By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Sudan's army is closing in on what looks like a battlefield win over the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group it has fought since 2023. But two dispatches from the ground this week suggest victory over one enemy is only clearing space for others.
According to Al Jazeera's reporting, the army's gains rest on an armed coalition of allied factions it has leaned on to do the fighting — and may struggle to control once the RSF, the common enemy holding that coalition together, is gone. That is the quiet warning inside the celebration: coalitions built to defeat someone often come apart once he's defeated.
The fragmentation is already visible in South Kordofan. The Sudan Doctors Network, a medical monitoring group, says fighters from the SPLM-N — a rebel movement separate from the RSF — killed 27 people in attacks there, including four children. That single tally, from one advocacy group, has not been independently verified by other observers, and this article treats it as such.
What's clear without dispute: Sudan's war has never been a simple two-sided fight. It has always been a patchwork of militias, ethnic armies and regional proxies, loosely aligned against whichever side looked ascendant. The RSF's likely defeat removes the war's main organizing conflict but leaves every other fault line — Kordofan among them — exposed and unresolved.
For the families in South Kordofan, and for the roughly 12 million Sudanese the UN says have been displaced since the war began, the distinction between one war ending and another beginning is mostly academic. The guns don't know the difference.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE –
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera and the Sudan Doctors Network.
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