Can Recent U.S. Diplomatic Efforts Open the Door to Ending the War in Sudan?Amgad Fareid Eltayeb
21 July 2025

Introduction
The Sudanese conflict erupted on April 15, 2023, unleashed a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, displacing over 13 million people internally, forcing 4.1 million to flee as refugees, and claiming at least 61,000 lives in Khartoum alone. Rooted in a failed coup attempt by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), the war has been prolonged by external interference, notably from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and complicated by a pervasive “Epistemic Maze” of disinformation that obscures the conflict’s origins. The collusion of the Taqaddum (now Somoud) coalition, led by former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, with the RSF has further muddied the waters, providing a civilian veneer to the militia’s ambitions under the banner of peace and civilian transformation. Recent U.S. diplomatic willingness to engage in Sudan, signaled by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. senior advisor on Africa Mossa’ad Bolous and President Trump offer hope for resolution. However, success hinges on addressing the war’s real causes, overcoming past mediation failures, deconstructing the epistemic maze that obscured the realities of the Sudan war and confronting the efforts of legitimizing the RSF.
Recent U.S. Diplomatic Moves: A New Approach?
On June 27, 2025, at the U.S.- and Qatari-backed Congo-Rwanda peace signing in Washington, Secretary Rubio declared U.S. readiness to address the Sudan crisis. This followed a June 3, 2025, meeting between U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Lando, Trump’s Africa advisor Bolous, and ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE. On July 2, 2025, Bolus revealed plans for a ministerial meeting in Washington with foreign ministers from a new Quad Committee (U.S., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and UAE), excluding the United Kingdom, which was previously part of the Quad, to tackle the Sudanese crisis. President Trump’s subsequent comments about commitment to peace in Sudan and Libya, underscores the seriousness of these moves. However, the proposed meeting must devise a framework that ensures Sudan’s meaningful participation, lest it replicate the Munich Agreement Syndrome—a model of exclusionary diplomacy conducted “ABOUT US, WITHOUT US” that has undermined previous efforts. The viability of this renewed approach to Sudan’s war hinges on learning from and transcending the failures of the past.
Origins of the Sudan’s Current War
The war began on April 15, 2023, when the RSF, a militia formed in 2013 by the former President Omar al-Bashir to rebrand the infamous Janjweed militias, attempted a coup to seize power. The coup aimed at avoiding its integration into the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) as mandated by the 2019 revolution demands. The RSF sought to exploit the post-2021 coup Framework Agreement negotiations to entrench its autonomy and indefinitely delay any prospects of integration, thereby preserving its predatory economic system.
RSF attempt at power began on April 13, 2023, the RSF besieged the Merowe airbase to neutralize SAF air capabilities, followed by attacks on April 15, on strategic sites in Khartoum, including the Presidential Palace, Khartoum International Airport, and state media headquarters, where RSF advisor Yusuf Ezzat was recorded preparing the coup announcement. These actions, corroborated by footage and video evidence, confirm the RSF’s intent to take over the government.
When the coup failed, the RSF escalated into a full-scale war, causing a humanitarian disaster. The conflict has displaced over 15 million people and led to atrocities, including the killing of over 61,000 civilians in Khartoum and the RSF’s massacre of at least 15,000 Masalit in West Darfur, officially designated as genocide by the U.S. in January 2025.

Past Mediation Efforts and Their Shortcomings
Several mediation efforts have failed to yield progress. The Jeddah Platform—an initiative spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the United States in May 2023—produced a civilian protection agreement by June of that year. However, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) disregarded its provisions, maintaining their occupation of civilian infrastructure and violating the agreement’s core tenets. This pattern of noncompliance deepened the Sudanese government’s skepticism toward similar negotiation frameworks, including the ALPS alliance convened in Switzerland in August 2024.
Other efforts targeting UAE support for the RSF failed including:

• Ethiopian Mediation (July 2024): Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed facilitated a call between Sudanese Sovereign Council President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, but the UAE’s publicizing of the call as a Sudanese concession derailed the effort.
• Turkish Mediation (December 2024): Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to limit UAE support for the RSF but failed due to the UAE’s demands for political and economic concessions.
• Egyptien Mediation (June 2025): Egypt’s proposed Sharm el-Sheikh meeting between Sudan and UAE collapsed over the UAE’s precondition to reinstate the canceled Abu Amama port deal, that was revoked following the exposure of UAE arms supply to the RSF via Chad and Libya.

