Ethiopia Has Entered Sudan's War: How Two of the Century's Worst Conflicts Could Merge

“All the ingredients are there for a much wider regional blow up — really, a regional mega-war.” Those were the words of International Crisis Group expert Alan Boswell, weighing the prospect that two of the worst wars seen this century might merge into a single conflict. On one side sits the Tigray War in northern Ethiopia, which plausibly killed 600,000 people between 2020 and 2022 and now looks set to reignite. On the other sits the ongoing meltdown in Sudan, a meltdown defined by mass killings, the destruction of entire cities, and what increasingly appears to be a genocide.

Boswell was speaking about a resurgent Tigray War drawing in neighboring Sudan. But there is another, more immediate possibility — one demonstrated just two weeks before this account was filmed. Ethiopia may not be pulled into Sudan’s war at all. It may enter of its own accord.

On March 23rd, fighters from the allied Rapid Support Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North routed the Sudanese army at the strategic town of Kurmuk in Blue Nile State. This was no ordinary victory. The rebels had crossed over from Ethiopian territory, where the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had been sheltering them. With Sudanese military officers now briefing that they regard Addis Ababa as an active participant in the war, the chance of these two conflicts merging has shifted from theoretical to a terrifying possibility.

The Fall of Kurmuk

The governor of Kurmuk province, in Sudan’s Blue Nile State, is not a man to mince words. After a combined force of fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North overran the strategic town on March 23rd, he told the media that “the forces that attacked Kurmuk set out from inside Ethiopian territory and are supported by Ethiopia,” adding bluntly, “We’re dealing with an invasion.”

This was not a sudden suspicion. Privately, leading figures in Sudan’s military had been briefing journalists for months that Ethiopia was becoming actively involved in the nation’s civil war. As Arab Weekly reported in January, “The current consensus within Sudan’s military-led government is that Ethiopia is now an official combatant.”

Yet the magnitude of the joint attack still seems to have caught the Sudanese Armed Forces off guard. When the combined RSF and SPLM-N force struck, it humiliated the defenders. According to the Sudan War Monitor, equipment was seized and senior army officers taken prisoner amid a chaotic retreat. By the time the dust settled, the strategic town of Kurmuk was in rebel hands.

The Camp in Benishangul-Gumuz

The fighters who took Kurmuk crossed over from Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, where a massive training and logistics camp had been established late the previous year. Its existence was no closely guarded secret, and neither was the sheer number of fighters drilling there. The Sudanese military had even moved additional troops into Blue Nile State to guard against precisely this kind of attack. It made no difference.

The financing tells its own story. In a recent in-depth investigative piece, Reuters uncovered diplomatic cables and internal security memos indicating that “the United Arab Emirates financed the camp’s construction and provided military trainers and logistical support to the site.” The camp was, in effect, a foreign-built launchpad sitting on Ethiopian soil — and it opened an entirely new front in Sudan’s war.

The Blue Nile offensive arrived at a pointed moment. The bulk of the fighting has been concentrated in Kordofan in central Sudan, a front where the paramilitaries had expected an easy victory only to absorb a series of setbacks earlier in the year. Opening a new campaign in the south is most likely an effort to draw SAF troops away from the main fight and force the army to spread itself thin.

An Unlikely Alliance

The Blue Nile front is also a direct product of the RSF’s surprise alliance with the SPLM-N, which has long maintained a presence in Sudan’s south, including Blue Nile State. The word “surprise” is warranted. From 2013 onward, the RSF was one of the principal forces responsible for crushing the SPLM-N’s rebellion against Khartoum — a job it carried out with gleeful violence.

The historical record is brutal. As al-Jazeera described it: “Even after the RSF turned its guns on its former ally, the SAF, in 2023, its fighters massacred villagers across the Nuba Mountains. According to Human Rights Watch, RSF forces committed war crimes in the Nuba between December 2023 and March 2024, including murder, sexual violence, looting, sexual slavery, gang rape, and the deliberate targeting of civilians.”

Little wonder, then, that the alliance forged in 2025 raised eyebrows — including within the two groups themselves. As the Sudan War Monitor has explained, “The two rebel groups still look upon each other warily, and their forces have not integrated.” Whatever the motives, the offensive worked. The SAF now fights on an additional front precisely when it most needs to concentrate forces in Kordofan.

Capturing the Blue Nile state capital of Damazin, which the military is rushing to reinforce, seems unlikely — but the loss of Kurmuk is still a major blow to SAF leader General al-Burhan.

Why Ethiopia Chose a Side

The obvious question is why. Why would Ethiopia — itself a fragile state fighting multiple insurgencies — be so keen to join what may be the world’s worst ongoing war? Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had spent the early years of the conflict trying to keep both sides guessing. He provocatively received RSF chief Mohammad Dagalo, universally known as Hemedti, as a head of state in Addis Ababa, then flew to the temporary military capital of Port Sudan, where he arranged a direct call between General al-Burhan and the RSF’s chief backer, UAE leader Mohammed bin Zayed.

