NM's blog

Realpolitik and selective accountability.  “The UAE is a strategic partner of the West. It is a buyer of arms, a major collaborator with Israel’s genocidal regime, a conduit for intelligence, and a financial hub. It has hosted US military bases, participated in counterterrorism operations, and invested heavily in Western economies. In short, it is too useful to punish.” Counterrevolution, gold and global impunity

Gold

Key points Hemedti’s war machine is predicated on continual expansion. Since the RSF offers its recruits licence to loot and raid in lieu of wages, absent fresh targets, its forces have a tendency to disperse. In every city it captures, the RSF has employed the same playbook: destroy state institutions, plunder humanitarian resources, raze civilian property. Its assaults have functioned as an enormous engine of primitive accumulation that has destroyed agricultural land, displaced millions of people, and effected a wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to a class of militia leaders backed by Emirati capital… The paramilitaries have generalized the predatory political economy of Bashir’s regime. While Bashir exploited the peripheries to enrich the centre, the RSF has turned the entire country into a periphery to be plundered. The RSF’s mode of warfare has ultimately proved its undoing. The Sudanese army’s resurgence is partly due to its successful solicitation of foreign support. Qatar –...

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e...

A protracted conflict between the SAF and RSF is a possibility Related الذهب وإسرائيل وفاغنر أم الديمقراطية والإسلاميون؟