President Omar al-Bashir and the National Congress Party (NCP) were ousted in April 2019 after 30 years in power, triggering a flood of optimism in much of South Kordofan state as prospects for a sustainable end to conflict appeared to solidify. The 9 January 2020 visit of Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok of the country’s transitional government to Kauda—the Nuba Mountains stronghold of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) of Abdel Aziz al Hilu—brought high hopes for Sudan to turn a page away from the exclusionary governments of a narrow group of Nile Valley tribes that had presided over the political and economic marginalization of populations in the country’s peripheries.[1] That marginalization drove a series of serious domestic conflicts that had sporadically engulfed South Kordofan since 1987, when the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) began operations in the state during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Arab tribes living in the state’s fertile forested and agricultural plains, who had felt neglected by the Bashir government in the last decade of his rule, expressed similar hopes of a new and more cooperative era with Kordofani neighbours and with the central government.
A 25 October 2021 coup brought Sudan’s nascent, stumbling transition to a juddering halt, with more adverse political and economic implications on the peripheries. Khartoum’s political turmoil saw old fissures and divisions between ethnic groups resurface almost immediately in South Kordofan as goodwill and optimism over the prospect of a new political and economic landscape dissipated and different identity groups prepared for a return to the more adversarial economic and resource extractive-based military-led political order. These renewed divisions precipitated a new round of low-level conflicts—most notably the violent displacement of the entire Nuba population of Lagawa town in October 2022—pitting the Nuba against Arab-identifying Misseriya in a resurgence of conflicts over land and water that have occurred historically along mainly ethnic lines (Monitor, 2022). Simultaneously exacerbating this competition, the RSF began to invoke Arab identity politics. They also used their superior spending power, acquired through mercenary activities carried out in Yemen on behalf of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, and their vast regional business interests to recruit Arab Hawazma and Misseriya Humr youth, many of whom were formerly part of the Islamist paramilitary PDF—taking advantage of the significant downturn in the economy to attract new recruits.[2] The RSF’s aggressive countrywide recruitment drive sharpened SAF suspicion of the paramilitary force and heightened the prospect of intra-military conflict. As a result of its chilling effect on the flow of international financial assistance into Sudan, the coup also worsened the country’s economic trajectory, inflicting further pressure on communities in South Kordofan and increasing competition for resources, thus pushing more youths into the arms of the RSF.
Triggered by an impasse over the integration of the RSF into SAF, existential quarrels between SAF and the RSF over control of the country spilled over into open, vicious conflict between the two armies in mid-April 2023. While its epicentre remains in the capital as of mid-December 2023, the conflict quickly expanded beyond Khartoum to Darfur as well as to greater Kordofan (ACLED, 2023). In Darfur, the conflict has taken on an overtly ethnic and tribal character, with ethnic cleansing reported and thousands killed in West and Central Darfur alone (Michael and McNeill, 2023). Black Masalit tribespeople were targeted by Arab armed groups—either directly or tangentially affiliated with the RSF (Gouja, 2023). News of the scale and targeting of attacks against the Masalit affected the Nuba in South Kordofan and beyond who had experienced similar ethnic-based attacks and displacement since the late 1980s at the hands of the NCP and allied Arab militias armed by the governments of Sadiq el-Mahdi and Bashir.[3] Disconcerted by events in Sudan, and particularly in West Darfur, and by the RSF’s recruitment of Hawazma and Misseriya Humr youth from South Kordofan, the SPLA-N mobilized and took key territory from SAF, due to concerns over a broader state breakdown and an interest in building up a safe and fortified position. ‘The [Nuba] saw the horrors of Geneina’, said one longer-term observer of the Nuba Mountains, ‘and were reminded of the massacres in Kadugli’ in 2011.[4] By expanding its area of control, the SPLA-N feels it can better protect the Nuba, who are at the core of its support base.
[1] This paper will use the acronym SPLM-N or SPLA-N to refer to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement- or Army-North faction of Abdel Aziz al Hilu. Al Hilu split from the rival SPLM-N wing of Malik Agar in 2017.
[2] Author telephone interview with a Sudan analyst connected to the RSF, 6 September 2023, and a South Kordofan-based academic, 28 March 2023.
[3] Abdel Aziz al Hilu’s father was Masalit.
[4] Author telephone interview with a confidential international source, 26 June 2023.
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