF's advantage in light mobility — using Toyota Land Cruisers mounted with heavy machine guns, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns in the 'technical' style perfected by Libyan and Chadian conflicts — compensated for its lack of heavy armor and air power. What the RSF lacked in firepower it compensated for in speed, numbers, and the political calculation that any target could be attacked without accountability.
The RSF's primary combat vehicles are 'technicals' — commercially purchased Toyota Land Cruisers and Hiluxes with heavy machine guns, DShK 12.7mm heavy machine guns, 14.5mm ZPU anti-aircraft guns, 23mm ZU-23-2 autocannons, or recoilless rifles mounted in the truck bed. The RSF developed this vehicle concept through its origins in the Janjaweed militias of the 2003–2020 Darfur conflict, which in turn adapted it from Chadian and Libyan insurgent groups. Technicals combine tactical mobility with firepower adequate against unarmored infantry and light vehicles. In Khartoum and Omdurman, RSF technicals seized positions in neighborhoods, using the vehicles as mobile weapons platforms that could relocate before SAF artillery or air strikes could respond.
Significance
The RSF's success against Sudan's conventional military — which possesses tanks, artillery, and aircraft — mirrors the pattern seen in Libya (2011) and Chad: motivated, mobile light forces that exploit their speed advantage to avoid conventional weapon systems. SAF tanks are slow, high-maintenance, require fuel and logistics the collapsing state can barely provide, and are ineffective in dense urban terrain. RSF technicals, by contrast, operate from civilian supply chains, can park in homes, and are individually expendable. The war demonstrated that mobile light paramilitary forces can militarily dominate even when severely outclassed in heavy weapons.
The Sudan Armed Forces possess Soviet/Russian-origin combat aircraft including Su-25 ground attack jets and MiG-29 fighters — giving them the only air power in the conflict. SAF aircraft have conducted airstrikes against RSF positions in Khartoum, Omdurman, el-Fasher, and other cities. The airstrikes have caused significant civilian casualties because RSF forces embed in residential areas, hospitals, and markets, making precise targeting effectively impossible. The bombings have been condemned by the UN and human rights organizations for indiscriminate effects.
Significance
SAF air power gave the government a decisive capability advantage that has nonetheless failed to produce strategic results. RSF forces, dispersed throughout urban areas and lacking fixed military infrastructure, present no lucrative air targets. Airstrikes that destroy buildings occupied by RSF simultaneously destroy civilian homes, hospitals, and markets, generating civilian casualties that erode the government's legitimacy and complicate aid operations. The pattern repeats a lesson from Syria, Yemen, and Iraq: air power used in urban areas causes civilian harm disproportionate to its military effect against dispersed insurgents.
Both SAF and RSF forces are predominantly armed with AK-47 and Chinese Type 56 assault rifles — weapons that flooded Sudan through decades of proxy wars, arms trafficking from Libya and Chad, and direct military supply from multiple state patrons. Sudan is one of the most heavily armed societies in Africa; the combination of the Darfur conflict's arms distribution, the 2011 South Sudan split (which produced another arms glut), and ongoing flows from Libya after Gaddafi's fall created a weapons environment in which rifles are available at any price point to any combatant. RSF fighters, many recruited from nomadic communities in Darfur and Kordofan, came to the April 2023 fighting already armed.
Significance
The ubiquity of small arms in Sudan — and across the Sahel region broadly — makes disarmament after any peace agreement functionally impossible. Each of Sudan's previous civil wars produced arms distributions that armed the next conflict's combatants. The RSF itself grew from the Janjaweed militias of Darfur, which were armed by Khartoum to fight the Sudan Liberation Army, which was itself armed by various regional patrons. Each cycle of conflict produces armed groups whose weapons outlast the conflict that created them.
The RSF has reportedly received drone support through UAE networks — specifically CAIG Wing Loong II armed drones operated from bases in Libya and Chad that conduct surveillance and strike missions in support of RSF operations. The UAE's support for the RSF reflects its broader regional strategy of backing armed groups that share its interest in preventing political Islam and democratic movements in North Africa. Wing Loong drones — a Chinese system comparable to the U.S. MQ-1 Predator — can carry air-to-surface missiles and conduct hours-long surveillance missions.
Significance
The drone component of the Sudan conflict reflects the broad diffusion of armed drone capability that has occurred since 2011. The UAE has used Wing Loong drones in Libya, Yemen, and reportedly Sudan — providing precision strike capability to allies without committing Emirati personnel. The pattern establishes a new template for proxy warfare: a wealthy state can provide game-changing military technology to non-state or rebel forces through plausibly-deniable arms supply networks, shaping conflict outcomes without direct intervention.
The SAF operates T-72 main battle tanks — Soviet-era heavy armor acquired through arms deals with Russia and other suppliers. In conventional open terrain, the T-72 provides the SAF with significant firepower advantages over the RSF's unarmored technicals. However, in the urban environment of Khartoum, Omdurman, and other cities, the T-72's advantages are reduced and its vulnerabilities exposed — the tank requires infantry support to prevent ambush by RPG teams in narrow streets, its mechanical complexity exceeds maintenance capacity in the collapsed logistics environment, and fuel shortages limit operational radius.
