Sudan’s War Is Not Just a Catastrophe. It Is a Revenue System Protected by Impunity.

Flashpoints & Frameworks Commentary By Nuri Shakoor

A sharp analysis of Sudan’s war as a self-sustaining political economy, where violence, gold, foreign backing, and impunity function not as side effects but as the business model of the conflict. This report argues that Sudan is not merely collapsing; it is being organized around armed extraction, and that reality must shape any serious response.

The most misleading phrase in coverage of Sudan is “state failure.” Sudan has not simply fallen apart. It has been reorganized around armed extraction. That distinction matters because failure suggests absence. Sudan’s war shows the opposite: a functioning political economy in which coercion, territorial control, gold, cross-border logistics, and foreign sponsorship still generate returns for the actors driving the violence. Until that system is named as a system, diplomacy will keep treating a business model as if it were a misunderstanding. ^{(World Health Organization)}

Start with the scale, because in Sudan the numbers are not background; they describe the structure of the war. WHO said in January that 33.7 million people in Sudan needed assistance in 2026. WFP says more than 21 million face acute hunger, with famine confirmed in Al Fasher and Kadugli and risk spreading across additional areas of Darfur and Kordofan. WHO and its regional office also report 13.6 million displaced and a health system in which more than a third of facilities are non-functional nationally, while in the worst-affected areas less than a quarter remained operational by mid-2025. These are not incidental humanitarian effects trailing behind the conflict. They are the predictable output of how the conflict is being fought. ^{(World Health Organization)}

That is the first point that needs clarity. Sudan’s emergency is not only large. It is organized. The UN fact-finding mission concluded in 2025 that both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces deliberately targeted civilians and destroyed infrastructure essential for survival, including medical centers, markets, food systems, water systems, and displacement camps. In other words, civilian collapse is not merely what happens around the war. It is part of how the war is waged. ^(OHCHR)

The usual shorthand, two generals competing for power, is true and still too shallow. Sudan’s conflict began as a struggle between the SAF under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti. But the war now persists because both sides are embedded in wider patronage and supply networks that reduce the pressure to compromise. Reuters reported in February that Ethiopia is hosting a secret camp to train thousands of RSF fighters and that the camp was financed by the United Arab Emirates, according to multiple sources and documents reviewed by Reuters; Ethiopia and the UAE denied the allegations. Last year Reuters also reported on a U.N. panel investigation into weapons seized in Darfur and possible Emirati links, while noting that the latest panel report did not say there was substantiated evidence of UAE arms support and that the UAE denied arming the RSF. That is exactly the point: Sudan now sits inside a fog of documented allegations, denials, proxy interests, and half-enforced international rules that keeps the war supplied while diffusing accountability. ^(Reuters)

This is where gold enters the story. Sudan’s armed economy is not sustained by ideology alone. Control over mining zones, trade corridors, taxation points, and transport routes creates revenue, and revenue creates military endurance. Reuters has long reported on gold’s role in Hemedti’s rise and on the overlap between armed power and illicit extraction networks in Sudan. That does not mean every shipment funds a specific atrocity. It means the war is not financially weightless. Armed actors are not merely spending down political capital; they are drawing on an economy built for conflict survival. Once that is true, ceasefire talks face a harder problem than battlefield mistrust. They confront actors whose leverage is partly commercial. ^(Reuters)

The humanitarian devastation therefore is not separate from the revenue logic. It helps secure it. Siege warfare, destruction of hospitals, attacks on aid routes, and the collapse of schools and local administration all degrade civilian alternatives to armed power. WHO has verified 201 attacks on health care since April 2023, causing 1,858 deaths and 490 injuries. Reuters reported in February that fatal drone strikes on civilians in Greater Kordofan were continuing, including attacks on medical facilities, even as the war entered new fronts. When infrastructure is repeatedly destroyed, civilians become more dependent, more mobile, and easier to dominate. That is not chaos replacing order. It is coercive order replacing civic order. ^{(World Health Organization)}

A second mistake in much commentary is to treat impunity as a byproduct. In Sudan, impunity is part of the operating environment. The United States determined in January 2025 that members of the RSF and allied militias committed genocide. The ICC’s recent reporting to the Security Council says there are reasonable grounds to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity are ongoing in Darfur. The U.N. fact-finding mission’s February 2026 update went further, describing the RSF takeover of El Fasher as showing “hallmarks of genocide.” Yet the distance between documentation and consequence remains enormous. The legal record keeps thickening. The enforcement record does not. ^{(State Department)}

Sudan’s case against the UAE at the International Court of Justice illustrates the problem. Sudan accused the UAE of violating the Genocide Convention by supporting the RSF. Reuters reported both the filing and the later ruling that the court lacked jurisdiction, leaving the underlying accusations unresolved in that forum. The legal defeat matters, but not because it disproved the political claim. It matters because it showed how easy it is for major questions of external complicity to remain suspended between allegation and action. The result is a familiar message to armed actors and their backers: the world may document your conduct in exquisite detail and still fail to materially change your incentives. ^(Reuters)

Funding tells the same story in another register. OCHA’s 2025 Sudan plan sought roughly $4.2 billion. The Financial Tracking Service shows it finished far short of that target, and OCHA said in July 2025 that the plan was only 23 percent funded at that stage of the year. For 2026, the U.N. appeal sought $2.9 billion to reach about 20 million people. Underfunding on this scale is not just an administrative shortfall. It is part of the strategic environment. A starved response system cannot offset starvation politics. When relief is predictably inadequate, armed control becomes even more decisive. ^(OCHA)

That is why the right question is not whether Sudan can get another conference, another statement, or another procedural peace track. The right question is whether outside powers are willing to raise the cost of participation in the war economy itself. That would mean real financial forensics on gold and procurement networks, stronger scrutiny of logistics hubs and air corridors, serious enforcement of embargoes where they exist, and diplomatic costs for states credibly tied to sustaining either side. It would also mean funding the humanitarian system as if civilian survival were strategically relevant rather than morally optional. None of that would guarantee peace. But without it, calls for dialogue amount to asking civilians to outlast a market that still works for the men with guns. ^(Reuters)

The core analytical point is simple. Sudan’s war endures not only because two armed factions distrust each other. It endures because violence still pays, because outside actors still hedge rather than reckon, and because the institutions meant to punish mass atrocity remain better at description than coercion. Sudan is not merely collapsing. It is being consumed by a system that continues to finance itself. Until policy is aimed at that system, the world will keep responding to Sudan as a humanitarian emergency while leaving intact the political economy that keeps producing it. ^(OHCHR)

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^Sources

1. Sudan: 1000 days of war deepen the world’s worst health and humanitarian crisis

2. “A war of atrocities:” Sudan civilians deliberately targeted, UN Fact-Finding Mission reports international crimes on large-scale | OHCHR

3. Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say | Reuters

4. Sudan’s conflict: Who is backing the rival commanders? | Reuters

5. Genocide Determination in Sudan and Imposing Accountability Measures - United States Department of State

6. Sudan launches case against United Arab Emirates at World Court | Reuters

7. Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2025 - Executive Summary (December 2024) [EN/AR] | OCHA