Why Doesn't Sudan's War End?

Part two of two. Last week: how the war is fought and funded. This week: what it has built, who is paying, and what the Security Council decided.

Last week we described the machine and left one question for this week: what the Security Council would do when the Darfur arms embargo came up for renewal on 12 September 2026. It has now answered, and the answer is almost nothing.

On Friday 11 September 2026, the day before the embargo would have lapsed, the Council voted fifteen to nothing to extend it, unchanged, for one month, to 9 October 2026, and to keep its panel of experts running to 9 November. That was the whole of it. The American proposal that framed last week's piece, to widen the embargo to all of Sudan, to add sexual violence and kidnapping for ransom and attacks on aid workers to the conduct it can punish, and to strengthen the panel, never came to a vote. The Council could not agree on it, and gave itself thirty more days to try. Russia, which arms and backs the army's government and holds a veto, had made its red lines plain in the closed negotiations; afterward its deputy ambassador, Anna Evstigneeva, said Moscow would not allow "even a hint of broadening the restrictions." China and several of the African members stood with it. The United States, which wrote the wider draft, voted for the month's extension while calling a long technical rollover "not an option," and promised to be back.

We named three outcomes last week and said we would report which one arrived. This is the third, in its plainest form: the twenty-year-old, Darfur-only, drone-silent instrument rolled over as it stands. That it was rolled over unanimously might be read as resolve. We read it the other way. Fifteen governments that agree on almost nothing about this war agreed on the one move that changes nothing, keeping the least effective version of the embargo alive a little longer, because the alternative was to decide and they could not. That is not the world acting on the mechanism these two pieces describe. It is the world declining to, on a thirty-day clock.

One item in last week's ledger has moved, and it belongs on the record. We wrote that no finding against the army carries the weight of the genocide finding against the RSF, and that we had looked. That is true of genocide findings, and it let a grave allegation on the army's side sit in their shadow. In April 2025 the United States determined that Sudan's government had used chemical weapons in 2024, and imposed sanctions that took effect that June. On 5 September 2026 the New York Times and the Washington Post, working from more than a hundred and fifty leaked documents, and separately a panel of former officials of the international chemical-weapons watchdog, reported evidence that the army developed and fired chlorine munitions at the RSF in 2024. The army denies it. The watchdog itself, the OPCW, has not confirmed the allegation; it has asked Sudan to clarify, and that process is open, and two of the published accounts differ on where the chlorine came from. So this is not, yet, a finding of that weight. It is a government's determination and a body of reporting the treaty body has not adjudicated, and we carry it as exactly that. It narrows, at the level of grave allegation, the asymmetry we drew last week at the level of established finding.

What has the money built?

A country with two governments, and a front line that is still moving between them.

On 26 July 2025 an alliance of the Rapid Support Forces and allied armed and political groups, calling itself the Sudan Founding Alliance, or Tasis, announced a government of its own, the Government of Peace and Unity. On 30 August 2025 the RSF's commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, was sworn in as its president before a chief justice in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, with Abdelaziz al-Hilu of the SPLM-North as his deputy; Reuters, reporting the ceremony, said it could not independently confirm Dagalo was there. When El-Fasher fell that October, after a siege of eighteen months, the last army garrison in Darfur went with it, and on the map the parallel government's reach ran across the two western regions, Darfur and Kordofan. Those two regions together make up something like forty-six percent of Sudan's land. That figure is the size of the regions as they are drawn, not the ground the parallel government holds, which is smaller and, in Kordofan, contested by the week.

What that government says about itself is the most direct evidence we have of what the gold is for. In November 2025 a leader of the Tasis coalition, Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim, told the Sudan Tribune that the administration was arranging to export strategic commodities, that its traditional gold production had doubled, and that it was opening the sector to companies for mineral extraction and for agricultural exports, gum arabic and peanuts among them. That is an interested party describing its own plans, and we carry it as that. But set beside last week's first section the shape is hard to miss. The parallel state presents itself as an export administration for the same commodities that fund the war, sold into the same market.

