Declan Walsh and the Staff of The New York Times

Famine and ethnic cleansing stalk Sudan. Yet the gold trade is booming, enriching generals and propelling the fight.

By Declan Walsh

The luxury jet touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on a mission to collect hundreds of pounds of illicit gold.

On board was a representative of a ruthless paramilitary group accused of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s sprawling civil war, the flight manifest showed. The gold itself had been smuggled from Darfur, a region of famine and fear in Sudan that is largely under his group’s brutal control.

Porters grunted as they heaved cases filled with gold, about $25 million worth, onto the plane, said three people involved with or briefed on the deal. Airport officials discreetly maintained a perimeter around the jet, which stood out in the main airport of one of the world’s poorest countries.

After 90 minutes, the jet took off again, landing before dawn on March 6 at a private airport in the United Arab Emirates, flight data showed. Its gleaming cargo soon vanished into the global gold market.

As Sudan burns and its people starve, a gold rush is underway.

War has shattered Sudan’s economy, collapsed its health system and turned much of the once-proud capital into piles of rubble. Fighting has also set off one of the world’s worst famines in decades, with 26 million people facing acute hunger or starvation.

But the gold trade is humming. The production and trade of gold, which lies in rich deposits across the vast nation, has actually surpassed prewar levels — and that’s just the official figure in a country rife with smuggling.

Indeed, billions of dollars in gold are flowing out of Sudan in virtually every direction, helping to turn the Sahel region of Africa into one of the world’s largest gold producers at a time when prices are hitting record highs.

But instead of using the windfall to help the legions of hungry and homeless people, Sudan’s warring sides are wielding the gold to bankroll their fight, deploying what U.N. experts call “starvation tactics” against tens of millions of people.

Gold helps pay for the drones, guns and missiles that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and forced 11 million from their homes. It is the prize for rampaging fighters and mercenaries who have robbed so many banks and homes that the capital now resembles a giant crime scene, with fighters gleefully vaunting piles of stolen jewelry and gold bars on social media.

The Sudanese people once hoped that gold would lift up their country. Instead, it is turning out to be their downfall. It even helps explain why the war started — and why it is so hard to stop.

“Gold is destroying Sudan,” said Suliman Baldo, a Sudanese expert on the nation’s resources, “and it’s destroying the Sudanese.”

The civil war pits the nation’s military and what remains of the government against their former ally, a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces.

The group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, is a camel trader turned warlord whose forces grew especially powerful after they seized one of Sudan’s most lucrative gold mines in 2017.

“It’s nothing, just an area in Darfur that belongs to us,” he told The New York Times in a 2019 interview, trying to downplay its significance.

The mine became the cornerstone of a billion-dollar empire that transformed his armed group, the R.S.F., into a formidable force. General Hamdan later sold the mine to the government for $200 million, helping him buy even more weapons and political influence.

But that wealth and ambition led to a standoff with the Sudanese military, paving the way for the civil war that has all but destroyed the country.

The fight for gold only intensified when the war broke out in 2023. In one of his opening salvos, General Hamdan seized back the mine he had sold to the government. Weeks later, his fighters marched on the national gold refinery in the capital as well, making away with $150 million in gold bars, the government says.

Gold drives the war for Sudan’s military, too. It has bombed R.S.F. mines, while ramping up gold production in areas still under government control, often by inviting foreign powers to do the mining. Sudanese officials have been negotiating gun and gold deals with Russia and are seeking to woo Chinese mining executives. They even share a gold mine with Gulf leaders accused of arming their enemies.

The war’s foreign sponsors play both sides as well.

President Vladimir V. Putin has long heralded Russian gold mining in Sudan, and his country’s Wagner Group worked with the military and its rivals even before they went to war.

Now that Wagner’s boss is dead, killed in a plane crash after his brief mutiny against Russia’s military leaders, the Kremlin has taken over the group’s business and appears to be pursuing gold on either side of the front line, partnering with the R.S.F. in the west and the nation’s army in the east.

The United Arab Emirates is also lighting both ends of the fuse. On the battlefield, it backs the R.S.F., sending it powerful drones and missiles in a covert operation under the guise of a humanitarian mission.

Yet when it comes to gold, the Emiratis are also helping to fund the opposing side. An Emirati company, linked by officials to the royal family, owns the largest industrial mine in Sudan. It sits in government-controlled territory and delivers a chunk of money to the army’s cash-strapped war machine — yet another example of the dizzying array of alliances and counter-alliances fueling the war.

Motorbikes, trucks and planes spirit gold out of the nation at every turn, shuttling it across the porous borders with Sudan’s seven neighboring countries. Ultimately, nearly all of it ends up in the United Arab Emirates, the prime destination for smuggled gold from Sudan, the State Department says.

Along the way, a motley chain of profiteers take their cut — criminals, warlords, spymasters, generals and corrupt officials, the cogs of an expanding war economy that provides a powerful financial incentive for the conflict to grind on, experts say.

Some now liken Sudan’s gold to so-called blood diamonds and other conflict minerals.

“To end the war, follow the money,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese tycoon whose foundation promotes good governance. “Gold feeds the supply of weapons, and we need to pressure the individuals behind it. At the end of the day, they are merchants of death.”

An Empire of Gold

In the Spain-sized region of Darfur, where a genocide spurred global outrage two decades ago, the horrors have returned.

R.S.F. fighters have waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against civilians and carried out a punishing siege on an ancient city. In the turmoil, the world’s first famine in four years started in a camp of 450,000 terrified civilians.

“I shouted and screamed,” said Zuhal al-Zein Hussain, a woman from Darfur who recounted being gang-raped by R.S.F. fighters last year. “But it was useless.”

Yet in a corner of Darfur largely untouched by the war, the R.S.F. has also been quietly building a vast, secretive gold mining operation.

The enterprise, worth hundreds of millions a year, expanded with the help of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries and has become the financial fuel of a military campaign notorious for atrocities.

In the savanna around Songo, a mining town hacked out of a nature reserve, tens of thousands of miners labor in sandy pits in a region rich with gold, uranium and possibly diamonds. The mines provide rare, though often dangerous, jobs at a time of near total economic breakdown.

But a fortune is being made by the R.S.F., whose fighters control every aspect of the gold trade.

The mines are the latest offshoot of a vast family business that began well before the war.

When General Hamdan seized a major gold mine in Darfur in 2017 — effectively becoming Sudan’s biggest gold trader overnight — he channeled the profits into a network of as many as 50 companies that paid for weapons, influence and fighters, the U.N. says.

His paramilitary force ballooned in size, and General Hamdan grew so wealthy from gold and supplying mercenaries for the war in Yemen that he publicly offered $1 billion in 2019 to stabilize Sudan’s tottering economy.

One company anchors his empire of guns and gold. It’s called Al Junaid, and the United States sanctioned it last year, saying that gold had become “a vital source of revenue” for General Hamdan and his fighters.

As violence has engulfed Sudan, Al Junaid has focused on hundreds of square miles around Songo, where the R.S.F. has long worked closely with Wagner.

Production across the region has been brisk, according to witnesses, satellite images and documents obtained by The Times. A confidential report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in November found that $860 million worth of gold had been extracted from paramilitary-controlled mines in Darfur this year alone.

The fighters don’t do the digging themselves. At about 13 sites across the region, small-scale miners work for a pittance. The R.S.F. controls everything at the barrel of a gun.

Sudanese journalists with Ayin Media, an investigative website, visited the area this year and recounted R.S.F. fighters patrolling an Al Junaid gold plant, with Russian employees stationed behind high walls.

Sudan’s mines have been a big lure for Wagner, as The Times reported two years ago. New documents obtained by The Times since then further detail Wagner’s partnership with the R.S.F., including a plan to prospect for diamonds near Songo.

In one letter from 2021, a manager for Al Junaid invoked the name of the R.S.F. leader, General Hamdan, and extolled “the great work between us and the Russian company,” a common shorthand for Wagner in Sudan.

The alliance is about weapons as well as money. U.N. investigators have documented missile shipments from Wagner to the R.S.F.

Songo is now so important to General Hamdan that the mines are a military target. The Sudanese air force bombed the area last year and again in January, killing civilians, according to news reports. A video taken after one strike shows people scrambling for safety as a fire blazes nearby.

The R.S.F. has a ready market for its gold in the Emirates, where 2,500 tons of undeclared gold from Africa, worth a staggering $115 billion, were smuggled between 2012 and 2022, according to a recent study by Swiss Aid, a development group.

The challenge is getting it there.

Before the war, General Hamdan could fly his gold directly to the Emirates. But Sudan’s main airport has been destroyed in the war, its tarmac riddled with holes, and the other way out, through Port Sudan, is in army hands.

So the R.S.F. has had to find new routes through neighboring countries — as it did with the smuggling job earlier this year, when porters heaved cases filled with illicit gold across the airport tarmac.