These repeated failures reflect the UAE’s lack of genuine commitment to a negotiated resolution—an impunity made possible by the absence of a mediator possessing the necessary influence or leverage to compel meaningful Emirati compliance. A January 2024 UN report (S/2024/65) confirmed UAE military support to the RSF. U.S. Congress members identified UAE support to the RSF as a key driver of the conflict’s continuation. In its January 2025 briefing to Congress, the U.S. administration confirmed that the United Arab Emirates’ support to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) remains ongoing, violating its previous commitments to halt it.

The Epistemic Maze: Disinformation Obscuring the Conflict
This “epistemic maze” refers to a calculated disinformation campaign designed to obfuscate the origins, principal actors, and structural dynamics of the Sudanese conflict. This campaign, spearheaded by RSF- and UAE-aligned networks and amplified through complicit domestic, regional and international actors and media outlets—deliberately distorts the narrative of the war. Its objective is to obscure the core catalyst of the conflict: the Rapid Support Forces’ attempted coup in April 2023. In doing so, it seeks to reframe the war through misleading tropes that serve specific geopolitical and political agendas, thereby complicating peace mediation efforts and undermining accountability.
The key elements of this epistemic maze include:

1. Mischaracterization of the Conflict:
   • Certain political actors—most notably Abdalla Hamdok and the Taqaddum/Somoud coalition—have advanced a reductive narrative that frames the Sudanese conflict primarily as a struggle against the alleged resurgence of “Islamist” elements affiliated with the former Bashir regime. This narrative conflates SAF with extremist groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and even links to Iran—claims that lack substantive grounding. A notable example is a May 2024  articlein the Jerusalem Post, reportedly sponsored by Emirati interests, which amplified this line of argumentation in an effort to influence Western perceptions and consolidate international support for the RSF-aligned axis. By deploying the specter of Islamism, Hamdok and other figures within Somoud have sought to justify their strategic alignment with the UAE and their tacit accommodation of the RSF’s political role, despite the latter’s documented record of atrocities. This instrumental use of the Islamist label serves to obscure the real balance of power and culpability in the war, while eroding the credibility of Sudanese actors advocating for a truly civilian and democratic order.
   • Historical Revisionism: The RSF’s coup attempt—marked initially by the siege of Merowe airbase on April 13, 2023, followed by coordinated attacks on April 15—has been deliberately reframed by its proponents as a legitimate struggle against entrenched structural inequalities and as an extension of historically marginalized groups’ resistance to Khartoum’s political elite. This narrative strategically obscures the RSF’s well-documented record of atrocities and its foundational identity as a militia forged under the Bashir regime. Moreover, it conveniently omits the RSF’s failure to present or implement any coherent governance framework in the territories under its control, which instead have become synonymous with disorder, rampant looting, and systemic criminality.
   • False Equivalency: The portrayal of the SAF and the RSF as morally or politically equivalent actors in the ongoing conflict represents a perilous false equivalency. While abuses have been perpetrated by both sides, civilians overwhelmingly continue to flee RSF-controlled areas seeking refuge in territories under SAF control. Equating a national army—flawed though it may be—with a paramilitary entity that originated as a genocidal militia and now operates as a fragmented mercenary force fundamentally obscures essential differences in both mandate and conduct. Empirical data of independent sources underscores this disparity: 77% of documented violations against civilians are attributed to the RSF, compared to less than 15% linked to the SAF. Moreover, the SAF remains integrated within a legitimate governmental framework that, despite challenges, continues to provide social services and maintain a degree of stability for populations under its jurisdiction. This false equivalence fosters an environment conducive to institutional impunity, tacitly endorses violent power struggles through armed means as the standard of political practice, and undermines initiatives aimed at justice and comprehensive state reconstruction. By erasing the critical distinctions between these actors, it compromises any coherent pathway toward sustainable peace, political reform, and accountability in Sudan.
