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For the past week, forces loyal to Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and rival fighters of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been battling for control.
More than 400 people have been recorded as killed and thousands wounded, but the toll is expected to be far higher, with witnesses describing corpses lying on the streets as fighting rages.
We looks at the two main forces fighting in the worsening conflict.
– How big are the forces involved? –
The Military Balance+, compiled by International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), estimates that the army has 100,000 troops, compared with the RSF’s 40,000 fighters.
However, several experts have put forward the figure of 100,000 RSF troops, while giving numerical superiority to the army, or Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
But on the ground, neither side seems to have seized the advantage in nearly a week of bitter fighting.
Alex de Waal, academic with a longtime focus on Sudan, said the two forces have a “comparable size and combat capacity”.
There are no exact figures as to sizes of the two forces — since the conflict exploded precisely because of the dispute between the two generals on the methods of integrating the RSF into the regular army.
Burhan wanted to do this within two years, by imposing the army’s recruitment criteria on the paramilitaries.
Daglo, also known as Hemeti, wanted a 10-year window and also ranks equivalent to those awarded in 2013 to RSF fighters who led the war in Darfur for autocrat Omar al-Bashir, before his ouster in 2019.
– What are the military objectives? –
“Neither SAF nor the RSF has much incentive to back down,” said Aly Verjee of the Rift Valley Institute.
The two forces normally fight together against rebel groups in far-flung provinces, but this time they are in a race against time as they fight each other on unfamiliar terrain: Khartoum.
The RSF wants to prolong the conflict, while the army was aiming to use its warplanes to weaken the paramilitary force as quickly as possible, said Verjee.
“Hemeti… has an interest in stretching out the conflict” since the main difference “in capacity between the SAF and the RSF is air power”, said Verjee.