A Luxury Jet, Loaded with Gold

The plane that landed in South Sudan on March 5 to pick up that gold was not the usual bush hopper used by many smugglers in Africa.

It was a Bombardier Global Express, a long-range business jet of a kind favored by corporate executives, and it was registered in the United States.

Its crew had a troubled history.

Seven months earlier, the pilot in command of the plane and the flight attendant had been arrested in Zambia soon after landing in another private jet. Zambian investigators who raided that plane confiscated five guns, $5.7 million in cash and 602 bars of fake gold, indicating a likely gold scam, they said.

The flight to pick up the R.S.F.’s gold, by contrast, went off smoothly, possibly because the deal involved a web of powerful officials from multiple countries who helped ease the way, according to flight documents and three people who were involved with or briefed on the deal.

After leaving Abu Dhabi, the Bombardier jet — with the same pilot and flight attendant — stopped off briefly in Uganda before landing in South Sudan. Though the plane had room for 15 passengers as well, only two were listed on a manifest obtained by The Times.

One of them was a relative of General Hamdan who has acted on behalf on R.S.F. interests before, said several officials and experts familiar with the paramilitary group’s business networks.

The other passenger on the manifest was a senior intelligence officer for Uganda, a country widely seen as a major hub for smuggled African gold. In 2022, the Treasury Department sanctioned a large gold refinery right next to Uganda’s main airport that, it said, was handling hundreds of millions of dollars in conflict gold every year.

“It’s the epicenter of gold laundering in Africa,” J.R. Mailey, an expert on corruption at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, said of Uganda.

Reached by phone, the senior Ugandan official confirmed that his passport details listed on the manifest were accurate, though he denied being on the plane or transporting any gold from Sudan. But the three people involved with or briefed on the deal said he was seen standing outside the Bombardier jet as porters loaded it with cases of gold weighing as much as 1,200 pounds in all.

Other regional officials appeared to take part in the deal, too. The gold had come in from Darfur through the city of Wau in South Sudan, two of the people briefed on the transfer said. From there, it was transported to Juba aboard a commercial airliner operated by South Sudanese intelligence, they said.

South Sudan is a particularly opaque corner of the international gold trade. Senior figures in the country’s elite control a gold industry that produces up to 40 tons a year, diplomats say. Yet, officially, they export next to nothing.

Only a single kilo of gold left the country through official export channels this year, said James Yousif Kundu, a director general for the nation’s mining ministry.

“The rest may be smuggled,” he said.

On March 6, the Bombardier jet landed back in Abu Dhabi, just before 3 a.m., at the Al Bateen Executive Airport used by business and government jets, flight data shows. (Fly Alliance Aviation, the Florida-based company that operates the Bombardier jet and advertises it on its website, declined to answer questions about the flight, including who had chartered it and why.)

The Emirates is a major hub for the R.S.F., which uses front companies controlled by General Hamdan and his relatives to sell gold and buy weapons, officials say. Since the war started, the United States has imposed sanctions on 11 R.S.F. companies, mostly in the Emirates, and often for their links to the gold trade.

On the sidelines of American-sponsored peace efforts in August, which failed to stop the war, General Hamdan’s younger brother, Algoney Hamdan, told The Times that he had lived in the Emirates for the past decade. But he insisted that the R.S.F. was no longer in the gold business.

“Since the war, there haven’t been any more exports,” he said.

Less than two months later, the United States imposed sanctions on him, calling him the “procurement director” for the paramilitary group, responsible for obtaining weapons “to facilitate attacks and other atrocities against their own citizens.”

The Government’s Gold

Hundreds of miles from the R.S.F.’s gritty, but lucrative, gold pits in Darfur sits a modern, industrial gold mine that helps the military keep fighting as well.

It’s called the Kush mine, with giant excavators and expensive machinery that churns out gold and generates precious income for Sudan’s wartime government.

The trick is, Sudan’s leaders haven’t always known who owns it.

They thought the mine — out in the desert, 220 miles from the capital — was controlled by Boris Ivanov, a Russian mining executive with ties to the Kremlin who flourished in the upheaval of post-Soviet Russia.

But when they looked more closely in 2021, Sudanese government officials discovered that the mine had actually passed into the hands of mysterious new investors from the United Arab Emirates, the country backing their enemy today.

Officials from the Sudanese government, which had a minority stake in the mine, said that no one bothered to tell them of their surprising new partnership. So they sent a delegation, led by Sudan’s finance minister, to Abu Dhabi to sort it out.

Kush was the jewel of Sudan’s gold boom, the largest industrial gold mine in the country. It also had geopolitical significance, as a focal point of Sudan’s strengthening ties with Russa.

Mr. Putin singled out the “flagship” project at the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019, and he named the Russian company under U.S. sanctions at the center of the effort. Mr. Ivanov, the managing director of that company, also spoke at the summit, at a session titled “Using Minerals in Africa for the Benefit of Its Peoples.”

Mr. Ivanov’s success in mining was a classic story of post-Soviet Russia. He began his career as a diplomat — posted in the 1980s to the Soviet embassy in Washington, where his portfolio included arms control — and ended up in the oil, gas and mining business. (Two former colleagues said he boasted that he was also working under cover for the K.G.B. during his time in Washington. A person briefed on Western intelligence confirmed that, but a spokesman for Mr. Ivanov denied the assertion, saying Mr. Ivanov never had any ties to Russian intelligence).

By 2015, when the Kush mine began producing gold, Russia and Sudan were both facing international sanctions — Russia for its intervention in Ukraine, and Sudan for the genocide in Darfur — and their joint gold mining only expanded from there.

Mr. Ivanov seemed to prosper as well. Property records show that he and his wife, Natasha, bought two condominiums in Manhattan, next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in the early 2010s. Later, they bought a pair of adjoining beachfront homes in Juno Beach, Florida, which they are seeking to demolish to construct a single 15,000-foot mansion instead.

But when the Sudanese officials traveled to Abu Dhabi in 2021, they learned that Mr. Ivanov wasn’t the only one they were in business with.

The mine in Sudan now belonged to Emiral Resources, a new company founded by Mr. Ivanov. And behind that company was a much bigger player — Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati National security adviser and brother to the country’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, according to three people familiar with the talks.

An Emiral spokesman said that the Sudanese government had, in fact, been properly informed that the mine was under new ownership. But he declined to specify who, exactly, those new owners were, saying only that Emiral was owned by “a leading Abu Dhabi investment group,” without providing names.

The takeover was a sign of the Emiratis’ billion-dollar push into African mining. Seeking to diversify the nation’s oil-dependent economy, Sheikh Tahnoon’s companies are racing to acquire mines and the raw minerals needed for electric cars and the transition to green energy.

That means the Emiratis are effectively hedging their bets in Sudan’s war. In the past 18 months, they have smuggled vast amounts of weapons to the R.S.F., often under the guise of the Red Crescent, a potential war crime.

But the Emirati-owned Kush mine in government-controlled territory likely generates tens of millions of dollars for the Sudanese authorities, who, in turn, use the money to buy Iranian drones, Chinese planes and other weapons.

In other words, the Emirates is arming one side in the war, while funding the other.

The Biden administration raised its concerns directly to Sheikh Mohammed and Sheikh Tahnoon when they visited the White House in September, three senior U.S. officials said. Yet President Biden has been careful not to publicly criticize a wealthy Gulf nation that is an ally on Iran and Israel — infuriating many Sudanese.

A degree of mystery still surrounds the role of Mr. Ivanov, however. Records at Sudan’s mining ministry list him as part owner of the Kush mine, a senior Sudanese official said. But Emiral contested that, saying Mr. Ivanov left the business last year and that “Emiral is an Emirati company.”

Mr. Ivanov remains in the public eye. With his wife and daughter, he attended a gala dinner in Manhattan in October for the Princess Grace Foundation.

Prince Albert II, the monarch of Monaco, presented an award to the actor Michael Douglas. The program said the Ivanovs, listed as a “crown sponsor,” paid $100,000 for their table.

Blood Mineral

When Sudan’s gold boom kicked off over a decade ago, many Sudanese families built their futures around it, storing jewelry at home or in banks for a rainy day.

Now, they rely on it to survive.

Ten days into the war, Al Fatih Hashim sped through the chaotic streets of the capital, Khartoum, and held his breath through checkpoints manned by plunderous fighters. The car carried his fearful parents and siblings, their hastily-packed clothes — and bags of hidden gold.

Mr. Hashim had stashed the family’s wedding jewelry in a hidden compartment under the back seat, and even inside the fuel tank, he said, adding: “It was our insurance policy.”

The ruse worked. After weeks, the family made it to Egypt, where the gold funds their precarious new lives as refugees.

“We had to live from the gold,” he said. “So many other families have done the same.”

Even before the conflict, gold was so essential that it soared to 70 percent of the country’s exports, helping to make up for the oil revenues Sudan lost after the secession of South Sudan in 2011.

