Sudanese Civil War: Timeline & Latest Developments

Sudan’s civil war began on April 15, 2023, when years of unresolved tension between two men who had jointly ruled the country boiled over into open warfare in Khartoum. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), had led Sudan’s transitional government together since a joint 2021 coup, but could not agree on a timeline for folding the RSF, a force that grew out of the Janjaweed militias active in Darfur two decades earlier, into the regular army. When the dispute turned violent, RSF units attacked SAF bases and the capital’s airport in a single morning, and both forces have fought for control of the country since. Neither side has offered a credible account of who fired first, and both have spent the war blaming the other for its toll.

The war’s first year fell into a grim pattern that has largely held since: a devastating urban battle for Khartoum alongside a campaign of ethnically targeted violence in Darfur. RSF and allied Arab militias killed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people, per a UN panel of experts, when they overran the Masalit-majority city of El Geneina in West Darfur in June 2023, one of the deadliest single episodes of the war. Mediators convened talks in Jeddah that May, producing a Declaration of Commitment to Protect Civilians that both sides signed and largely ignored; the ceasefire tied to it collapsed within weeks, a pattern of failed truces repeated through 2024 and 2025 without one holding for long. By June 2023, a third armed faction, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North under Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, had entered the fighting in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, complicating any simple two-party framing of the war from its first months.

The RSF spent 2023 and much of 2024 expanding its territorial reach, capturing Wad Madani, Sudan’s agriculturally vital second city, in December 2023, and tightening a siege around El Fasher, the last SAF-held city in Darfur, starting in May 2024. That siege produced the war’s defining humanitarian catastrophe: the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in El Fasher’s Zamzam camp that August, its first famine determination anywhere in seven years, later expanded to more camps and to besieged Kadugli in South Kordofan through 2024 and 2025. Sudan’s civilians have borne the brunt of both sides’ tactics: a September 2025 UN Fact-Finding Mission report concluded SAF and RSF forces alike were deliberately targeting civilians in ways that may amount to crimes against humanity, citing SAF airstrikes such as an October 2024 strike on El Koma market that killed at least 65 people, alongside RSF’s pattern of atrocities in Darfur.

SAF mounted a slow but steady counteroffensive through late 2024 and early 2025, retaking Wad Madani in January and then, on March 26, 2025, announcing full recapture of Khartoum after RSF withdrew from the presidential palace and airport it had held for nearly two years, a major turning point that nonetheless left RSF in firm control of Darfur. The recapture came with its own documented abuses: UN human rights officials reported summary executions tripled in the capital between February and April 2025, largely reprisal killings by SAF-aligned forces against people suspected of RSF collaboration. Two months earlier, on January 7, 2025, the US State Department had formally determined RSF forces committed genocide in Darfur, citing systematic ethnic killings and sexual violence, and sanctioned Hemedti; Sudan separately took a case to the ICJ alleging the UAE armed the RSF, which the court dismissed that May on jurisdictional grounds without ruling on the underlying allegations, which the UAE has repeatedly denied.

Having lost Khartoum, the RSF consolidated a political project in western Sudan instead. In July 2025, the RSF-led Sudan Founding Alliance, in coalition with al-Hilu’s SPLM-N faction, declared a parallel government in Nyala, drawing condemnation from the African Union and no recognition from Port Sudan. Three months later, on October 26, 2025, RSF forces broke El Fasher’s defenses after an 18-month siege, taking all five of Darfur’s regional capitals. What followed was, per humanitarian researchers and a later UN-backed investigation that found “hallmarks of genocide,” one of the war’s worst episodes: more than 460 people were reportedly killed at the city’s last functioning hospital within days, and researchers estimated a quarter of a million remaining civilians had been killed, displaced, or forced into hiding.

The war has not spared its diplomacy from foreign entanglement. A four-nation Quad of the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE proposed a humanitarian-truce roadmap in September 2025 that SAF has resisted, wary of locking in RSF’s battlefield gains, and both sides continue to draw on outside backers whose roles remain contested: Sudan and rights groups have alleged UAE arms transfers to the RSF, which Abu Dhabi denies, while RSF officials have accused Egypt of arming and flying missions for SAF, allegations a February 2026 investigation linked to a covert Egyptian drone base, which Cairo also denies. By mid-2026, with front lines shifted from Khartoum to Kordofan, where RSF was pressing toward El Obeid and its half a million residents, Sudan’s overlapping wars had displaced more people than any other conflict on earth, some 9.1 million within the country and more than 4.3 million abroad, while roughly 21 million people faced acute food insecurity and neither side showed signs of ceding the fight.