Significance
The SAF's heavy armor advantage has translated into less battlefield dominance than theoretically expected, demonstrating a lesson that has now been proven in multiple urban conflicts: main battle tanks are optimized for open terrain against other tanks, not for clearing cities held by dispersed infantry. The RSF's success in controlling urban terrain against SAF armor — though at cost — confirmed that urban environments equalize asymmetric power balance in favor of light forces with local knowledge and distributed command.
The BTR-80 is an eight-wheeled Soviet-era amphibious armored personnel carrier that forms a significant part of the SAF's mechanized infantry force. Armed with a 14.5mm heavy machine gun and a 7.62mm coaxial gun, the BTR-80 can transport infantry squads while providing fire support. In the urban fighting of Khartoum and the Nile corridor battles, BTR-80s were used by SAF forces to hold defensive positions and escort logistics convoys. RSF forces captured a number of BTR-80s in the opening days of the fighting, turning them against SAF positions.
Significance
The BTR-80's capture and repurposing by RSF forces — documented in video footage — highlighted a recurring dynamic of the conflict: the RSF's ability to rapidly absorb SAF heavy weapons through capture and turn them against their former owners. This pattern of equipment capture eroded one of the SAF's key advantages and demonstrated the risk of deploying heavy equipment in urban areas where command and control could be disrupted and individual crews could be separated from their units.
The Soviet-designed ZU-23-2 twin-barrel 23mm autocannon, designed for anti-aircraft use, was adapted by both SAF and RSF forces as a devastating ground-combat weapon mounted on technicals or in fixed positions. The ZU-23-2 can fire 800–1,000 rounds per minute of 23mm ammunition — effective against light vehicles, infantry, low-flying aircraft, and building positions alike. Truck-mounted ZU-23-2s became among the most feared weapons for urban fighters on both sides. The gun's high rate of fire and substantial range (2,500m effective) made it a versatile platform that could dominate streets and open areas.
Significance
The ZU-23-2's widespread adoption for ground combat in African conflicts represents an improvisation pattern that predates Sudan — seen in Libya, Somalia, and earlier Darfur fighting. Its repurposing from anti-aircraft to anti-personnel and anti-vehicle use reflects the creative improvisation of forces operating outside standard military supply chains. The weapon's devastation in urban environments — capable of punching through walls to hit targets inside buildings — makes it a particularly dangerous threat to civilians sheltering in place during urban fighting.
The SAF obtained Iranian-supplied surveillance and strike drones — including variants of the Mohajer-6 and possibly Shahed-class systems — as part of a growing Iran-SAF military relationship that expanded as the war progressed. Iran, whose support for Russia in Ukraine had already demonstrated its willingness to supply drones to state actors in major conflicts, found Sudan a useful opportunity to deepen ties with the SAF government. The drones provided the SAF with precision strike capability that complemented its air force assets, enabling surveillance of RSF positions and strikes in urban areas where manned aircraft presented higher crew-risk.
Significance
Iran's drone exports to both Russia and the SAF in the same period established a pattern of Iranian military technology diffusion that alarmed Western and Gulf analysts. Iran was simultaneously supplying Russia with Shahed-136 drones for use against Ukrainian cities and providing SAF with similar technology — demonstrating how armed drone proliferation via Iran was reshaping conflicts simultaneously across thousands of kilometers. The SAF-Iran relationship also complicated regional alignments, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia — both SAF backers — had their own complex relationships with Iran.
Following the Wagner Group's activities in Libya and Sudan's gold-mining regions in preceding years, the RSF benefited from Wagner-mediated weapons flows and equipment that entered Sudan through Libyan supply routes. Wagner's Libyan ally Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA) served as a conduit for arms, including military-grade communications equipment, armored vehicles, and ammunition. Wagner advisors had operated in Sudan before the 2023 war, building relationships with RSF leadership and establishing supply chain familiarity that persisted after the group's post-Prigozhin reorganization.
Significance
Wagner's Libyan operations created a regional arms network that the RSF was able to tap in 2023, giving it access to equipment and supply routes that no arms embargo could easily interdict. The Libya-Sudan arms corridor — running through remote desert regions — proved nearly impossible for international monitors to track or halt. This network also demonstrated how a single private military company's regional operations could create lasting proliferation effects that outlived the company's original presence in a theater.
The Soviet-designed DShK heavy machine gun — nicknamed the "Dushka" (dear little one) — was ubiquitous in the Sudan conflict, used by both SAF and RSF forces mounted on vehicles, on rooftops, and in fixed defensive positions. Capable of engaging light vehicles, low-flying aircraft, and infantry at ranges up to 2,000 meters, the DShK became a defining weapon of the urban fighting in Khartoum. In a conflict where anti-aircraft missiles were rare, DShK guns provided both sides with a deterrent against low-altitude air operations — the RSF used them effectively to threaten SAF aircraft operating over contested urban zones.