   • Instrumentalization of Peace Rhetoric: This involves the calculated use of peace discourse to demand political concessions for the RSF, deliberately overlooking its documented genocidal conduct and the deeply entrenched war economy that underpins its power. By cloaking violent objectives in the language of peace, this rhetoric distorts the urgency and nature of the conflict, enabling the RSF to leverage international and regional actors for political gain without accountability or structural reform. Closely linked to this is the deflection through humanitarian discourse, the selective and strategic invocation of humanitarian concerns serves as a smokescreen to obscure the RSF’s systematic targeting of civilians and its weaponization of aid access to control populations and consolidate territorial dominance. This tactic not only misdirects international attention but also undermines genuine humanitarian efforts by politicizing aid. Furthermore, this campaign includes deliberate falsification of facts, wherein violations committed by the RSF are falsely attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Such distortions have been repeatedly perpetrated by certain civilian coalitions aligned with RSF interests; The Civilian Front, which served as the precursor to the Taqaddum coalition, and subsequently Taqaddum itself, leading to public apologies when these fabrications were exposed. This manipulation of truth was also used to justify the RSF attack on civilians’ facilities and IDPs camps such as what happened in Zamzam IDP’s camp, further eroding trust in credible reporting and weakens the prospects for justice and reconciliation.
   • Erasure of Sudanese Agency:  A critical dimension of the epistemic maze is the systematic erasure of genuine Sudanese agency—manifested through the centering of external actors and regional geopolitical interests at the expense of authentic domestic political resistance, popular suffering, and indigenous visions for the country’s future. This phenomenon is acutely visible in the conduct and orientation of certain civilian coalitions, notably Taqaddum, which was established and functions entirely dependence on foreign political funding. Taqaddum/Somoud’s strategic focus has disproportionately prioritized securing international recognition and positioning itself as the singular legitimate civilian representative of the Sudanese people. This pursuit often eclipses substantive engagement with the diverse and fragmented realities on the ground within Sudan itself, including grassroots civil movements, community-based activism, and the lived experiences of the war-affected populations. By privileging external validation—particularly from influential regional patrons such as the UAE, as well as Western diplomatic corridors—Taqaddum has cultivated a self-referential political bubble, increasingly detached from the realistic socio-political fabric of Sudan. This detachment has exacted a heavy cost. The coalition’s internationalized posture has alienated it from broad segments of Sudanese society who perceive Taqaddum as out of touch, unrepresentative, or even complicit in obscuring the war’s realities. The resultant isolation undermines both the coalition’s legitimacy and its capacity to foster an inclusive, homegrown political process capable of addressing Sudan’s multidimensional crises. Moreover, this dynamic facilitates the instrumentalization of Sudanese political actors by external powers, reinforcing patterns of dependency and complicity that further erode prospects for sovereign democratic reconstruction. By marginalizing Sudanese civil resistance and suppressing the multiplicity of local political visions, this model reproduces a postcolonial paradigm where the voices of those most affected by the conflict are silenced in favor of externally mediated agendas. Such erasure not only impoverishes the peace process but also perpetuates cycles of exclusion and conflict, fundamentally undermining any genuine pathway toward sustainable peace, justice, and social cohesion in Sudan.
2. Regional and International Amplification:
   • UAE-backed media and lobbying efforts portray the RSF as a reformist force, downplaying its atrocities and UAE arms support, that are well documented. Fears of “political Islam,” have occasionally echoed these claims, ignoring RSF war crimes detailed in Human Rights Watch (December 2024) and Amnesty International (November 2024) reports.
   • This narrative leverages post-2019 revolution anti-Islamist sentiment to obscure the RSF’s coup and atrocities, complicating mediation by mis-defining the conflict as a power-sharing dispute rather than a failed coup.

