I keep hearing it mentioned and the only stuff I can really find out about it are from questionable mainstream US sources, any insight as to whats going on there would be appreciated, thanks.
I keep hearing it mentioned and the only stuff I can really find out about it are from questionable mainstream US sources, any insight as to whats going on there would be appreciated, thanks.
Omar al-Bashir (who has a warrant from the ICC for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the civil war in Darfur in the 2000s) was ousted from power on April 11, 2019, following the pro-democracy December Revolution protests. The military took command.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was formed in 2013, and is comprised of the various militias that participated in the civil war and did a lot of the aforementioned war crimes. The RSF has extensive gold mining operations in Darfur.
After Bashir’s ouster, army chief Burhan named Hemeti (the head of RSF) his deputy.
The protests continued, and on June 3, 2019 RSF massacred over 100 people.
The Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), which is a coalition of civilian protest organisations, was granted limited civilian governance until October of 2021, when another military coup put the country back into martial rule.
Negotiations between the FFC, the RSF, and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) to settle on a power-sharing agreement between the militias, the military, and the civilians, began with international interests vying to impose their preferred power structure on Sudan.
However, the people of Sudan, desiring a complete toppling of the military regime, formed over 5000 Resistance Committees (RCs) across the country. As crackdowns on mass protests continued, the negotiations for power-sharing came to a halt as the relationship between the RSF and the SAF broke down, unable to agree on how the RSF would be integrated into the military.
The RSF captured the airport in Khartoum on April 15, 2023. From there they began to siege Khartoum, and the fighting between the RSF and the SAF has continued until now. More than eight million people have been displaced, more than 13000 people have been killed, and more than 18 million are facing acute hunger as famine conditions ravage the country and the fighting continues.
The RSF and the SAF are both backed by imperialist interests (the US has alternately sided with both factions, and are often opposed to KSA who also has backed the conflict). Ultimately, the goal seems to be to keep the country at war to maximize the waste commodity and open it up to complete dominance once both sides are weakened. The FFC has also largely been ineffectual after their limited governance run (and even then they sold the people out to the SAF/foreign intervention enough that the grassroots RCs sprung up to replace them as the dominant vehicle for expressing civilian discontent).
Partially explains why we hear next to nothing about it, though the US treats Africa as though it is in a different solar system 95% of the time anyway, the exceptions being when it is being ‘exploited’ by China.