War vaporized that wealth. Gold has been looted from homes, seized at checkpoints or stolen from banks, sometimes by fighters using metal detectors to ferret it out. But the generals and their foreign allies dominate the trade.

Russian officials have streamed to Port Sudan this year, offering weapons to Sudan’s army in exchange for a naval port on the Red Sea. They also want to mine: Sudan’s minerals minister met a Russian delegation in September.

But even if the war’s foreign sponsors walked away, the gold trade is so lucrative that the belligerents could finance the conflict on their own, experts say.

In the first year of war alone, Sudanese officials say, the nation produced over 50 tons of gold — more than during the previous 12 months of peace.

One solution could be pressuring the buyers. Classifying Sudanese gold as a “conflict mineral” could require companies to keep Sudanese gold out of their products. Similar concerns over “blood diamonds” from West Africa led to a U.N.-backed certification system two decades ago.

But gold, which is often melted and mixed, can be hard to trace. And with gold prices recently smashing records, the incentives for war keep growing.

“Our country is cursed by gold,” Duaa Tariq, a volunteer aid worker, said from her home in war-torn Khartoum.

“Gold created armed groups and made some people rich,” continued Ms. Tariq, 32, an art curator who now serves meals in a food kitchen and helps victims of sexual assault. “But for most of us, it only brought trouble and war.”

Reporting was contributed by Anatoly Kurmanaev in Berlin; Malachy Browne in Limerick, Ireland; Abdalrahman Altayeb in Port Sudan, Sudan; Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt in Washington; Jack Begg and William K. Rashbaum in New York; and Mohamed Elhadi in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The United Arab Emirates is expanding a covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan’s civil war. Waving the banner of the Red Crescent, it is also smuggling weapons and deploying drones.

By Declan Walsh and Christoph Koettl

The drones soar over the vast deserts along the Sudanese border, guiding weapons convoys that smuggle illicit arms to fighters accused of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

They hover over a besieged city at the center of Sudan’s terrible famine, supporting a ruthless paramilitary force that has bombed hospitals, looted food shipments and torched thousands of homes, aid groups say.

Yet the drones are flying out of a base where the United Arab Emirates says it is running a humanitarian effort for the Sudanese people — part of what it calls its “urgent priority” to save innocent lives and stave off starvation in Africa’s largest war.

The Emirates is playing a deadly double game in Sudan, a country shredded by one of the world’s most catastrophic civil wars.

Eager to cement its role as a regional kingmaker, the wealthy Persian Gulf petrostate is expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to fighters rampaging across the country, according to officials, internal diplomatic memos and satellite images analyzed by The New York Times.

All the while, the Emirates is presenting itself as a champion of peace, diplomacy and international aid. It is even using one of the world’s most famous relief symbols — the Red Crescent, the counterpart of the Red Cross — as a cover for its secret operation to fly drones into Sudan and smuggle weapons to fighters, satellite images show and American officials say.

The war in Sudan, a sprawling gold-rich nation with nearly 500 miles of Red Sea coastline, has been fueled by a plethora of foreign nations, like Iran and Russia. They are supplying arms to the warring sides, hoping to tilt the scales for profit or their own strategic gain — while the people of Sudan are caught in the crossfire.

But the Emirates is playing the largest and most consequential role of all, officials say, publicly pledging to ease Sudan’s suffering even as it secretly inflames it.

Starvation haunts Sudan. Famine was officially declared last month after nearly 18 months of fighting, which has killed tens of thousands and scattered at least 10 million people in the world’s worst displacement crisis, the United Nations says. Aid groups call it a calamity of “historic proportions.”

The Emirates says it has made “absolutely clear” that it is not arming or supporting “any of the warring parties” in Sudan. To the contrary, it says, it is “alarmed by the rapidly accelerating humanitarian catastrophe” and pushing for an “immediate cease-fire.”

At a major meeting on Sudan at the United Nations on Wednesday, where one speaker after another decried a “man-made” catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions, the Emirates emphasized its aid to the war’s victims.

But for more than a year, the Emirates has been secretly bolstering the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s military for control of Africa’s third-largest country.

A Times investigation last year detailing the Emirati weapons smuggling operation was confirmed by U.N. investigators in January, when they cited “credible” evidence that the Emirates was breaking a two-decade U.N. arms embargo in Sudan.

Now, the Emiratis are amplifying their covert campaign. Powerful Chinese-made drones, by far the largest deployed in Sudan’s war, are being flown from an airport across the border in Chad that the Emirates has expanded into a well-equipped, military-style airfield.

Hangars have been built and a drone control station installed, satellite images show. Many of the cargo planes that have landed at the airport during the war previously transported weapons for the Emirates to other conflict zones, like Libya, where the Emiratis have also been accused of breaching an arms embargo, a Times analysis of flight tracking data found.

American officials say the Emiratis are now using the airport to fly advanced military drones to provide the R.S.F. with battlefield intelligence, and to escort weapons shipments to fighters in Sudan — to keep an eye out for ambushes.

Through an analysis of satellite images, The Times identified the type of drone being used: the Wing Loong 2, a Chinese model often compared to the MQ-9 Reaper of the U.S. Air Force.

The images show an apparent munitions bunker at the airport and a Wing Loong ground control station beside the runway — only about 750 yards from an Emirati-run hospital that has treated wounded R.S.F. fighters.

The Wing Loong can fly for 32 hours, has a range of 1,000 miles and can carry up to a dozen missiles or bombs. So far, the drones do not seem to be conducting airstrikes of their own in Sudan, officials say, but are providing surveillance and identifying targets on chaotic battlefields.

That makes them “a significant force multiplier,” said J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

After taking off from the base, the drones may in fact be piloted remotely from Emirati soil, experts and officials say. Recently, they have been detected patrolling the skies above the embattled Sudanese city of El Fasher, where people are starving and surrounded by the R.S.F. The city is home to nearly two million people, and fears are rising that the war is on the precipice of even more atrocities.

American officials have been pressuring all the war’s combatants to stop the carnage.

Vice President Kamala Harris confronted the leader of the Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, over his country’s support of the R.S.F. when the two met in December, according to officials briefed on the exchange. President Biden called this week for an end to the “senseless war,” warning that the R.S.F.’s brutal, monthslong siege on El Fasher “has become a full-on assault.”

The crisis is expected to come up again when he and Ms. Harris host the Emirati leader at the White House for the first time on Monday.

“It’s got to stop,” John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said of the siege.

‘They Can’t Lie to Us Anymore’

Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have been accused of war crimes, including brutal assaults filmed by the fighters themselves.

The war erupted in 2023, when a power struggle between Sudan’s military and the R.S.F. — a fighting force it helped create — erupted into gunfire on the streets of the capital and quickly enveloped the nation.

Sudanese military planes have bombed civilians, while rights groups accuse the R.S.F. of ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate shelling that has destroyed hospitals, homes and aid warehouses.

In El Fasher, Doctors Without Borders has accused the military of bombing a children’s hospital, and R.S.F. troops of plundering a hospital and blocking food intended for a camp of 400,000 starving people.

Aid workers are hoping to airdrop food into the city, which Toby Harward, the top U.N. official for Darfur, likened to “hell on earth.”

The Emirates insists it is simply trying to halt the war and help its victims. It has provided $230 million in aid and delivered 10,000 tons of relief supplies, and it played a prominent role in recent American-led peace talks in Switzerland.

“The U.A.E. remains committed to supporting the people of Sudan in restoring peace,” Lana Nusseibeh, an Emirati minister for foreign affairs, said afterward.

Senior American officials have privately tried to coax the Emirates to drop its covert operations, bluntly confronting it with American intelligence on what the Gulf state is doing inside Sudan, said five American officials with knowledge of the conversations.

After Vice President Harris raised American objections to the arms smuggling with Sheikh Mohammed in December, the Emirati leader offered what some officials considered a tacit acknowledgment.

While not admitting direct support to the R.S.F., Sheikh Mohammed said he owed the paramilitary group’s leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, for sending troops to fight alongside the Emirates in the war in Yemen, according to two American officials briefed on the exchange.

Sheikh Mohammed also said he viewed the R.S.F. as a bulwark against Islamist political movements in the region, which the Emirati royal family has long considered a threat to its authority, the officials said. (The Emirati government did not respond to questions about the conversation.)

“They can’t lie to us anymore, because they know that we know,” said one American official who, like others, was not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence.

Relief organizations are particularly incensed with the Emirates, accusing it of running “a Potemkin aid operation” to disguise its support to the R.S.F., according to Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former Obama and Biden administration official.

“They want it both ways,” he said of the Emiratis. “They want to act like a rogue, supporting their militia client and turning a blind eye to whatever they do with their weapons. And they want to appear like a constructive, rules-abiding member of the international system.”

Sudan’s civil war has turned the country, perched strategically on the Red Sea, into a global free-for-all. Iran has supplied armed drones to the Sudanese military, which has fought alongside Ukrainian special forces in the capital, Khartoum. Egypt has also sided with the military.

