--- title: "Sudan's Rebels are Falling Apart. That Doesn't Mean the War is Over." description: "Fronts video analysis of Sudan's Rebels are Falling Apart. That Doesn't Mean the War is Over, with context on conflict, defense, and security." url: https://fronts.co/videos/sudans-rebels-are-falling-apart-that-doesnt-mean-the-war-is-over.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/sudans-rebels-are-falling-apart-that-doesnt-mean-the-war-is-over/ datePublished: 2026-10-21T20:30:09.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-21T20:30:09.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/sudans-rebels-are-falling-apart-that-doesnt-mean-the-war-is-over-585593b8.png" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4423 --- For more than three years now, the civil war in Sudan has been raging. On one side, the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, on the other, the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. For much of the war, the momentum has swung like a pendulum between the two sides. Early on, the RSF seemed to be on top, claiming territory all over the country, and even besieging the SAF's leader, General Abdul Fatah Al-Buhan at the Army Base in Khartoum. They held the momentum for a while until a counter-offensive from the SAF broke through and re-took the capital. And then, momentum has swung to and fro, but the direction of travel has been clear. The SAF has made so many gains that in our video on the 7th of August, we asked if the Sudanese military might be winning. In the time since we made that video, the momentum has continued to shift even more firmly in the SAF's direction. The Army is now advancing on multiple fronts, even as the RSF is split by def ections. But the paramilitaries and their allies are still fighting and still receiving aid from the UAE. The question now is how long can they keep it up? On the battlefield. When we published our video on the 7th of August, the SAF was still consolid ating its late July victories. Apart from taking control of the highway that linked Khartoum to Ella Bade, the SAF had also captured the towns of Barat, Jabrat al-Shake, and Umm Sayala. And one of the first things the RSF tried to do was reverse those gains. On the 13th, the RSF launched a major attack to try and retake Jabrat al-Shake. Local outlets indicated that the RSF had mobilized over 250 armed vehicles for this attack. In the week leading up to it, the RSF had escalated its assaults on multiple fronts at once, which a senior SAF officer described as a departure from the group's usual tactic of massing its forces for a strike on a single target. It didn't work. The Army and their allies, the Joint Forces, a coalition of various independent armed groups that opposed the RSF held the town, and the RSF fell back toward Darfur. Footage released by channels associated with the Joint Forces showed dozens of destroyed and captured combat vehicles alongside detained RSF personnel. Lucid the vehicles undoubtedly hurt the RSF, but failing to retake Jabrat al-Sh ake was a far bigger blow. The town, you see, sits on the Al-Sadarra Highway, the direct route between the Khartoum region and Ella Bade. As the Sudan War Monitor explains, the RSF held large sections of that road from the early months of the war, using it to move fighters and supplies between Khortof an and the outskirts of the capital's sister city, Omdurman, and to put pressure on Ella Bade. Even after the Army partially broke the siege of Ella Bade in May 2025, its convoys still had to take much longer detour through White Nile State. When the SAF captured the highway in July, that detour ended, and the Army could resupply and reinforce Ella Bade much faster than before. Taking Jabrat al-Shake would have nullified those gains. What was this the only major town to be taken by the military? Sadari fell on the 25th of September, with footage geolocated by Sadan's post showing joint forces fighters in the western part of town. Sadari is the administrative center of its locality, and it sits on the routes linking North Khortofan to both North Darfur and West Khortofan. That makes it a gateway for anyone moving between the RSF's territory and the rest of the state. The RSF still holds some ground in the surrounding locality, but the Army now controls the town. And then, a week later on the 2nd of October, the SAF took Al-Maz-Roube, an army source told out the Sierra, it was the RSF's largest stronghold in North Khortofan. Like Sadari, it sits on the desert routes the RSF uses to move reinforcements and logistics between North Khortofan and Darfur. Between them, the two towns put the Army in a position to choke off those reinforcements and to strike it to Darfur, the RSF's historic stronghold. And we need to emphasize what a massive shift this is from late last year. Like then, the Army's first offensive into Khortofan had stalled out. The RSF had just conquered the last significant city in Darfur, and the param ilitaries seemed poised to roll onwards, back towards Sudan's central heartlands, and maybe even the capital region. Now, however, the military has taken so many towns in North Khortofan that the local governor has estimated they hold 96% of the state. But even with the SAF clearly holding more land, analysts, including those at Sudan War Monitor, are still cautious, warning that control of individual villages and towns does not necessarily mean the Army holds as much territory as its supporters say it does. North Khortofan, you see, is massive, occupying an area of about 185,000 square kilometers or roughly the same size as Washington State. But while Washington is home to over 8 million people, North Khortofan is currently thought to only have three and a half million living there, or though it's hard to say, as no census has been conducted for a really long time. Anyway, the point is that North Khortofan is basically a whole load of desert and scrublands daunted with a handful of cities. The major population centers