For Ethiopia to suddenly swing so decisively behind the RSF appears counterintuitive. Why labor so hard to preserve a veneer of neutrality only to abandon it? The answer is bound up in the shifting geopolitics of Africa and the wider MENA region, but the most obvious driver is Ethiopia’s heavy reliance on the UAE.

Since Abiy came to power in 2018, Abu Dhabi has bankrolled his regime — funding government projects and sinking money into a gigantic palace the prime minister is building for himself. More importantly, it was Emirati weapons shipments that allowed Addis Ababa to win the Tigray War, a war in which the Tigray People’s Liberation Front came close to marching on the capital and toppling the government before being driven back by withering drone fire. Abiy sees UAE backing as essential to his political survival, especially as he battles an insurgency in Amhara Region and braces for another potential war in Tigray. As Africa expert Cameron Hudson put it, “Ethiopia is less motivated here by incentives, which seem absent, than by pressure from the UAE.”

The Tigray War’s Long Shadow

The UAE’s leverage is only part of the story. Addis Ababa has its own grievances, and they too trace back to the Tigray War. While most of the devastation was confined to Tigray region in the north, or to regions such as Amhara that the TPLF invaded during its counteroffensive, the war was also traumatic for the federal government. As the crisis erupted, Sudan’s military exploited the distraction to move into the disputed al-Fashaqa borderlands, seizing ninety percent of a territory Addis Ababa considers rightfully Ethiopian.

Khartoum’s meddling did not stop there. When the war ended, scores of Tigrayan fighters sought refuge in Sudan. The SAF always denied harboring them — until those denials collapsed in early 2025, when the TPLF’s Army 70 helped Sudan’s military liberate Khartoum.

The deeper fear is alignment. Ethiopia worries that the Sudanese army is drawing ever closer to its mortal enemies. For tangled reasons, a large faction of the TPLF is now warming to its old foe Eritrea. Asmara believes, with some justification, that Abiy intends to annex part of its territory to secure access to the sea — something the prime minister has called an existential issue for landlocked Ethiopia.

So Eritrea now arms the same Tigrayan rebels with which the Sudanese army is deepening and formalizing ties, hoping to build a deterrent.

The SAF, in turn, is being pulled into a direct alliance with Eritrea. Sudan’s military believes the war would already be over were it not for the UAE keeping the RSF afloat, and Eritrea — fearful of Ethiopia — is part of a coalescing anti-Emirati bloc. The two share a common enemy. This is no longer theoretical: Eritrean airfields shelter Sudanese fighter jets from RSF drone strikes, while Asmara trains and arms anti-RSF groups in Darfur that are aligned with the SAF.

The Egypt Factor

To grasp what is truly at stake requires sketching yet another rivalry — this one between Addis Ababa and Cairo. As one Fronts piece described the regional tangle, plotting it on a corkboard “would wind up looking like something designed by an obsessive detective tracking a serial killer: endless lines of string crossing maps like spiderweb, while printed mugshots of the main players stare impassively out.”

The root of the Egypt-Ethiopia feud is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD. Spanning the Blue Nile, the dam is meant to transform Ethiopia by generating enormous quantities of hydroelectric power, and in Addis Ababa it stands as a symbol of national pride. In Cairo, it looks like theft — an Ethiopian hand on Egypt’s water supply. As a nation that is essentially one vast desert, nearly all Egyptian life clings to the coasts or the Nile.

Dam the Blue Nile, and you gain the power to control Egypt’s access to the one thing it cannot live without.

Egypt therefore treats the GERD as a potential threat. The Lowy Institute argues that Cairo’s growing alliance with the SAF is entirely rooted in the fear that an RSF-controlled Sudan would cripple its Nile diplomacy. That may overstate matters, but the GERD is plainly a major driver of Egyptian decision-making, alongside the fear that a wider Sudanese collapse would push enormous refugee flows across the shared border.

Cairo makes no secret of wanting the SAF to win. Egypt recently reinterpreted a years-old joint defense agreement with Sudan as a pact specifically with the SAF, while the Egyptian air force has begun using Turkish-supplied drones to bomb RSF supply convoys leaving eastern Libya — where the warlord General Haftar sits firmly in the UAE’s pocket.

Two Blocs and a Tightening Noose

The strikes on RSF supply routes from Libya are part of a broader pattern. An alliance headed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey is working to hobble the ambitions of a rival bloc coalescing around the UAE and Israel. Both blocs remain somewhat informal, and some alignments have been scrambled by the Iran War, but they represent an underreported driver of affairs across the African Horn.

The consequences are concrete. Somalia, long a UAE client, recently cancelled Abu Dhabi’s access to its ports over fears surrounding Israel’s recognition of the breakaway state of Somaliland — and over Ethiopia’s offer, roughly two years ago, to recognize Somaliland in return for access to one of its ports. The cumulative result is that the UAE now finds it harder than ever to move weapons to the RSF, with multiple routes closed.

