“The people’s revolution. Power to the people. Let the army return to its barracks and the janjaweed be disbanded!” At dawn on October 25, 2021, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators shouted in chorus, marching through Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in reaction to the coup d’état led hand in hand by General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane and his then deputy Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, otherwise known as “Hemetti.”

Eighteen months before the outbreak of a fratricidal war between the country’s two armies, the Sudanese streets had already sensed the danger. Like a foreboding, the crowds chanted slogans demanding the removal from power of the head of Sudan’s armed forces and the dismantling of General “Hemetti’s” Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the offshoot of the Janjaweed militias who had taken part in the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s.

During the night, the junta arrested the members of the civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, putting a stop to the period of democratic transition that had begun two years earlier, in 2019, when a massive popular uprising brought down the military and Islamist regime of Omar Al-Bashir after three decades of rule.

An ungovernable country

Barely a few hours after the announcement of the military coup, barricades appeared in the streets, a general strike was declared in the factories, and calls for civil disobedience from the minarets of mosques spread fast. The country would remain ungovernable for many months, faced with a protest movement led by resistance committees that had formed in every neighborhood

By ousting the civilians, the country’s two most powerful generals found themselves in a dangerous face-off. Defeated by the Sudanese street and without a popular base to govern from, the putschist generals were forced to return to the negotiating table with the civilians. But the United Nations-sponsored talks were short-lived. On April 15, 2023, the generals chose war, and the country was set ablaze.

From the outset, the conflict transcended a simple rivalry between two generals. The revolution had reshuffled the political deck. The people were peacefully calling for the foundation of a “new Sudan,” advocating a pluralist Sudanese identity, respectful of ethnic and religious minorities, and decentralized governance that would guarantee a better distribution of wealth, long monopolized by the military and elites in the center of the country.

“Since independence, Sudan’s political space has been militarized and transactional. Power is in the hands of the men who hold the weapons or have resources to trade. The current conflict is part of this continuum,” said Reem Abbas, of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

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