are separated by vast tracts of open land connected by dirt roads. Both the RSF and the SAF can move through the roads and either force can enter a town while the other operates a short distance away. This means that territorial control is a good deal more porous than the phrase might imply, with the RSF still able to move freely in some of these swaths of open land. Even with that caveat, though, it's undeniable that the SAF has the upper hand, at least for now. The major reason for that is all the defections within the RSF. Losing Friends Fast On the 31st of August, the Sudan Tribune reported that around 200 RSF fighters had defected to the army, arriving in the town of Ondurman with their weapons and equipment. They were led by Abu Bakr Hamoda Dalub, the RSF's intelligence chief in North Khortofan and a member of the group's executive office. While the 200 fighters are important because they help replenish the SAF's ranks, Dalub is the real prize. He ran intelligence for RSF's special missions in an area that includes Hamrat al-Shak, one of the few positions the RSF still holds in North Khortofan, along with the desert where the Egyptian, Libyan and Sudanese borders meet. And he is already providing valuable intel after defecting, he claims that Ale utian cargo planes were landing on dirt airstrips near Hamrat al-Shak, each unloading 8-10 tons of weapons and ammunition. This is the kind of information the SAF desperately needs and could very quickly act on using a few well-placed drone strikes. And we should mention that the SAF had droid forces launched their latest offensive in the state barely two weeks after Dalub defected. And while this could just be a coincidence, it seems more likely that the former high-ranking intelligence officer coughed up the goods. Not the Dalub who was the only high-ranking member of the RSF to recently walk away from the group. Whenever we talk about defections, we tend to focus on the military ones for obvious reasons, commanders bring troops, weapons and vehicles, and in Dalub's case, intelligence that the SAF can use against the RSF. But there was a major civilian defection in early August that we should mention. Hamrat Mohammed Khalifa, the RSF appointed governor of Khortofan, defected from the group during a live interview with Saudi television channel Al-Arabia. He accused the RSF of failing to meet people's basic humanitarian needs in Kh ortofan and Darfur, and of destroying cities and killing civilians without restraint. Which, given the RSF filmed itself committing genocide in al-Fasha, probably shouldn't have come as a surprise, but here we are. Now, it would be bad enough if Khalifa was just a run of the mill-regional administrator. But he was also a member of the Presidential Council and the RSF led parallel government based in Niala, the capital of South Dothor State. The fact that it's such an important official who has presumably worked alongside RSF leader Hamrati as a member of that Presidential Council has left the group shows that everyone, not just those in the military, can see the writing on the wall. Their best shot at surviving this war is to abandon the RSF for the SAF, which is currently welcoming defectors with open arms and pardons for war crimes. The worst part, at least from the perspective of the paramilitaries? These two may just be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to a report from Madam Assa, Abdul Rahim D'Galo, the RSF's deputy commander and Hamrati's brother met tribal leaders from Rizagar, in the first week of August. Rizagar are the Arab tribe that the D'Galo family belongs to, and its communities have supplied the RSF with fighters since the war began. Abdul Rahim wanted them to mobilize again. The tribal leaders, however, let know. Those tribal leaders claimed that they could no longer persuade their communities to mobilize as they did in the early years. They pointed to the scores of young men who had come home wounded, many with missing limbs, and the families that had lost their sons and communities that had borne the cost of war for years as proof that people weren't willing to sacrifice anymore. One tribal leader apparently got so angry that he told Abdul Rahim to go to the villagers himself and ask the women and families to send their sons. Abdul Rahim accused the tribal leaders of colluding with the army, threatening to send them to prison. This would have been a major escalation and almost guaranteed that the RSF lost the support of the tribe. As Madam Assa's piece explains in detail, "In Darfur, military recruitment is a negotiation. Most of the fighters pass from commanders to tribal leaders and then to local families who expect protection, money, and status in return." By threatening the very tribal leaders that formed the backbone of this process, Abdul Rahim was undermining the very system the RSF relies on to replenish his ranks and risking alienating one of its most important sources of manpower. The RSF has already had to deal with the fallout from pissing off one tribal leader. In February this year, Musa Halal, the leader of the Mahamid, a subgroup of the Rizagat, fled Dafur to the safety of an SAF control area after the RSF attacked his base. This was a big deal as Halal previously served as the leader of the Jandra Weed, the militia group that the RSF is descended from, and many of the RSF's commanders had served unto him. The attack on Halal triggered a wave of defections from the RSF, with many Mah amid commanders leaving the group. Dalub is also believed to be a part of the Mahamid, according to local outlet Iron Network. All of these defections stemmed from one subgroup of the Rizagat. If Abdul remain followed through on his threat, the RSF risks losing the entire tribe and a huge chunk of its fighting force as well as a lot of senior commanders with it. Now, there's no guarantee that this will happen. During the meeting, the Paramount Chief of the Rizagat apparently stepped in and stopped tensions from