Geography of wealth ties Sudan’s feuding factions together

https://arab.news/89t5w

Decades after South Sudan voted overwhelmingly to break Africa’s largest country in two, a new seam is being stitched into Sudan’s political fabric. In diplomatic circles and even on social media, speculation has hardened into a strange fascination: that the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces is headed toward a “Libyafication” of Sudan, cleaving the riverine heartland from the western peripheries of Darfur and Kordofan. On the ground, the conflict has indeed entrenched two rival administrations. Yet the prospect of a clean, internationally recognized divorce is a mirage. Sudan is destined to remain a single state — perpetually broken, violently contested, and incapable of governing itself either as a coherent whole or through a surgical amputation. Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan’s SAF operates from the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, preserving the institutional skeleton of the old regime: the central bank’s transaction records, the Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic cables, and control of the arterial highways that channel agricultural exports toward the port that handles more than 90 percent of the country’s legitimate foreign trade. On the other hand, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo has established a shadow “state” across Greater Darfur and chunks of Kordofan. Since late 2025, a self-proclaimed civilian administration in Nyala, South Darfur, has issued ministerial decrees, collected informal taxes, and printed its own identification documents. No capital has recognized it, but within its territory it runs the schools, the clinics, and the checkpoints. Parallel to the military fragmentation, a populist discourse has taken root in the Nile Valley that frames partition as liberation. The “State of the River and Sea” movement argues that the north should cleave itself from Darfur and Kordofan. It is........

© Arab News Pakistan