Russia has played both sides. Wagner mercenaries initially supplied missiles to the R.S.F., United Nations inspectors found. More recently, officials say, the Kremlin has tilted to the military, offering it weapons in exchange for naval access to Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

The Houthis of Yemen sent shiploads of weapons to Sudan’s military, at Iran’s behest, and gas-rich Qatar sent six Chinese warplanes, American officials say. (Qatar and the Houthis denied sending military aid.)

The Emirates has sent an array of weapons as well, officials have concluded.

“The delivery of drones, howitzers, multiple rocket launchers and MANPADS to the R.S.F. by the U.A.E. has helped it neutralize the air superiority” of Sudan’s military, the European Union ambassador to Sudan, Aidan O’Hara, wrote in February in a confidential memo obtained by The Times. (A MANPAD, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, is a type of antiaircraft missile.)

The memo contained other startling assertions: that Saudi Arabia has given money to Sudan’s military, which used it to buy Iranian drones; that as many as 200,000 foreign mercenaries were fighting alongside the R.S.F.; and that Wagner mercenaries had trained the R.S.F. to use the antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Emirates.

The Emirati role appears to be part of a broader push into Africa. Last year, it announced $45 billion in investments across the continent, analysts say, nearly twice as much as China. Recently, it has expanded into a new business: war.

It turned the tide of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2021 by supplying armed drones to the prime minister at a crucial point in the fight, ultimately helping him emerge victorious. Now it appears to be trying to repeat the same feat in Sudan with the R.S.F.

The Arms Pipeline

Last year, when cargo planes began to land at the airport in Amdjarass, 600 miles east of the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, the Emirates said it had come to establish a field hospital for Sudanese refugees.

But within months, American officials discovered that the $20 million hospital quietly treated R.S.F. fighters, and that the cargo planes also carried weapons that were later smuggled to fighters inside Sudan.

The Times analysis of satellite images and flight records showed that the Emiratis set up the drone system at the same time they were promoting their humanitarian operation.

During a lengthy phone call in early May with his Emirati counterpart, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, cited American intelligence that had been declassified so that it could be shared with a foreign official. The evidence documented Emirati military support to the R.S.F., two American officials briefed on the exchange said.

But the American candor appears to have had little impact. The Emirates has only doubled down on its support to the R.S.F. in recent months, American officials and witnesses in Chad say.

Fewer cargo flights now land at Amdjarass airport, where they can be easily detected, but a greater proportion of supplies arrives by truck, often along routes that bypass major cities and towns, officials say.

Traces of Emirati-supplied weapons are also being found on the battlefield. Human Rights Watch recently identified Serbian-made missiles, fired from an unidentified drone, that it said were originally sold to the Emirates.

“It’s very clear: The U.A.E. is sending money, the U.A.E. is sending weapons,” said Succès Masra, a former prime minister of Chad.

After complaints from Western officials, he said, he told his nation’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, that allowing the Emirates to funnel weapons through Chad was a “huge mistake.”

Nothing changed. The Emirates promised Mr. Déby a $1.5 billion loan, nearly as big as Chad’s $1.8 billion national budget a year earlier.

The Emirates supports the R.S.F. in other ways, too. Earlier this year, an Emirati private jet carried the paramilitary force’s leader, General Hamdan, on a tour of six African countries, where he was treated like a head of state.

Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the nation, is the hub of the R.S.F.’s business empire, which is anchored in gold trading. The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on what it calls an R.S.F. “front company” and recently listed seven Emirati companies under investigation on suspicion of being linked to the paramilitary group.

General Hamdan’s 34-year-old brother, Algoney Hamdan, has lived in Dubai since 2014 and was singled out by American sanctions. Yet he is now an interlocutor for stuttering peace efforts. Speaking in Switzerland during last month’s talks, Mr. Hamdan brushed off the U.S. measures against him.

“If it brings peace to Sudan, they can sanction as many companies as they want,” he said.

Mr. Hamdan conceded that some R.S.F. troops had committed abuses, but insisted the Emirates was not backing the R.S.F.

“There is no proof of anything,” he said. “It’s just false propaganda.”

A Cherished Symbol of Aid

The Emirati operation in Chad has deeply worried the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, one of the world’s oldest and most venerable aid movements.

It learned only from news reports that the Emirates Red Crescent had established a hospital in Amdjarass, said Tommaso Della Longa, a Red Cross spokesman. The Emirates Red Crescent, which is funded by the Emirati government, did not inform the international federation, as it should have, he added.

The Emiratis eagerly touted their largess. The government’s publicity showed workers unloading cargo pallets and treating patients under the Red Crescent logo — an emblem dating back to the 1870s that is legally protected under the Geneva Conventions. Misuse of that symbol is a potential war crime.

Worried that its reputation for neutrality was at risk, the Red Cross sent fact-finding missions to Chad in 2023 and 2024, “to better understand” what the Emiratis were doing under the Red Crescent banner in Amdjarass, Mr. Della Longa said.

They found few answers.

When the officials arrived, they were turned away from the Emirati field hospital for unspecified “security reasons,” Mr. Della Longa said. The officials eventually left Chad without setting foot in the hospital.

The Emirates Red Crescent did not respond to questions.

Mr. Konyndyk, the Refugees International official, said it was “unheard-of” for an aid organization to bar its own officials from visiting a hospital that supposedly treats refugees.

“The Emirates seems to be instrumentalizing the Red Crescent as cover for well-documented arms shipments to a militia that is actively committing atrocities in Darfur.”

In June, Emirati officials said they had treated nearly 30,000 patients, and were looking to expand the hospital, but people in Amdjarass say the hospital opens for just four hours a day.

The Emirates opened a second field hospital in Chad, in the city of Abéché in April. When The Times visited the 80-bed facility in July, doctors readily offered a tour of its well-equipped wards, which the hospital’s director, Dr. Khalid Mohammed, said received as many as 250 patients every day.

A private Emirati company ran the hospital, and it had no connection with the Red Cross or Crescent, he said. But the hospital closed at 4 p.m. each day, limiting the medical services it could provide.

The Red Cross says it is still trying to figure out what the Emiratis are up to.

“The process is not finished,” Mr. Della Longa, the Red Cross spokesman, said of the inquiry into the Amdjarass hospital. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”

Counterbalancing Iran

As Sudan plunges deeper into what many experts called the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, American officials say they are more sharply focused on the conflict than ever.

Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, organized last month’s peace talks in Switzerland despite their low chance of halting the fighting.

And Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, intervened directly with officials from Saudi Arabia when they appeared to be obstructing talks, said three people with knowledge of the interactions.

But the Biden administration is divided on a fundamental question: How hard should it push the Emirates?

When the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, suggested on a podcast on Sept. 4 that he supported a boycott of the Emirates by the rapper Macklemore, who recently canceled a Dubai show over the Emirates’ role in Sudan, it provoked a furious private reaction from Emirati officials, several officials said.

“I sure didn’t have Macklemore as hero for Sudan on my bingo card,” Mr. Perriello said on the podcast.

Some senior White House and State Department officials felt Mr. Perriello had gone too far, while others cringed at the idea of cowing to the Emiratis for the sake of good relations.

The dispute reflected the limits of challenging the Emirates, a country the United States relies on for many global priorities. The Emirates is a staunch American ally against Iran, a signatory of the Abraham Accords to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, a potential player in postwar Gaza, and it has even facilitated prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russia.

The Gulf state has shrugged off international censure before, notably over its role in Yemen, but it appears to be sensitive to growing criticism over Sudan.

When European diplomats considered last February whether the nation “would have any qualms about the slaughter and devastation” caused by its actions in Sudan, the confidential E.U. memo said, the diplomats concluded that the Emiratis “would be more concerned about any damage to their reputation rather than any sense of moral culpability.”

But whether the Emiratis would be willing to cede Sudan to one of the many rival powers piling into the war, especially Iran, is another matter entirely.

The prospect of Iran gaining a foothold on the Western shores of the Red Sea has clearly unnerved the Emirates and several other Arab countries involved in Sudan, officials say.

That sense of alarm is driving a proxy war and prompting rival powers to pour ever more weapons into Sudan, pushing the tottering state toward complete collapse.

The Emiratis say Sudanese refugees are grateful for the Emirati help. But the anger among others is growing.

Last week, when Ms. Nusseibeh, the Emirati minister who took part in peace talks in Switzerland, visited one of the hospitals in Chad to showcase her country’s good works, she was confronted by an infuriated Sudanese refugee.

“You know very well that you ignited this war!” yelled a man during a public meeting, in an exchange that quickly spread on social media. “We don’t want anything from you, except that you stop it.”

Speaking by phone, the man, who asked to be identified as Suliman out of fear of reprisals, said he hadn’t been able to contain himself.

