May 28, 2025: Sudan is the southern neighbor of Egypt and for the last few years has been ravaged by famine and a civil war between the army and the Rapid Support Force or RSF militias. The RSF was created in 2013 to deal with rebels in western Sudan. The RSF did that and gained combat experience that gave them an edge over the army that kept the civil war going from late 2023 to the present. What started the war was a military coup that was supposed to be a temporary condition to speed up the return of democracy. That backfired as a lot of the pro-reform civilians declared the military government another effort to restore dictatorship. That’s how Omar al Bashir, the dictator from 1989-to-2019, got his start. What form post-Bashir Sudan will take is one of feuding factions and escalating fighting over scarce resources like food and gold. Before the current civil war Sudan produced over $3 billion worth of gold annually and was the third largest producer in Africa. Currently that production is down to about $400 million. Gold is sought by all the factions because with gold you can buy food, weapons, friends, influence or a way out of the country to somewhere safer.

Safer also means safe from enslavement. Slavery continues to exist in Sudan. Since the 1990s the government encouraged the RSF in Western Sudan to raid non-Moslem black African tribes and take slaves.

In 2024 the Sudan civil war escalated and moved to the capital where government and rebel RSF gunmen fought constantly. The two sides could not agree on how to run the government and decided that a deathmatch was the only way to settle the matter. Civilians caught in the crossfire are fleeing the capital and, in some cases, if they can afford it, leaving the country.

Sudan is one of the poorest nations in the world and considered the least developed nation on the planet. The last few years of civil war have led to 60 percent of the population slipping towards starvation because of persistent food shortages. Another problem Sudan has is its short existence as a nation. Modern Sudan did not appear until 1956 when the Republic of Sudan was created from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Before that Sudan was an Islamic religious dictatorship for fourteen years. Before that Sudan was always part of some kingdom or empire.