Whether it can govern is a different question, and one we cannot answer. The government in Port Sudan and Khartoum calls it a phantom that administers nothing. Its own coalition does not always move as one: in early September 2026 the forces of its deputy, al-Hilu's SPLM-North, attacked villages of the Otoro, a Nuba minority, in South Kordofan, killing more than twenty-five people by a Sudanese medical group's count, a reminder that "a government" here is a coalition of armed groups that keep their own wars. And the front has not been kind to it. Through late July 2026 the army took the towns north of the road from Omdurman to El-Obeid, and on 27 July said it held the highway itself, the route that lets it move troops, fuel and supplies the length of the corridor. On 13 August it said it had thrown back the largest RSF assault in weeks at Jabrat al-Sheikh, an attacking force it numbered in the hundreds of vehicles. A day later fighting broke out in the hills southwest of El-Obeid, around Umm Arada; the army said it repelled the attack, the RSF said it had seized the ground, and we adopt neither. What can be said is that after the Kordofan setbacks Dagalo gave his field commanders licence to act without waiting for central orders, a loosening our own running record has read as the first reversal the RSF has suffered in this phase of the war.

What we can observe: two administrations, each with its own gold, each selling into the same market, and a front that this summer moved against the side that declared the second state. What we cannot observe: whether that government can govern, and how long the line holds where it is.

So we do not write that Sudan has settled into two states. On 1 September 2026 the Sudan Youth Parliament warned of a "deepening de facto partition," and the people who live under both are increasingly describing the result the same way. But the line is moving, and lately it is moving against the side that declared the second state; and the structure both sides have built, two treasuries filled by the same trade, would survive a great deal of movement on the map.

The two administrations are not the whole of the political map. There are also the attempts to bridge them, and they have not gone well. Sudan's army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, put forward what he called a Sudanese-Sudanese Dialogue, and on 31 August 2026 the African Union Commission welcomed it. Within two days the country's civilian anti-war forces wrote to the AU's own Peace and Security Council to object, on the ground the Council had itself set: that a humanitarian truce should lead to a ceasefire before any political process, and that a dialogue convened on one side's territory, without a ceasefire and without broad participation, would entrench the very fragmentation the war has produced. The RSF's alliance rejected it too, from the other side, as the army's own process by another name. The United Nations' envoy, Pekka Haavisto, met Burhan and his ministers in Khartoum on 6 September 2026 to press for de-escalation and an exchange of detainees; two days later a Quintet of the African Union, the United Nations, IGAD, the Arab League and the European Union made its first visit to Sudan and, as it left on 10 September, called for an inclusive, Sudanese-led political process, saying there is no military solution to the war. Every table so far has foundered on the same point: a process convened on one side's ground, before any ceasefire, ratifies the map instead of redrawing it.

Who is paying?

The people the numbers describe, and the numbers should be given one at a time, with their sources, because they come from different counts and do not add.

Inside Sudan, the International Organization for Migration's displacement tracking put the number of internally displaced people at 8,622,801 in its snapshot of 18 August 2026, about one percent below its June count, because returns are now running a little ahead of new displacement. Outside the country, the UN refugee agency counted, by late August 2026, some 4.6 million Sudanese who had crossed a border, most of them refugees and asylum seekers, and close to a million of them former refugees, many of them South Sudanese returning to a country they had themselves once fled. Those are separate populations, counted by separate agencies on separate definitions, and added together in various ways they produce the thirteen or fourteen million that is often quoted. We keep them apart.

What the larger of those two numbers looks like in one place: at the Tawila camp in North Darfur, sixty-eight kilometres west of the El-Fasher the RSF took last year, the migration agency counts more than 665,000 displaced people, and reported this week that the three thousand tents it has raised in recent months are negligible against the need.

Where the people went. Source: UNHCR, 24 August 2026; the map panel is cropped from the agency's weekly situation sheet.