R.S.F. brutality had forced him to flee Sudan a year earlier, joining 800,000 refugees now in Chad, he said. So when the Emirati minister sat before him, he said, he saw “the reason my house was destroyed.”

“I lost everything,” he said. “I had to get up and say what was in my heart.”

Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Shuaib Almosawa from Bangalore, India. Videos and graphics by Alexander Cardia and Josh Holder.

A country torn apart by civil war could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades, experts said.

By Declan Walsh                                                                                                                             Photographs and Video by Ivor Prickett

As Sudan hurtles toward famine, its military is blocking the United Nations from bringing enormous amounts of food into the country through a vital border crossing, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people during the depths of a civil war.

Experts warn that Sudan, barely functioning after 15 months of fighting, could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades. But the Sudanese military’s refusal to let U.N. aid convoys through the crossing is thwarting the kind of all-out relief effort that aid groups say is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths — as many as 2.5 million, according to one estimate — by the end of this year.

The risk is greatest in Darfur, the Spain-sized region that suffered a genocide two decades ago. Of the 14 Sudanese districts at immediate risk of famine, eight are in Darfur, right across the border that the United Nations is trying to cross. Time is running out to help them.

The closed border point, a subject of increasingly urgent appeals from American officials, is at Adré, the main crossing from Chad into Sudan. At the border, little more than a concrete bollard in a dried-out riverbed, just about everything seems to flow: refugees and traders, four-wheeled motorbikes carrying animal skins, and donkey carts laden with barrels of fuel.

What is forbidden from crossing into Sudan, however, are the U.N. trucks filled with food that are urgently needed in Darfur, where experts say that 440,000 people are already on the brink of starvation. Refugees fleeing Darfur now say that hunger, not conflict, is the main reason they left.

A mother of three, Bahja Muhakar slumped with exhaustion under a tree after her family migrated into Chad at the Adré crossing. It had been a frightening six-day journey, from the besieged city of El Fasher, along roads where fighters threatened to kill them, she said. But the family felt they had little choice.

“We had nothing to eat,” Ms. Muhakar said, motioning to the children squatting beside her. She said they often subsisted on a single shared pancake per day.

The Sudanese military imposed the edict at the crossing five months ago, supposedly to prohibit weapons smuggling. It seems to make little sense. Arms, cash and fighters continue to flow into Sudan elsewhere on the 870-mile border that is mostly controlled by its enemy, a heavily armed paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F.

The military doesn’t even control the crossing at Adré, where R.S.F. fighters stand 100 yards behind the border on the Sudanese side.

A map of Sudan highlighting the Adre border crossing in Chad. It also features Tine, as well as El Geneina and El Fasher in the Darfur region.

Even so, the U.N. says it must respect the order not to cross from the military, which is based in Port Sudan 1,000 miles to the east, because it is Sudan’s sovereign authority. Instead U.N. trucks are forced to make an arduous 200-mile detour north to Tine, at a crossing controlled by a militia allied with Sudan’s army, where they are allowed to enter Darfur.

The diversion is dangerous, expensive and takes up to five times as long as going through Adré. Only a fraction of the required aid is getting through Tine — 320 trucks of food since February, U.N. officials say, instead of the thousands that are needed. The Tine crossing was closed for most of this week after seasonal rains turned the border into a river.

Between February, when the Adré border crossing was shut, and June, the number of people facing emergency levels of hunger went from 1.7 million to seven million.

As the prospect of mass starvation in Sudan draws closer, the Adré closure has become a central focus of efforts by the United States, by far the largest donor, to ramp up the emergency aid effort. “This obstruction is completely unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., recently told reporters.

Getting aid into Darfur was difficult even before the war. Adré is roughly equidistant from the Atlantic to the west and the Red Sea to the east, about 1,100 miles as the crow flies in either direction. Roads are rutted, lined with bribe-seeking officials and prone to seasonal flooding. A truck leaving the port of Douala, on the west coast in Cameroon, takes nearly three months to reach the Sudanese border, one U.N. official said.

Blame for the looming famine is hardly limited to the military. The Rapid Support Forces also paved its path. Since the war started in April 2023, their fighters have scattered millions from their homes, burned factories that make baby food and looted aid convoys. They continue to rampage through Sudan’s breadbasket regions, which were among the most productive in Africa, causing massive food shortages.

And the international response to Sudan’s plight has largely been paltry, slow and lacking in urgency.

At a conference in Paris in April, donors pledged $2 billion in aid for Sudan, just half the requested amount, but those pledges have not been fully delivered. In the teeming refugee camps of eastern Chad, the lack of funds translates into desperate living conditions.

In Adré, nearly 200,000 people squeeze into a single transit camp that sprawls into the surrounding desert. Latrines overflow. Shelter is scarce.

The U.N. refugee agency, which manages refugee camps in Chad, said its operations were 21 percent funded in June. The World Food Program was recently forced to cut rations because it lacked money.

As rain pelted down, Aisha Idriss, 22, huddled under a plastic sheet, gripping it tight against gusts of wind as she nursed her 4-month-old daughter. Her three other children squatted beside them.

“We sleep here,” she said, referring to the sodden ground.

Just three beds were empty in a malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders, filled with starving infants. The youngest was 33 days old, a girl whose mother had died in childbirth.

In the next bed lay Moaid Salah, a 20-month-old boy whose thinning hair and gaunt features were classic symptoms of malnutrition. He had arrived in Chad last November after gunmen stormed into his family’s home in El Geneina, across the border in Darfur, and killed his grandfather.

“They shot him in front of our eyes,” said Moaid’s mother, Dahabaya Ibet. Now their struggle was to survive on meager U.N. rations.

“Whatever we get, it isn’t enough,” she said, spooning formula into Maiad’s mouth.

The situation is much worse in Darfur, where just a handful of aid groups are still working with international staff. The U.N., which pulled out at the start of the war, works through local organizations. The World Food Program says it can reach just 10 percent of people in need.

In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said that one quarter of children in central Darfur state were so malnourished that they could soon die.

Experts say that only the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to ramp up an emergency operation at scale. But without unimpeded access to the border, providing aid is proving extremely challenging.

It takes trucks several extra days just to reach the border crossing at Tine. To cross into Sudan, trucks need permits issued by the authorities in Port Sudan that can take weeks to arrive, if they do at all, aid officials said.

In an interview, Sudan’s ambassador to the U.N., Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, defended the Adré closure, citing evidence collected by Sudanese intelligence of arms smuggling. He said the U.N. was “happy” with the arrangement of routing trucks north through the border at Tine.

He added that foreign countries predicting a famine in Sudan were relying on “old figures” and seeking a pretext “for international intervention.”

He said, “We have seen deliberate, meticulous politicization of humanitarian aid to Sudan from the donors.”

At the Adré crossing, the military’s inability to control anything entering Sudan is starkly apparent. Porters with donkey carts said they deliver hundreds of barrels of gasoline that are consumed by the R.S.F.’s four-wheel-drive vehicles, which are usually mounted with guns.

And farther north, the R.S.F.’s powerful patron, the United Arab Emirates, continues to smuggle weapons and cash across the porous border, several western officials said.

The swelling crisis has brought recriminations inside the aid community. In private, aid workers and American officials say the U.N. leadership should be more forcefully urging the military to reopen the Adré crossing. Some wonder why the organization has not lined up trucks at the border, as it did in Gaza last year, to step up the pressure.

The U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan did not respond to questions for this story.

In Washington, intelligence briefings provided to the State Department and White House have confirmed the stark projections, issued by aid groups, for mass famine-related deaths by the end of this year, said a senior American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The coming famine is likely to be as deadly as the one in Somalia in 2011, the official said, and by the worst estimates could match the great Ethiopia famine of the 1980s.

To override the blockage at Adré, American officials including Ms. Thomas-Greenfield have called on the United Nations Security Council to permit U.N. trucks to cross at Adré without military authorization, as what happened earlier with cross-border aid into Syria. But analysts say that Russia, which recently offered arms to Sudan’s military, would be likely to veto such a resolution.

The other hope now is fresh cease-fire talks, announced this week and mediated by the United States, that are scheduled to start in Switzerland mid-August. In an interview, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, said he would be pressing both sides to allow full humanitarian access — if they even show up for the talks.

As the conflict in Sudan rages on, an army has built its own state within a state — a vision of what the nation could become.

By Nicholas Casey                                                                                                                         Photographs and Video by Moises Saman

By the time I reached the hilltop over Kadugli in June, the war in Sudan had been raging for 1 year, 2 months and 7 days — more time than the war in Gaza, less than the one in Ukraine. Yet despite having killed many thousands of people and displacing millions more, this brutal civil war has remained nearly unknown to most of the world. Many NGOs no longer operate in the country. The United States Embassy fled to Ethiopia shortly after the fighting erupted. I arrived in Sudan with the help of a rebel group that controlled parts of the south. Armed men ushered me in over a muddy border road two weeks before without even a stamp in my passport.