That has left Ethiopia as one of the few friendly countries Abu Dhabi can still rely on to supply the paramilitaries. As Cameron Hudson told the Africa Report, “Ethiopia has become the last natural place to do that.” Addis Ababa is thus entering Sudan’s war both because of UAE pressure and because it perceives a tightening regional noose — old foes like Eritrea joining with Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Tigrayan rebels that threaten both the GERD and Ethiopia’s quest for the sea. Its neighbors, meanwhile, see an expansionist power aligning itself with genocidal paramilitaries while gearing up to attack Eritrea.

Is a Wider War Inevitable?

The implications spill outward still further. South Sudan is sliding into civil war, with the SAF backing one faction while the government under Salva Kiir increasingly supports the RSF — a dynamic that risks dragging in Uganda, which has already deployed troops to keep Kiir in power in Juba. Were a wider conflict to pull in South Sudan, it could merge the Sudan War and the Tigray War with yet another bloodbath; South Sudan’s earlier civil war, fought along the same fault lines, is believed to have killed an estimated 400,000 people.

The flashpoints are easy to enumerate. Even indirect Ethiopian involvement in Sudan risks a reaction from Eritrea, which could destabilize its southern neighbor by backing rebels in Amhara or Tigray. Addis Ababa, for its part, seems intent on finishing Tigray’s rebels once and for all; at the end of February the Ethiopian military moved heavy armor to the region’s borders.

Widespread fighting never erupted, a restraint theorized to stem solely from an Iran War–driven fuel crisis that would have hampered the army’s mobility. Should Ethiopia ultimately attack Tigray, the SAF might well enter the war on the TPLF’s side. And should the SAF retaliate for Blue Nile with direct strikes on Ethiopia — perhaps to destroy the RSF training camp — Egypt could conceivably join the fray.

None of these flashpoints exists in isolation, and that is what makes the moment so dangerous. There are thousands of potential triggers across the region; one wrong move and suddenly everyone is fighting. If 2026 was jokingly compared to 1939, the wider MENA region looks more like 1914 — a year in which a complex web of alliances pulled an entire continent into war.

The War That Will Not End

Even if the feared mega-war never ignites, the news out of Sudan remains a grim reminder that the world’s worst war continues unabated. This April, Sudan’s war marks its third anniversary — three years since a standoff between the SAF and the RSF turned Khartoum into a warzone and spread fighting across the entire country.

The stalemate is brutal in its symmetry. Together, the RSF and SPLM-N are thought to still field perhaps half a million men under arms, while the SAF holds slightly more. Both have scored victories in recent months, yet neither can deliver a knockout blow. And as the war drags on, the atrocities mount.

In October, the RSF overran the Darfur city of El-Fasher, unleashing mass killings that may rank among the worst atrocities of the century. Death tolls vary wildly, but a commonly accepted middle-range figure is 60,000 dead in slightly over a week — a toll that, by comparison, took the Hamas-run health ministry 21 months to announce in Gaza.

Whatever happens next, Sudan’s tragedy seems set to continue: a catastrophe fueled by outside actors and ignored by the wider world, even as it threatens to plunge the Horn of Africa into a crisis that would make the Iran War look like child’s play.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened at Kurmuk on March 23rd?

Allied fighters from the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North overran the strategic town of Kurmuk in Sudan’s Blue Nile State. According to the Sudan War Monitor, the attackers seized equipment and took senior Sudanese army officers prisoner amid a chaotic retreat. Crucially, the fighters had crossed over from Ethiopian territory, and the Kurmuk province governor described the assault as an invasion supported by Ethiopia.

Why would Ethiopia back the RSF against Sudan’s army?

The most obvious driver is pressure from the UAE, which bankrolled Abiy Ahmed’s regime and supplied the weapons that won the Tigray War. Because Abu Dhabi also backs the RSF, it leaned on Abiy to do the same. Ethiopia additionally fears an encircling alliance of Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan, and Tigrayan rebels, and resents Sudan’s wartime seizure of the disputed al-Fashaqa borderlands.

What is the RSF-SPLM-N alliance, and why is it surprising?

The two groups allied in 2025 despite a bitter history: from 2013 onward, the RSF was a principal force in crushing the SPLM-N’s rebellion against Khartoum, committing war crimes in the Nuba Mountains between December 2023 and March 2024 per Human Rights Watch. As the Sudan War Monitor notes, the groups still regard each other warily and have not integrated their forces.

How does Egypt factor into Sudan’s war and the wider regional crisis?

Egypt has reinterpreted a joint defense agreement with Sudan as a pact specifically with the SAF, and its air force has used Turkish-supplied drones to bomb RSF supply convoys leaving eastern Libya. The Lowy Institute argues Cairo’s alliance with the SAF stems largely from fear that an RSF-controlled Sudan would cripple Egyptian Nile diplomacy, given Egypt’s overwhelming dependence on the Blue Nile’s waters.

What is the current state of Sudan’s civil war after three years?

This April marks the war’s third anniversary. The RSF-SPLM-N bloc fields roughly half a million fighters and the SAF holds slightly more, yet neither can deliver a decisive blow. Atrocities continue to mount: the RSF’s seizure of El-Fasher in October produced an estimated 60,000 deaths in just over a week, making it among the worst atrocities of the century.

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