Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: New actors in the Horn of Africa get involved in Sudan’s civil war as it enters its fourth year, Pope Leo XIV begins an 11-day trip through Africa, and the results of elections in Djibouti and Benin come in.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: New actors in the Horn of Africa get involved in Sudan’s civil war as it enters its fourth year, Pope Leo XIV begins an 11-day trip through Africa, and the results of elections in Djibouti and Benin come in.

Three Years of Civil War

Sudan’s civil war, often referred to as the “forgotten war,” entered its fourth year on Wednesday, with little sign of resolving anytime soon.

The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began on April 15, 2023, when fighting broke out after a monthslong simmering dispute over plans to incorporate the 100,000-strong RSF into the military.

Since then, the war has grown into what many experts consider to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, an estimated 19 million face acute hunger, and around a quarter of Sudan’s population of 52 million has been displaced.

A United Nations probe found “hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur communities in the RSF’s massacre of civilians during its takeover of the city of El Fasher last October. The U.N. has also said that drone strikes from both sides have killed civilians indiscriminately in the Kordofan region and Blue Nile state—the new epicenters of the conflict.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has continued to fuel the conflict by backing the RSF. Even while Iranian drones and missiles struck the UAE amid the Iran war, Abu Dhabi continued to deliver weapons to the RSF, including via the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, according to a recent Le Monde report.

Even more worrying, new actors within the Horn of Africa are joining the conflict. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab reported last week that Ethiopia’s military is supporting the RSF; it also found through open-source intelligence and satellite imagery that the RSF has been staging attacks on Sudan’s Blue Nile state from an Ethiopian army base across the border.

Meanwhile, Egypt, a longtime SAF ally, has conducted drone strikes on RSF supply convoys since late last year as fighting has drawn near the country’s border with Sudan.

As war has threatened to engulf the wider region, negotiations through the so-called Quad nations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab........

© Foreign Policy