We had now climbed the hilltop to a position the rebels had seized, a stony outcrop where a city of more than 100,000 people spread out across a lush African plain. Through a pair of binoculars, I could make out Kadugli’s residents beginning their day in what was still territory held by the government. Kadugli once served as a staging ground for a slow ethnic slaughter as the Sudanese regime tried to wipe out the rebels in the surrounding mountains. Villagers paid the price instead, as entire settlements were destroyed by barrel bombs. Many families hid in caves. But the dictatorship fell in 2019, and last year, the two generals who seized power in its wake turned against each other. A new civil war began.

Now, in this valley, the tables had turned: As the generals fought each other elsewhere, the rebels were on the offensive.

Kadugli’s food stores had dwindled since the rebels took the main supply route to the city, a wide paved road I could make out through the binoculars. You might have expected the people of this place to have fled by now. But nowhere in Sudan is safe. Khartoum, the capital, has fallen along with other major cities as the generals continue their war. The de facto government has relocated to a port on the Red Sea. Instead, Kadugli seems to be awaiting the arrival of those who sent the fighters on the hilltop: The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, known here by its main initials, S.P.L.M., which has been fighting Sudan’s government on and off since 1983.

As rebel movements go, the S.P.L.M. is an unusual one. Armed insurgencies have long been fueled by radical ideology, be it Marxism, in the case of the Central American guerrillas of the 1980s, or Islamism for Hamas and the Islamic State more recently. The S.P.L.M. is among the few rebel groups to claim it is fighting for a Western-style democracy: It has a Constitution and calls for a secular state in Sudan, though it does so while pointing a rifle. The S.P.L.M.’s stronghold is in the Nuba Mountains, a region in southern Sudan roughly the size of Ireland that remains one of the world’s most isolated places. Across the Nuba landscape, piles of pink granite boulders rise up, many for hundreds of feet, making ideal lookout points for assaults against government-held lands. The S.P.L.M. has been capturing territory at a steady pace during the current civil war — “liberating” it, in the rebels’ parlance. Kadugli is their next major target.

The rebel army eyed the city below as one fighter fiddled with the wooden handle of a rocket launcher. They believed the government had stockpiled tanks, armored personnel carriers and potentially large stores of ammunition that, if captured, could fuel their movement for many years. In short, taking Kadugli could be the first step in realizing their vision for the nation that they hope will emerge from these many years of war. “We are patient, and Kadugli is surrounded on three sides,” a commander told me that afternoon. “It is only a matter of time till you and I will meet for lunch there.”

Sudan’s war has left nearly 11 million people displaced from their homes — more than the entire population of New York City, and currently the single largest population of internal refugees anywhere in the world. One U.S. State Department official estimated in May that as many as 150,000 people might be dead in the fighting, though the chaos has made an accurate body count impossible. Hospitals have ceased operating. Khartoum’s international airport is a ghost town, overrun by militiamen. Western Darfur, on the country’s frontier with Chad, stands besieged by paramilitary groups who have rekindled the ethnic cleansing that made Darfur a household name in the 2000s.

And then there is the threat of starvation, the specter that haunts nearly all conflicts in Africa and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. More than 15 million Sudanese faced crisis-level food insecurity even before the war began. Since then, the fighting has destroyed not just schools and roads but also farms and agricultural infrastructure, as the warring parties pillage the countryside to sustain themselves. The possibility of a great famine, like the one that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s, has become real again. Yet in a world already ravaged by entrenched wars and the threat of more, the tragedy of Sudan has hardly registered in many corners. Protesters do not march on capitals demanding a cease-fire. The United States has kept its distance. “For a Full Year, the Bodies Have Piled Up in Sudan — and Still the World Looks Away” was the headline of a piece this April by Nesrine Malik, a columnist at the British newspaper The Guardian who writes about the country and was born there.

Perhaps the war’s greatest tragedy is that it started with a moment of hope. In December 2018, Sudanese protesters amassed on the streets to end the 30-year rule of Omar al-Bashir, a brutal military dictator who oversaw the genocide in Darfur and left the country crippled economically. After five months of demonstrations, the military forced al-Bashir out of power, and eventually agreed to a joint government of civilians and generals that would pave the way for elections. Among those negotiating the shape of the new democratic Sudan were professionals in the capital, exiles who had returned from abroad and the secularist rebels of the S.P.L.M., who had long been fighting for an end to al-Bashir’s regime. But the elections never happened. In 2021, the army joined with the paramilitary forces to stage a coup, banishing civilians from the government and leaving two generals in charge.

The first was Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, now the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, known as the S.A.F. Now in his mid-60s, al-Burhan was an establishment figure in the last regime who had spent his life in the main branch of Sudan’s military. The other general was Mohamed Hamdan, a younger and wilier figure known throughout Sudan as Hemeti, or Little Mohammed. Hamdan rose to power not with the armed forces but through a paramilitary militia called the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F. The militia, known during its early days as the Janjaweed, grew infamous in the early 2000s when it was deployed to Darfur as part of the ethnic-cleansing effort.

Like the transitional government before it, the partnership between the two generals didn’t last long. In April 2023, the R.S.F. launched attacks against al-Burhan and took control of most of the capital. The militia received assistance from the United Arab Emirates, according to The Times, even as the Emiratis officially pushed for peace. (The U.A.E. has denied providing support for either side.) Egypt has backed the military, which also has been using Iranian drones. Russia’s role remains murky: It appears to be playing both sides.

In the south, the rebels of the S.P.L.M. formed another front of the war, sweeping into towns and villages as the two generals fought each other for the control of the north. For decades, Khartoum had attacked the rebels using Hamdan’s militias. Now the militias had brought down Khartoum, creating an opportunity the rebels had not seen in years. They could secure not just their home but a much broader territory, with the prospects of even more to come.

Late this spring, the photographer Moises Saman and I asked the S.P.L.M. for permission to visit their enclave to see their side of the war engulfing Sudan. Word came within days: The rebel chairman, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, welcomed the visit. But with the R.S.F. in command of Khartoum, there would be no entering through the capital. Instead, we took a longer route through Juba, the capital of neighboring South Sudan, and flew to a refugee camp close to the border. There, we were met by an intermediary who led us to a point along the border the rebels controlled, and then into their territory in the Nuba Mountains.

Our circuitous route through South Sudan — which was cleaved off from Sudan in 2011 — was a circumstance of the region’s complex divisions. For generations, Sudan has been torn by a bitter divide between its north, which identifies as Arab and Muslim, and its south, which is ethnically Black and religiously mixed, with a large Christian population. Khartoum was founded as a slaving town, the center from which Sudan’s Arab population preyed for years on its Black one. Many Africans fled the slavers and came to the Nuba Mountains, one of countless waves of migrants who have sought refuge in the rugged terrain. The mountains would also create a fertile ground for rebels. Khartoum’s persecution of the Christian south continued, and in the 1980s an Islamist government introduced new punishments inspired by Shariah, a form of religious law based on the Quran, for all of Sudan. It was a bridge too far for some in the south’s population. In 1983, a group of Black leaders formed the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the armed faction of the S.P.L.M. A civil war — Sudan’s second — began that year and lasted for the next two decades.

In 2005, the two sides reached a peace agreement that led to the country’s being split in two: A largely Arab state would keep Sudan’s name and capital, and the mostly Black country of South Sudan would be created with a government in Juba. But the Nuba Mountains, which sat on the dividing line between the two Sudans, were given to the north. Its rebels there were marooned. After South Sudan became independent in 2011, al-Bashir tried to root out the S.P.L.M. — now renamed the S.P.L.M.-North — with airstrikes. The fighting continues to this day in the current civil war, the country’s third.

After nine hours driving on unpaved roads, we at last reached the rebel capital. Kauda, a farming town, sits in a wide valley between two sets of mountains. Stone terraces line the hills along the road where circular mud-brick homes sit under traditional thatched roofs.

Generations of guerrillas have fought from rugged lands like this one, but few have claimed the prize that the S.P.L.M. has — a state within a state where they are the law now. In Kauda, the rebels run their own court system with volunteer judges, deciding everything from dowry disputes to murder cases. A rebel-run school system teaches classes in English — a rebuff to Khartoum’s education system, which teaches in Arabic — and issues driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The rebels wouldn’t say how many soldiers are in the ranks of the S.P.L.M.’s military arm, though one person close to the S.P.L.M. told me about 20,000 fighters were scattered through the mountains. They call the territory they defend New Sudan.

