Sudan's civil war is on the brink of entering its fourth year, with no end in sight. The conflict has drawn in regional actors who support the warring parties, thereby prolonging the fighting and risking a much wider fallout across the region. Sudanese civilians are bearing the brunt of this protracted struggle.
Militarily, momentum has shifted back and forth between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Currently, the front line largely runs along west-central Kordofan, with no decisive breakthrough imminent. As the war edges toward its fourth year, it is steadily regionalizing into the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, making any settlement increasingly difficult to achieve. External patrons with deep pockets are turning Sudan into an indirect theater of confrontation. Their financial, weaponry, and logistical support shape battlefield calculations, sustain combat capacity, and at times shift military momentum, extending the conflict and diminishing incentives for compromise.
On one side stands the Sudanese army, which has assembled a coalition of supporters including Egypt, Eritrea, Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and increasingly Saudi Arabia—initially a neutral mediator. These countries, along with the United Nations and the Arab League, recognize army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as Sudan's head of state. Most frame their backing as support for a government confronting an internal rebellion.
On the other side, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been the RSF's primary patron, providing financial, military, and logistical assistance. This support enabled the RSF to sustain major operations, such as the prolonged battle for el-Fasher. When the city fell after an approximately 18-month siege, images and testimonies of atrocities—including executions, torture, abductions, and sexual violence—spread widely. The horror prompted a wave of critical coverage of Abu Dhabi's role, but this has not affected Emirati support.
Sudan's geostrategic position helps explain why outside powers remain deeply invested. The country sits at the crossroads of the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and North Africa. For some regional powers, the war is not only about Sudan itself but also about their own national security interests and the projection of influence in a rapidly changing and contested regional order.
Sudan's African neighbors are also being drawn into the conflict, sometimes due to direct national interests and other times due to incentives to serve as transit hubs for arms and supplies. These dynamics risk exacerbating existing fault lines across the Horn of Africa and potentially merging multiple regional conflicts, with Sudan at the epicenter.
On September 12, 2025, after months of US-led negotiations, the Quad—comprising the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt—proposed a roadmap to end the war. There was some initial diplomatic progress within the Quad format, including agreement on broad principles and indirect talks. In theory, alignment among these external backers could generate meaningful pressure on both the SAF and the RSF to negotiate an end to the hostilities.
However, mounting tensions between two Quad members, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, now overshadow the roadmap negotiations. In December, those tensions erupted publicly when the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council in Yemen launched a surprise offensive near the Saudi border against Saudi-backed forces, provoking Riyadh's ire and triggering a rare, open rupture between the two Gulf heavyweights. Saudi Arabia publicly rebuked the UAE and demanded a full Emirati withdrawal. The UAE then announced a pullout, but the rift has not closed. Saudi-aligned media now regularly accuse the UAE of "destabilizing the region," including in Sudan.
The UAE-Saudi feud risks deepening the intractable nature of the war. It could, for example, drive even more overt support for the army from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Few expect the UAE to scale back its support for the RSF.
The US regime remains at the center of the push to end the war, despite ongoing questions about whether the Trump administration is committed to seeing those efforts through. Those questions are likely to grow amid the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran, which has retaliated by also striking states across the Gulf.
All these developments raise doubts about whether Quad negotiations over Sudan will make progress in the short term. As Gulf states respond to an unprecedented security threat, their attention is unlikely to be trained on Sudan. Yet the same crisis could also create an opening. Faced with a shared security challenge, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi may find reason to set aside some of their differences, including over Sudan. If they do, the effects could be constructive, helping revive stalled diplomatic efforts to end the war. The US and European powers, as well as other regional actors such as Turkey, Egypt, and other Gulf states, should try to help broker a Saudi-Emirati detente and use it as a critical step toward a truce in Sudan. Any such truce between the two warring parties would, in turn, need to set in motion an intra-Sudanese political process, possibly facilitated by the African Union and the UN.
There is also an urgent need to cool temperatures in the Horn of Africa, which appears on the precipice of a wider regional war driven in part by rivalries over Sudan's conflict. It is time for African and other leaders to step up and try to ward off any escalation.
Even as the war with Iran intensifies and consumes global attention, it is vital not to forget that Sudan's conflict is also primed to spread unless more is done to stop it.
Source: www.aljazeera.com