The hunger is a third count, and it is measured in seasons. On the IPC scale, the one on which famine is formally declared, the analysis for February to May 2026 placed nineteen and a half million Sudanese in acute food insecurity, two in every five people in the country; more than five million of them at the emergency level; and a hundred and thirty-five thousand at the catastrophe level, the last step before famine. The projection for the lean season that followed, June to September, the months we are in as we write, is worse: the catastrophe count is expected to climb toward two hundred thousand, and fourteen areas carry a risk of famine under the worst case. In Kordofan, where the fighting is, road closures around El-Obeid have local monitors warning of famine now, not in projection.

Cholera has moved with the war. The World Health Organization counted more than 2,600 cases in Kordofan's latest outbreak by early August 2026 and calls the region its newest hotspot; a vaccination campaign is under way for 928,000 people in West Darfur and West Kordofan. And the gum arabic trade on which some five million Sudanese livelihoods depended, the world's main source of the emulsifier before the war, has been looted by both sides, so that the second currency we described last week is a lost income for millions this week.

The dead are the least certain count of all. ACLED, which tallies reported fatalities from the events it can document, had recorded more than fifty-nine thousand by April 2026 and says plainly that the true number is far higher, because so much of the country cannot be reported from at all. By September 2026 aid workers quoted on the wire were putting the toll, by all causes, at figures several times that. We cannot reconcile the two and we do not try; we report the documented floor and its own warning that it is only a floor.

And then there is the machinery of help, and whether it is being paid for. By the middle of 2026 the UN children's fund had raised about a third of what it asked for Sudan, a funding gap of sixty-four percent; the refugee agency's Sudan response was seventy-two percent short in June. The consequences are not abstract. In September 2026 Doctors Without Borders said aid cuts were forcing the closure of clinics across the country, hundreds of them, forty-five in Central Darfur alone, as donor money ran out. On 30 August an air strike destroyed two World Food Programme trucks outside Dilling in South Kordofan, more than fifty tonnes of food, enough to have fed 5,800 people for a month; a week later, on 6 September, nine governments and the European Union condemned the attack. And the currency in which Sudanese themselves count all of this collapsed: on 7 September the pound touched a record low against the dollar on the parallel market, and food prices in the markets of Wad Madani rose by a third to a half in a matter of weeks. The war is being paid for in the same coin whether or not the world helps; the only variable the world controls is how much of the bill the people carry.

Why does no one stop it?

We cannot see inside the decisions of the two men who run the war. What we can see is the one condition that, in most wars, eventually pushes the parties toward terms, and its absence here. Wars of this kind tend to end when one side can no longer pay for the next month of them. Neither side in Sudan is near that point, and the one instrument the world put on the table this month would not have moved either of them closer to it.

The instrument the Council rolled over, as the opening described, is worth looking at for what it does not touch. It is an arms measure. It reaches the drones, in principle; it does not reach the gold that pays for them. Nobody at the Council this month was being asked to stop the money that funds both sides. And both armies had reason to want the embargo left exactly as it was, because a Darfur-only embargo silent on aircraft catches the RSF's Chinese drones not at all in practice, and the army's Iranian, Turkish and Pakistani ones not even in principle. That is why the government that says it is fighting a genocidal militia argued, through its ambassador Al-Harith Idriss, to keep the one instrument that might name its enemy's weapons and not its own; and why Russia and China, who can each veto, were prepared to block any widening. We report their stated reasons; we set beside them, claiming no knowledge of the weight they carry, that Russia agreed a naval basing arrangement with the army's government at Port Sudan in 2025, and that the drones the RSF flies are made in China.

The mediators, whose efforts we followed earlier, ran into the same wall. Every attempt to talk the war down, from the African Union's tables to the United Nations' envoy, has had to ask two solvent armies to stop for some reason other than money, and none has yet found one. That is not a claim about anyone's sincerity. It is an observation about incentives: a war that pays both sides has removed the pressure that ordinarily ends wars, and nothing the world put forward this month restored it.