On the first day in Kauda, we were taken to the rebel media office. On the wall, a handwritten sign promised a “strong revolutionary media system” that would “liberate the people of the Nuba Mountains from Stereotypic ideology which reduces their values and that makes them feel inferior.” Rania Wanza, 36, who serves as the S.P.L.M. information secretary, invited us in from a waiting area in a dirt lot under a tree. I asked her to tell me about the war. Rania — the Nuba traditionally go by their first names — said war was not new for her people; after all, they had been fighting successive Arab dictators since the 1980s. What was different this time was that Khartoum had fallen. Throughout her life, she said, Sudan’s leaders sent armed militias to terrorize ethnic groups on the country’s fringes, be it in Darfur in the 2000s or the Nuba Mountains in the 2010s. “The policy of the government was to use the militias to stay in power,” she told me. “This time the militias have brought down the government itself.”

Rania seemed unworried by the weakened government — it was losing territory both to the militias and her own rebel group, which was expanding its grip on the mountains. Her concerns had to do with the displaced people pouring in from many parts of Sudan, more than 700,000 people, according to the estimate she gave me, in a region of around 2.8 million people. The S.P.L.M. had never received an influx of so many internal refugees, and they had come on the tail end of a devastating drought in the Nuba Mountains that destroyed the local crops. “Now we are in June, and there is no sorghum in the market,” Rania said, adding there were now reports of people dying of starvation in several counties. “This is a first for us.”

That afternoon, when I visited Daud Eshaiya Elful, the region’s acting governor, he was also concerned about food security and the new arrivals. “There is enough room for everyone, but the problem is the water, the problem is the food. We depend on farming. There will be deaths.” Still, Daud took the influx of displaced people, some arriving from Khartoum, the very capital that had declared war on the rebels, as a vote of confidence for their cause. “The Nuba Mountains have become the safest region of Sudan,” he declared. I asked about two foxholes I saw outside the governor’s office when I walked in: When were they dug? Earlier in the year, I was told, a government airstrike nearby prompted to them to redig an old foxhole from the last war and add a new one. “Sudan’s safest place” was a relative term.

On another morning in Kauda I visited an S.P.L.M.-run elementary school. Dozens of students sat under a large tree doing final exams before the summer break as a teacher — a volunteer, like all civil servants — scored the tests inside. But there were limits to what these rebels could provide the Nuba. There are no S.P.L.M. hospitals, only small clinics. The rebels leave the heavy lifting of the health care system to foreign NGOs, several of which told me that potential donors were nervous about dealing with a rebel regime.

In a hospital run by the German NGO Cap Anamur — only one of two in the Nuba Mountains — I came across a young woman caring for twins. Lagomi Issa, a nurse anesthetist who was working in the maternity ward, told me they were born prematurely but their mother, a teenager, went into convulsions after a cesarean section and died on the operating table. The woman with the twins was 29-year-old Sumaya Hassan, their grandmother. I introduced myself to Sumaya and offered my condolences. She told me she was now worried about the twins. The grandmother was breastfeeding her own infant now, but the premature twins were refusing to take her milk. They would need baby formula, but she could not afford any. Sumaya, resigned, said the twins might die soon, too.

I thought again about Rania’s warning — that the S.P.L.M. couldn’t keep up with the food supply. At its heart, the S.P.L.M. was a rebel organization, built to battle the government with propaganda and weapons. It was far less adept at defending its people against the hunger that was spreading across Sudan.

The rebels were eager to show us some of the territory they had conquered from the government. But Sudan’s rainy season had begun, and the S.P.L.M. controls few paved roads. Most of the Nuba, if they traveled at all during the muddy summer months, did so on foot or by tractor. Two relief agencies offered to lend us several A.T.V.s that would get us to the front line faster.

My vehicle was driven by Yassin Hassan Kundaly, a 39-year-old journalist who accompanied us as a minder for the rebels. (Yassin’s presence, including during interviews, was the only condition the S.P.L.M. put on our visit; we traveled freely, determined our own itinerary and asked what questions we chose without interference.) As we chatted over the roar of the A.T.V., Yassin told me he was the son of a “radical Muslim” father — but, he added, his mother was a Christian. This wasn’t unusual, he said. Since its inception, the S.P.L.M. encouraged those in its territory not to identify by religion or even by tribe, but rather as simply “Nuba,” to downplay the divisions that have long plagued Sudan. The rebels also had the practice of identifying talented Nuba students at an early age and sending them abroad for higher education, bypassing schools in the Sudanese capital, where Islamist education was common. As a teenager, Yassin lived for 10 years in Nairobi, where an S.P.L.M. scholarship paid for him to learn documentary filmmaking in college. But he wanted to return home to be part of the rebel movement. Now he was guiding me on the A.T.V. into the mountains where he was raised.

We passed through a changing landscape: parklike savannas covered in pink lilies, and stony fields where lone baobab trees stood watch. Every so often we would pass a rebel checkpoint, where a man in fatigues would examine our papers and wave us on. The only constant was the unforgiving road of mud and rocks. About six hours in, however, an enormous paved highway appeared before us like a sudden mirage. The S.P.L.M. captured the road this summer after the war began, Yassin told me over his shoulder. It ended in Kadugli, which the rebels wanted to take next. For years, the Sudanese Army used its control of the highway to cut off the rebel capital in Kauda from a large enclave it controlled in the west; now the two were finally connected. Saman and I were the first foreigners to make the journey in at least 15 years, Yassin said. He gave the A.T.V. some gas, and we started to accelerate down the tarmac highway.

We arrived in Mehtan just as a turbaned imam began his services for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. The S.P.L.M. refers to Mehtan as a “newly liberated” village; the Sudanese Army lost it after what someone in Kauda told me was a protracted battle with the rebels last summer. As we entered Mehtan, a hundred Nuba gathered under a tree to listen to the imam read from the Quran, with the men and boys seated near his feet and the women arranged in a long row behind them.

“You are experiencing war, you are experiencing hunger,” he said, looking up, after he finished reading. “But you will not die of either one unless God has written for it to happen on this day.”

“Amen,” the congregants intoned.

When the services were over, the 65-year-old imam, Abbas Hassan Kuku, sat with me next to the mosque as some passers-by listened in. I started to ask him about the fighting in the village last year, but he said that seemed like a distant memory; he wanted to talk about the hunger his parishioners faced. Khartoum had fallen to the R.S.F., which meant no more supplies from the capital. Locust swarms last year consumed the sorghum harvest, leaving few seeds to plant. “Our lot is basically the same as it is for those who fled from the north — no one has anything to eat,” Abbas told me. While the rebels had freed the town from the government, he said, the liberation had brought no food.

Ramadan Alnour Shalu, 59, the village chief, had joined us, and I asked him to tell me what the fighting was like last year. He pointed into the branches of the tree under which we sat; I could see the fins of a rocket-propelled grenade peeking out from the canopy. Ramadan said that it was launched by government fighters. The battle began after rebel fighters captured a neighboring village early last summer, Ramadan told me. One morning, the distant figures of the guerrillas could be seen on the top of the hill above the mosque; shortly afterward, their rockets were pouring down into Mehtan. The fighting lasted a month. When the army retreated, Ramadan, himself an S.P.L.M. supporter, entered the village with the local commander, gathered the villagers and declared the area “liberated” by the rebels.

But it had come at a steep cost, the chief told me: At least 100 people died in the fighting, and the school and part of the market were both destroyed by rockets.

The death toll of the rebel offensive was becoming clearer to us as we traveled. We arrived one night at Al Hadra, a town where the rebels told us the government launched a retaliatory attack in March, dropping a barrel bomb on a school that they said killed 11 students and two teachers. When our A.T.V.s entered the village, it was already dark, and because the town had no electricity, only the silhouettes of the residents could be seen. Abdulbagi Alnuw Said, the village chief, joined us for dinner and invited us to spend the night at his home. He told us his 16-year-old daughter died in the bombing, and his son, Yusef, had just returned from the hospital after taking shrapnel in his stomach and eye. He wanted to introduce us to Yusef in the morning, he said.

After sunrise, we headed out to the school. Yusef did not seem to want to come with us. But his father pushed him; the boy needed to confront his fear, he said.

Abdulbagi recounted the day of the bombing. He was on his way to Mehtan to handle some business there when he heard the sound of an Antonov bomber, the Soviet-made planes used by the Sudanese Armed Forces. By the time his motorbike had turned around, the plane had dropped the first of four bombs. The second hit the school just after the students had left the courtyard for an assembly.

We reached the school, a brick shell of its former state with a crater in the courtyard. Bloodstains were visible on a wall. A chalkboard had been shorn in half. “My name is Coco Bashir,” someone had written in English. Abdulbagi took me to the spot where he found his daughter’s body, along with those of two of her classmates.

Yusef didn’t follow us. The 13-year-old sat alone near a broken wall. “He hasn’t been the same since he came home,” his father said. “He just stares into space.”

As the days passed, I heard about a massacre that took place in Tukma, a village outside rebel territory, where the forces of the two generals were vying for control. Saman and I started looking for survivors, a search that led us to Tanto, an encampment of 23 families that included people who fled from Tukma after the militia attack. They now lived in a community of makeshift huts made of sticks and grass, where one resident pulled me into his home to escape a downpour that began just as I arrived.

