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PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are losing ground to the army due to strategic blunders, internal rifts and dwindling supplies, analysts say.
The regular army has made major gains, seeming to reverse the tide of a nearly two-year war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 12 million.
Last month, the army surged through central Sudan, reclaiming the Al-Jazira state capital of Wad Madani before setting its sights on Khartoum.
Within two weeks, it shattered RSF sieges on key Khartoum military bases, including the General Command headquarters, and overran the Al-Jaili oil refinery, the country’s biggest, just north of the capital.
Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Africa program, said while “the RSF outperformed at the start of the war because it was more prepared,” its weaknesses were now showing.
After nearly two years of fighting, the RSF’s supplies have dwindled and its recruitment efforts have faltered.
Many of its members lack formal military training, making them increasingly vulnerable in prolonged combat, Hudson said.
The army, which “was caught off guard” at the start of the war, has “had time to rebuild, recruit and rearm,” he added.
According to a former general in the Sudanese military, the army has broadened its fighter base, mobilizing volunteers, allied militias and other branches of the security apparatus.
One “critical” addition to the army’s operations has been reinstating the Special Operations Forces, part of state intelligence, the former general told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The special forces, who are trained in urban warfare according to the former general, have helped reverse what Rift Valley Institute fellow Eric Reeves called the army’s “cowardly willingness to engage only in ‘stand-off tactics’, namely artillery and aircraft strikes,” particularly in the capital.
The RSF meanwhile has overstretched its resources and exposed vulnerabilities in its military strategy, analysts say.
More than 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) separate RSF strongholds in Darfur — the vast western region nearly entirely under their control — from Khartoum, the fiercely contested metropolis.
Darfur’s strong tribal networks have supplied troops to the RSF, while crucial support from abroad has funnelled through the region’s borders with Chad and Libya, experts and the UN have said.
But attempting to expand their control into central and eastern Sudan, the paramilitaries have “stretched themselves too thin,” said Reeves, a veteran Darfur expert.
The long road — increasingly contested by the army in areas such as North Kordofan — has made resupply missions “both difficult and dangerous,” said Hamid Khalafallah, a Britain-based Sudanese researcher.
“It has become very costly for the RSF to get supplies from Darfur to the center and east,” he told AFP.
Beyond logistics, analysts say internal rifts have added to the RSF’s troubles.
“Their ability to command their forces in a coherent and organized way across the country has been severely tested,” said Magnus Taylor, deputy director of the Horn of Africa project at International Crisis Group.
In Wad Madani, the high-profile defection of an RSF commander in late 2024 has weakened the group’s hold.
The commander, Abu Aqla Kaykal — widely accused of atrocities against civilians — has since led troops on behalf of the army, according to a source in his Sudan Shield Forces militia.
Analysts say the RSF’s setbacks do not necessarily signal their defeat or an imminent end to the fighting.
They say the paramilitary force has changed its strategy, targeting civilian infrastructure in central Sudan while consolidating its hold on Darfur.
“It seems the RSF’s current strategy is to create chaos,” Hudson said.
“It is not targeting military sites, but civilians... to punish the people and the state,” he added.
RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has remained defiant, vowing again on Friday to “expel” the army from Khartoum.
In recent weeks, the RSF has struck power plants, the only functioning hospital in the North Darfur state capital of El-Fasher and a market in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city.
But the prize most critical to the RSF’s continued war effort is 1,000 kilometers west of Khartoum: El-Fasher, the only major city in Darfur out of its control.
Since May, the RSF has laid siege to the city as its fighters have been repeatedly repelled by the military and its allied militias.
Should the paramilitaries succeed in taking El-Fasher, “then the de facto bifurcation of the country will become much more formalized,” said Hudson.
And the RSF would put “itself in a more advantageous negotiating position, as it controls one third of the country,” he added.