The Darfur news agency Dabanga, whose reporters are inside the war, wrote in late August 2026 of "the gap between international will and action." That is a Sudanese judgement, not ours, and it is the closest thing to an answer this piece has found.

There is one reason more, and it is not about the money but about the record the money must answer to. Everything in these two pieces rests on the work of others: the fact-finding mission, the panel of experts, the special rapporteurs, the Sudanese who testify to them. On 10 September 2026 the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic reported that it had detected and shut down an influence operation it attributed, with high confidence, to officials of the United Arab Emirates, aimed at precisely that machinery. The operation, it said, used the company's software to compile dossiers on the UN rapporteurs who had criticised Abu Dhabi's role in Sudan, to draft testimony for the Human Rights Council written so as never to name the UAE, and, in one case, to borrow the identity of a real Sudanese human rights group so that material serving a party to the war would reach the UN as though from independent local witnesses. The UAE, which denies supporting the RSF, did not answer the news agency that reported it, and Anthropic said it could not tell whether any of it had changed a single mind. We carry it for what it is, one company's finding, contested and its effects unproven. But it names something the rest of this piece only implies. When the last pressure on a war is the pressure of an accurate account, the account becomes a thing worth capturing, and someone with an interest in this one has been trying to.

We opened these two pieces by asking why the largest war in the world does not end, and admitting we cannot see inside the decisions of the men who run it. We still cannot. What we have been able to see is the plumbing beneath those decisions: two armies that dig gold from the same ground and sell it to the same buyer, that fly aircraft neither of them builds, that have each raised a treasury and called it a state, and a world that, asked this month to touch even the narrowest part of that machine, agreed only to wait another month. We cannot say why the war does not end. We can say that nothing done this week made its ending any cheaper for the people paying for it. What we will be watching is not a communique but the flows themselves: the gold and where it lands, the drones and who supplies them, the funding line for the people in the camps. The embargo returns to the Council on 9 October, the panel of experts reports by 9 November, and we will tell you what each one does. We opened by admitting what we could not see. We will keep reporting what we can.

What would prove us wrong. We wrote these two pieces as a set of questions, and we said we would publish either way. Here is what the coming weeks could show.

• The vote, now in. The Council rolled the Darfur-only embargo over for a month rather than widen it or name the drones. That is the outcome we said would leave our reading intact, and it did. If, by 9 October, the Council widens the embargo across Sudan and strengthens the panel, the claim that the world will not act on the mechanism is weakened, and we will say so.
• The panel of experts. Its mandate now runs to 9 November 2026. If its next report adds nothing to the gold and arms flows described across these two pieces beyond what The Sentry, C4ADS, the Financial Times and the fact-finding mission have already published, the spine is weaker than we have presented it. If it shows that a Sudan-wide embargo would bite the army and not the RSF, the analyst who argued exactly that was right, and we will say so.
• The record itself. These pieces rest on the independence of the experts and witnesses they cite. The influence operation described above is one attempt to compromise that, and it was caught. If such efforts were shown to have shaped the findings we rely on, this would need rewriting, not updating. We have no evidence that they did, and we will report it if that changes.
• The two states. If the army's advance breaks the parallel government's territorial base, "two administrations" becomes a description of last year rather than this one, and we will retire it.

Where this comes from

We did not investigate any of this ourselves. Every fact above was established by someone else, often at some risk. What we have done is ask what their work adds up to, and hold it in one place.

Our own work, cited above

• Last week's issue, part one, 6 September 2026: where the money and the weapons come from, and the three outcomes we named for this week's vote.