He said his name was Mohammed Maki. As water began to collect on his floor, Mohammed told me about his former home in Tukma, noting it was made of brick and had an aluminum roof that didn’t let the rain in. Tukma was a quiet village with seven wells and four mosques that, deep within government-held land, was home to a mixed Nuba and Arab community where Mohammed lived with his wife and children. But the peace ended when Arab militias aligned with the R.S.F. began to attack the barracks nearby. Mohammed knew it was only a matter of time until they reached Tukma, so he and his neighbors began organizing nightly patrols to spot them.

Rehab, one of Mohammed’s two wives, told me she was still in bed at dawn the day of the attack; she was four months into a pregnancy and feeling exhausted. While she slept, gunmen were sneaking into Tukma on foot, bypassing the patrols. The mother woke up suddenly to the sound of gunfire. She gathered the children up to flee. When the youngest boy asked her what was happening, she said: “These people have come to kill us.”

Mohammed, still on the main road, could hear the gunfire in the town and rushed in the direction of his family. The Arab militiamen were racing into town, too, driving pickup trucks and carrying rifles. They wore civilian clothes with scarves over their faces. Mohammed wondered: Where is my wife? But Rehab was running in the other direction toward the mango groves on the outskirts of town. As the shots rang out, she noticed there was blood on her legs. She hadn’t been hit, however. The blood was coming from her womb.

Rehab found her husband later that day at a displaced persons’ camp and gave him the news: They had all survived except the unborn child, who, a midwife had told her, was lost in a miscarriage on the road. The family slept that night on the floor of a school, fearing the militia would attack there too.

The next morning, Mohammed was told that the government had taken back the village from the militias. He and a group of men ventured back into Tukma, where they found burned homes with the charred remains of their residents inside. They buried the bodies they could recover in shallow graves.

Suddenly there was gunfire again: The government had not retaken the town from the militia. Mohammed and the others fled, but left three men after they were hit by gunfire. After a time, Mohammed insisted they return once more to see if those they had abandoned were alive. Two were dead, but one, a forest warden, could still speak. Before he died, he whispered the name of the man who shot him — a nomadic Arab whom they all knew as their neighbor. They had been armed by the R.S.F., he said.

“We saw him in the market, we shared ceremonies with the Arabs, and then this war broke out and it became Arab versus Nuba,” Mohammed told me.

They had now fled to a village called Julud in S.P.L.M.-controlled territory; they were safe, but they were also hungry. “We’re in the same boat as the locals here,” he said. “No one has food. We are all eating bush leaves.” In the afternoon, Mohammed climbed a tree and began hacking off the branches. His children, gaunt and some with swollen stomachs, collected the leaves into plastic bags, to be boiled down for lunch. A woman walked up. “The ones yesterday were sweeter,” she said.

One night, as I headed to bed at a compound run by an NGO, I found something hard under the head of my mattress. It was a Kalashnikov rifle. The owner quickly came to claim it. Whether he was an S.P.L.M. fighter was unclear to me; he wore no uniform, but neither did many of those I saw on the road carrying similar rifles at rebel checkpoints.

What was clear was that after so many civil wars, the line between civilian and militant had become irrevocably blurred. The next day, I met Kuku Idriss, who had been described to me as a legendary commander of the rebels for two decades, known for his guerrilla-style ambushes. But when we sat down in his outdoor office, he had traded in his fatigues for an orange tunic with a peacock print. He said he was now a deputy governor in the northern corner of the Nuba Mountains where we had come to meet him. When I asked him about the S.P.L.M.’s progress in the current war, he demurred at first, saying he was a civil servant now. But he lit up when I asked him about Kadugli.

So far the S.P.L.M. had stopped short of a total assault on the regional capital, Kuku said. Too many Nuba lived there, and the rebels did not want a blood bath to capture it. They would slowly choke the city off, hoping the government soldiers there, many of them Nuba, would surrender. Kuku paused for a moment. “My brother is also there,” he said, adding that the man was a government military commander and that the two brothers had been fighting on opposite sides for many years. I asked him when the two had last talked. It was about two weeks ago, he said. “We try to keep our conversations strictly to family business.”

So far the S.P.L.M. had stopped short of a total assault on the regional capital, Kuku said. Too many Nuba lived there, and the rebels did not want a blood bath to capture it. They would slowly choke the city off, hoping the government soldiers there, many of them Nuba, would surrender. Kuku paused for a moment. “My brother is also there,” he said, adding that the man was a government military commander and that the two brothers had been fighting on opposite sides for many years. I asked him when the two had last talked. It was about two weeks ago, he said. “We try to keep our conversations strictly to family business.”

We decided to visit Kadugli to see the rebels’ front lines in the civil war. It was a 10-hour journey on our A.T.V.s, one that alternated, usually with little warning, between the blistering African sun and thunderstorms that brought heavy rains. As we approached Kadugli, the landscape turned into a flat no man’s land. We stopped at a former government army encampment that now had been taken by the rebels. A mosque lay in ruins after what fighters there told me was a 12-hour siege. We passed abandoned tanks that were left too wrecked for the rebels to fix. The remains of a charred car lay on the side of the road, sheared into several large pieces, as if it had been snapped by a giant. Yassin, the S.P.L.M. minder, told me it had exploded as it crossed over a land mine while an S.P.L.M. commander was inside. The rebels had no mine-sweeping technology: Instead, they depended on what one commander described to me as the “traditional method” of demining, which involved detonating mines by throwing objects, like lances, at the bombs to set them off.

As we approached the front lines, the sense of excitement grew among the rebels. “From here you can see the lights of Kadugli,” said Lt. Gen. Jagod Mukwar Marada, the S.P.L.M.’s top commander on the ground, who invited us to an outdoor lunch at his compound 20 miles from the city. “But they are not turning them on anymore, because we can shell them.” On a dirt road we came across a herd of cattle being driven by a contingent of young fighters who lifted their rifles and cheered as we passed them, bragging that they had just raided them from the city. If the state of the cows was any indication of the situation on the other side of the front line, it was not a good one: They were gaunt skeletons of cattle, and some could barely raise their heads.

At last, we reached a rebel position that faced the northern side of the city. A group of fighters were huddled in thatched huts. Some wore military boots; others had flip-flops and Adidas sneakers. Messages came in over a shortwave radio to a commander, who pointed us in the direction of the government stronghold. But palm trees blocked our view. The commander suggested we should accompany his soldiers on a march to a lookout point on a nearby hill. We set off with a contingent of eight men. As we continued the march, more rebels joined us: Some brought rocket launchers and others more Kalashnikov rifles. The commanders held wooden canes like those used by Nuba chiefs. After most of an hour passed there were at least two dozen of us, and we changed direction and scrambled to the top of a rocky hill.

I reached the top of the hill winded, and a soldier there handed me a cigarette. I looked down at Kadugli through binoculars. I could see water towers and roads. An airport stood below us whose control tower looked empty.

Then I saw a truck speeding toward us. Suddenly there was some commotion among the rebels, and several men readied their rifles. But the fighters calmed down when they saw the truck had a United Nations logo. The soldier who had handed me the cigarette explained that the hilltop position had been shelled by artillery recently.

“They’re hungry down there,” he said. “And they are desperate.”

I asked him what the soldiers on the hill were getting for food.

“Just leaves,” he answered.

I then thought back to the lunch I had eaten that day with Jagod, the rebel commander. There had been goat stew, cooked baobab leaves and kisra, a spongy bread made from sorghum. It was the only meal we had eaten like that in the Nuba Mountains. As we sat, the rebels’ commander recited again the principles of the S.P.L.M. and their long fight against discrimination against Black Africans that went back to the 1980s. “We can open up people’s eyes,” he said, getting more animated. “Do they want freedom? Do they want rights?”

I asked him what would happen if the rebels took Kadugli. “We advance to other states,” he said. “We can advance to Khartoum.”

It was the first time I had heard anyone in the S.P.L.M. suggest taking over the capital. I asked him if he really thought the war would end with his forces marching on Khartoum. “Why not?” he said, looking at me more seriously this time. Yet the bravado sounded to me like the kind that insurgent leaders have used to urge their men into battle for generations. On the ground, I saw a different reality: rebels hunkering down in the mountains to shield the Nuba people from the worst of the war, as the two generals continued to burn what remained of Sudan. The S.P.L.M. felt too ragtag to accomplish more, but perhaps that was enough.

It was time to go, Jagod said. His men had loaded his Land Cruiser. A half-dozen of them jumped inside carrying the usual assortment of rifles and rocket launchers. But when the driver turned the key, the engine didn’t start. Jagod’s men looked at each other for a moment, deciding what to do.

Finally a few fighters came up behind the land cruiser and started to push it forward. The driver got the engine going, and slowly angled the vehicle out of the gate. Jagod climbed into the truck, and it sped in the direction of Kadugli.

Photographs and Videos by Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times