escalating any further. And it's distinctly possible that since then, cooler heads have prevailed and the RSF senior leadership is once again in the good graces of the tribe, after all the group's leader Hameti is one of their own. But even if the two sides have resolved their issues, the fact that the cracks have emerged in the first place and that the situation has become so acrimonious that someone decided to leak it to the press is a testament to just how unpopular the RSF has become in certain quarters. But even with the RSF losing friends, it's still a formidable force. And it's here that we inject a little nuance into today's video. Because while the paramilitaries may be on the back foot in Kortofan, they're still advancing in other areas, not least thanks to their outside backers. Down, not out. Now, in our introduction, we mentioned that the RSF is a UAE-backed paramilitary group. And while that is accurate, it doesn't fully capture the lengths that the UAE is willing to go to to support the paramilitaries. UN experts found that between January and July, Boeing and Aleutian transport planes were landing at night in Niala, carrying fighters for a mercenary's drone's weapons. The same report found that a UAE-based firm had had a Colombian mercenary group known as Desert Wolves, which has fought alongside the RSF, operated drones with a group and even participated in the siege of Al Fasha, which you'll remember is where the RSF literally committed genocide. A separate UN investigation identified a transnational chain spanning several countries that were supplying the RSF with personnel, training, weapons, and logistics. Right is also reported that the UAE had financed the construction of a secret camp on the Ethiopian side of the border to train thousands of fighters for the RSF. Their backing is why the RSF can keep opening new fronts, even while dealing with significant losses both on and off the battlefield. The clearest example of this is in the Blue Nile State, in the southeastern part of Sudan. For much of the war, Blue Nile has been relatively unimportant, with Ali Bakhm ud Ali, Sudan analyst at the Conflict Monitoring Group Aqlad calling out a secondary theatre. However, in the last few months, it has become increasingly significant thanks to that RSF training ground just across the border in Ethiopia. In August, the RSF and its allies, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement North, or SPLMN, captured two towns on the Ethiopian border. The SPLMN is a rebel movement that had been fighting cartooned long before this war started, and a faction of it is now fighting alongside the RSF. According to Madamassar, the attacks were launched partly from Ethiopian territory, giving the rebels a huge advantage. After all, the RSF does not need to hold a long front line through Blue Nile if it could bring people and equipment in from the other side of the border. From there, the alliance pushed further, capturing the headquarters of the army 's 13th Infantry Brigade and an advanced military outpost. With these two locations under their control, the RSF was poised to make a move on Ed Damazin, the capital of Blue Nile State. And the army clearly knew it. Within days, the SAF announced that its joint forces units had been deployed to Ed Damazin to shore up the city's defenses against the rebels. But on the 2nd of September, General Abdul Fatah Al-Buhrhen, the SAF's leader, visited the city to rally morale. For now, the SAF still holds the city and vast swathes of the state, but that control has come to cost. The troops needed to reinforce the city had to be drawn from other theaters, most likely in North Qordafan, which would limit how effective the SAF can be there going forward. This appears to have been the RSF's plan from the start, to pull the SAF into conflicts in other theaters, thereby giving the RSF time to regroup and try to launch a counterattack to retake the territory it recently lost in North Qordafan. Only time is going to tell if this strategy will be successful. Away from Blue Nile State, we also have to talk about another important front in this war, Dafur. When the RSF overran al-Fashir lay last year, it took the last major city in the region that was held by the army. The SAF now primarily controls small pockets of territory along the border with Chad in areas largely inhabited by the Zagawa community. This is important because many of the joint forces fighters are ethnically Zak awa, so they are protecting their own communities. Since during the RSF a bit tried to squeeze these pockets, attacking multiple Sakawa villages and killing scores of civilians. The joint forces tried to push back against the RSF and even managed to recapt ure an important town. But they were eventually overwhelmed. In West Arfor State, the two sides are fighting over a patch of territory called Bea Saliba, near the Chadian border on the northern route to Elginina the State capital. Bea Saliba is the last remaining stronghold of the joint forces in the northwestern part of West Arfor. On the 4th of August, the RSF claimed that they had taken Bea Saliba, which started a pendulum of competing claims with both sides claiming to have taken it multiple times between then and the 5th of October. If the most recent claim is accurate, then the SAF and its allies still control Bea Saliba, at least for now. If the army does control the area, then we can expect more strikes into Chad as it tries to further disrupt RSF supply lines, which would add to the myriad of issues the RSF is dealing with. Even with all of those issues, the RSF continues to be an enormous threat. Unless the UAE and the other countries supporting the militia agree to stop supplying it with weapons, fighters and money, then there's no guarantee that it won't regroup and start making gains once more. The paramilitaries may be on the ropes, but with a full might of the UAE holding them up, it would be foolish to count them out just yet. Thank you for watching.