Primary documents and official statements

• UN Security Council, 11 September 2026: the resolution extending the Sudan sanctions regime and the Darfur arms embargo, unchanged, to 9 October 2026, and the Panel of Experts to 9 November 2026, adopted by all fifteen members; and the statements to the Council by US Ambassador Jeff Bartos, Russian deputy ambassador Anna Evstigneeva, and Sudan's ambassador Al-Harith Idriss. Via Radio Tamazuj, Al Jazeera and Al-Monitor / AFP.
• UN Security Council Resolution 2791 (2025): the sanctions regime and Panel of Experts mandate the vote rolled over.
• UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan: Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher, 19 February 2026, and Fuelling Sudan's Conflict, A/HRC/63/23, 3 September 2026, both cited in full last week.
• International Organization for Migration, Displacement Tracking Matrix, Displacement and Return Snapshot 8, 18 August 2026; and the IOM statement on the Daba Naira camp at Tawila, via Al Jazeera, 10 September 2026.
• UNHCR, Sudan situation and population-movements map, as of 24 August 2026.
• IPC acute food insecurity analysis for Sudan: the February to May 2026 analysis, issued 15 May 2026, and the June 2026 projection for the June to September lean season.
• World Health Organization cholera figures, via Dabanga, 3 September 2026.
• UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15 July 2026: gum arabic and the war economy.
• UNICEF 2026 Sudan appeal, mid-year, and UNHCR Sudan response, June 2026: the funding gaps.
• African Union Commission statement, 31 August 2026: welcoming the Sudanese-Sudanese Dialogue.
• US Department of State: the determination of April 2025 that Sudan's government used chemical weapons in 2024, and the sanctions that followed, effective June 2025.

Investigations and research

• Anthropic, threat-intelligence report, 10 September 2026: the UAE-linked influence operation, reported by AFP and Al-Monitor.
• The New York Times and The Washington Post, 5 September 2026: the leaked-document reporting on the army's alleged chlorine-weapons programme, and a separate panel of former officials of the OPCW.
• ACLED: reported conflict fatalities, more than 59,000 as of April 2026.
• The Sentry, C4ADS and the Financial Times: the gold and arms flows described across both pieces, cited in full last week.

Reporting and argument

• Sudan Tribune, 24 November 2025: Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim, a leader of the Tasis coalition, on the parallel administration's gold and export plans.
• Al Jazeera: the parallel government's declaration, 26 July 2025; the Omdurman to El-Obeid highway, 27 July 2026; al-Hilu's SPLM-North attacks in South Kordofan, 5 September 2026, with the Sudan Doctors Network; and the Tawila camp, 10 September 2026.
• Reuters, via the Straits Times, 30 August 2025: Hemedti sworn in as president of the parallel government in Nyala.
• Radio Dabanga: the Sudan Youth Parliament on "de facto partition", 1 September 2026; Burhan's dialogue, the African Union endorsement, the anti-war forces' memorandum and the Tasis rejection, 3 September 2026; the UN envoy Pekka Haavisto's meetings, 7 September 2026; the Quintet's visit and its closing statement, 8 to 10 September 2026; the World Food Programme convoy attack and its condemnation, 3 and 6 September 2026; and Switzerland's gold ban, announced 9 September and effective 10 September 2026.
• Radio Tamazuj: Doctors Without Borders on clinic closures, 8 September 2026; and the Sudanese pound's collapse, 7 September 2026.
• Long War Journal and Sudan Tribune: the RSF's command decentralisation and the Kordofan front, late July to August 2026.
• Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, Al Majalla, cited last week: the argument that a Sudan-wide embargo would fall on the side that can be caught.

Interested parties, reported as such

• The Government of Peace and Unity: Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim, via Sudan Tribune.
• The Government of Sudan: Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss at the Security Council.
• The Russian mission to the United Nations: deputy ambassador Anna Evstigneeva.
• The United Arab Emirates: its denial of supporting the Rapid Support Forces, and its silence to AFP on the influence-operation report.
• The Rapid Support Forces: its claim to have taken Umm Arada, which the army disputes.

Image

• Population movements: UNHCR, Sudan Emergency, Population movements from Sudan, 24 August 2026, map panel cropped.

A note on method

• This newsletter is written with AI assistance, including Anthropic's Claude. We name it because this issue reports Anthropic's own finding, and a reader should know the connection.