Taqaddum’s Collusion with the RSF: A Civilian Facade for Militia Ambitions
The Taqaddum coalition, led by Abdalla Hamdok, has played a pivotal role in legitimizing the RSF’s actions, providing a civilian cover that complicates peace efforts and fuels the epistemic maze. This collusion, rooted in political opportunism and external backing, manifests in several ways:

1. Formation and Alignment:

After resigning Sudan’s primeministership in January 2022, Hamdok relocated to the UAE, where he led later the formation of Taqaddum (later Somoud) after the eruption of the war as a coalition ostensibly representing civilian forces although it included several armed movements and personalities aligned with the RSF who later split to join the RSF-led Ta’asis alliance after gaining significant political capital and exposure from Hamdok. Nevertheless, Taqaddum alignment with the RSF became evident through its actions and rhetoric. In January 2024, Hamdok signed an agreement with Hemedti in Addis Ababa, derailing IGAD’s mediation efforts for a direct meeting between SAF and RSF leaders in Djibouti. Hemedti’s absence from the IGAD meeting, citing “technical reasons,” and his prioritization of going to Addis at the same time to sign the Taqaddum agreement signaled a strategic alliance. This move provided the RSF with a civilian partner to bolster its political legitimacy.

1. Political Cover for RSF Ambitions:

Taqaddum’s narrative attempted to indirectly frame the RSF as a reformist force fighting against Islamist remnants from the former regime, aligning with the epistemic maze’s distortion of the conflict. This portrayal ignores the RSF’s coup attempt and the subsequent atrocities, including the Masalit genocide, and leverages anti-Islamist sentiment from the 2019 revolution to distract attention away from RSF actions. The coalition’s media and political support for the RSF, including statements by Hamdok and affiliates, has portrayed the militia as a legitimate stakeholder in Sudan’s future, despite its lack of realistic credentials and history of war crimes under Bashir and after.

1. Civilian administration in RSF-Controlled Areas:

Following the RSF’s capture of Al-Jazira state in December 2023, Taqaddum facilitated the establishment of a civilian administration, with appointments drawn from its affiliates. This move aimed to project the RSF as a governing force rather than a militia, further entrenching its political ambitions. This governance structure provided a facade of legitimacy, masking the RSF’s violent occupation of civilian areas, including homes and public facilities. On numerous occasions, this so-called “civil administration” actively worked to justify the RSF’s crimes in the state. Concurrently, the official spokesperson of the Taqaddum coalition—who now serves as the spokesperson for the Ta’asis coalition—publicly cast doubt on the reports of sexual violence committed by the militia. Meanwhile, members of Taqqadum’s leadership did not hesitate to praise RSF leader Hemedti, portraying him as a man of peace with no personal ambitions.

1. External Backing and UAE Influence:

Taqaddum’s and Hamdok’s operations from the UAE, combined with the UAE’s documented military and logistical support for the RSF, suggest a coordinated effort to legitimize the RSF. The UAE’s hosting of Hamdok and funding of Taqaddum activities indicate that the coalition serves as a proxy for UAE interests in Sudan.
Impact on Peace Processes
Providing the RSF with an illusive civilian discourse complicated attempts to resolving the war by adding too many socio-historical factors that are not directly related to the war to the equation. Taqaddum’s collusion has prolonged the war by emboldening the RSF to pursue power-sharing rather than disarmament or integration into the SAF. The Addis Ababa agreement with the RSF disrupted IGAD’s mediation, not only by directly preventing it, but also by signaling to mediators that the RSF had civilian backing, thus weakening pressure for accountability.
By amplifying the epistemic maze’s narratives, Taqaddum has shifted focus from the RSF’s coup and atrocities to a misleading power-sharing discourse, undermining the Jeddah Platform’s ability to address the conflict’s root cause.

The Path to Peace – Recommendations for Mediators
The U.S.-led Quad initiative, with further adding Qatar’s diplomatic capabilities and Saudi Arabia’s regional influence and ensuring meaningful participation of Sudan offers a potential breakthrough. But Key steps are needed:

1. Reviving Jeddah platform:
   • Timelines: Set firm negotiation deadlines, starting with a ceasefire and progressing to a predetermined endgame: RSF military dismantling and unification of military forces in Sudan.
   • Enforcement: Establish a UN-backed joint monitoring committee to enforce agreements, addressing past failures noted in a July 2024 UN report.
2. Confronting UAE Support: Leverage U.S. ties and influence to halt UAE arms supply to the RSF.
3. Dismantling the Epistemic Maze: Launch a fact-based process to countering disinformation, focusing on the real dynamics that led to the war “RSF’s coup” and the subsequent atrocities.
4. Strengthening Regional Mediation: Qatar’s success in Gaza, Iran and Congo, combined with Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah leadership, can create a robust framework to address the conflict.
5. Prioritize the Protection of Civilians: The success of any peace mediation in Sudan hinges on prioritizing the protection of civilians—especially those trapped under siege in El‑Fasher. The city has been under prolonged siege by the RSF since May 2024, which has systematically blocked vital food and aid deliveries and repeatedly shelled hospitals, displacement camps, and markets. For mediation to succeed, the international community must demand access corridors, ceasefire enforcement, protection of healthcare and IDP sites, safe evacuation routes, and accountability for war crimes—with civilian wellbeing at the center of negotiation agendas.
6. Defining the End Game: There can be no sustainable peace or stability in Sudan as long as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continue to exist as an independent military and economic power. This challenge is further complicated by the RSF’s deep-rooted foreign alliances. A clear, realistic end goal must be established: the peaceful dismantling of the RSF must be prioritized and negotiated as a prerequisite before entering into the complex civil and political dimensions of the peace and political processes. Only with a well-defined and achievable objective can the peace process be meaningfully advanced and successfully concluded.

The recent U.S. willingness to engage in Sudan offers a historic chance to end Sudan’s war. However, these efforts need to restore clarity and accountability to pave the way for sustainable peace in Sudan.