Significance
The DShK's continued battlefield dominance nearly 90 years after its design (1938) reflects both the weapon's genuine effectiveness and the economic reality of African conflicts: ammunition is cheap, spare parts are universally available, and gunners can be trained in hours. The weapon's presence in Sudan — and in virtually every conflict on the African continent and across the Middle East — makes it arguably the most consequential infantry weapon of the post-Cold War era in terms of lives affected.
How the weapons and tactics of Sudan War changed the nature of warfare.
Khartoum's transformation into a battleground represented a novel military challenge — sustained conventional warfare conducted within a functioning metropolitan area of 6 million people. The RSF's strategy of pre-positioning fighters inside civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and homes before hostilities began — giving them prepared positions that the SAF could not attack without massive civilian casualties — established a military playbook for urban warfare that deliberately weaponized civilian protection law. The SAF's response — bombing residential areas to destroy RSF positions — produced the predicted humanitarian disaster.
Legacy
Urban warfare in densely populated capitals has historically been rare because the political and humanitarian costs are prohibitive. Khartoum demonstrated that where international accountability mechanisms are weak, combatants can choose urban combat as a deliberate military strategy with minimal consequences. Military planners studying Khartoum are grappling with a question for which there is no good answer: how do you defeat a militarily inferior force that has deliberately occupied a civilian population as a shield, when the civilian population cannot evacuate and international intervention is unavailable?
The Sudan conflict pioneered a model of proxy drone warfare where wealthy states — the UAE, and later Iran — supplied armed drones to warring parties in ways designed to maintain plausible deniability. The UAE funneled Wing Loong II drones to the RSF via Libyan infrastructure; Iran supplied the SAF with Mohajer and Shahed-class drones. Neither the UAE nor Iran acknowledged their drone supply roles, even as photographic evidence accumulated. The drones represented a new form of proxy intervention that combined high military impact with low political accountability.
Legacy
Sudan established that the threshold for drone proxy warfare is low — a state can decisively influence a major conflict through drone supply while maintaining formal neutrality. This template is being studied by every middle power with the economic capacity to purchase armed drones and the political motivation to shape regional conflicts. The Gulf states in particular have developed drone proxy warfare into a foreign policy instrument, with UAE operations in Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Sudan all following a similar pattern of drone supply through intermediaries.
The RSF's systematic targeting of non-Arab African communities — particularly the Masalit in West Darfur — represented the military application of ethnic cleansing not as a byproduct of combat but as a primary strategic objective. By forcibly displacing and killing the civilian population that supported armed resistance, the RSF simultaneously eliminated a recruitment base, broke supply lines that relied on local community support, cleared territory for Arab tribal allies who would be loyal to the RSF, and created a demographic fait accompli that no post-war settlement could easily reverse.
Legacy
The weaponization of ethnic cleansing as a military strategy — rather than as an atrocity accompanying combat — represents a pattern that international law prohibits but that the international community has consistently failed to prevent or punish. Sudan's 2023–24 experience closely mirrored Bosnia 1992–95, Darfur 2003–08, and Myanmar 2016–17 in its dynamics. The ICJ and ICC's inability to intervene in real time — while genocide was documented in near-real time by satellite imagery and survivor testimony — represents a fundamental failure of the post-WWII international order that Sudan exposed with brutal clarity.
Both SAF and RSF forces systematically obstructed, looted, and attacked humanitarian operations. RSF forces looted UN and NGO warehouses at scale — destroying years of pre-positioned food and medical supplies. SAF forces blocked convoy routes as a military tactic. Aid workers were killed, kidnapped, and sexually assaulted. The World Food Programme, UNICEF, MSF, and dozens of other organizations were forced to suspend operations repeatedly, creating cascading humanitarian failures. The targeting of aid infrastructure became a force multiplier — each food depot looted could deprive tens of thousands of people of food for months.
Legacy
The Sudan conflict demonstrated that humanitarian response systems designed for conflict environments are vulnerable to collapse when both sides view aid organizations as either intelligence threats, resource competitors, or acceptable collateral damage. The legal framework protecting humanitarian workers — Geneva Convention protections — functions only insofar as parties choose to observe it, and in Sudan neither did. The result was a humanitarian system unable to operate in the areas of greatest need, with consequences measured in tens of thousands of preventable deaths from disease and malnutrition.
Both SAF and RSF forces, at different points in the conflict, deliberately disabled or exploited the communications blackout caused by the destruction of Khartoum's telecommunications infrastructure. The internet shutdowns — some deliberate, some collateral — prevented civilians from seeking safety, blocked journalists from reporting atrocities, hindered coordination among humanitarian organizations, and made it impossible for the displaced to locate family members. The RSF benefited particularly from communications blackouts that prevented documentation of its atrocities in real time in Darfur.
Legacy
Communications infrastructure — internet exchanges, mobile network towers, satellite ground stations — has become a primary target in modern conflicts precisely because its destruction multiplies humanitarian harm while reducing accountability for atrocities. Sudan's conflict demonstrated that a country can be effectively blacked out from global communications without nuclear-level destruction — a standard power outage and cellular tower damage is sufficient. The lesson — that communications resilience requires redundant, distributed systems including satellite internet — is one that civil society organizations operating in conflict zones have taken seriously.