Sudan's Military is on a Roll

In the span of just seventeen days, Sudan’s military executed two back-to-back siege-breaking operations that analysts had considered unlikely just weeks earlier — a dramatic reversal that has redrawn the operational map of Africa’s most devastating ongoing conflict and set off a chain of geopolitical consequences rippling across the Red Sea region.

On January 26th, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) punched through the encirclement of Dilling, a city of tens of thousands in South Kordofan, delivering the first real relief to its besieged population. Eight days later, on February 3rd, the SAF broke through to Kadugli to the south — a city that had been effectively cut off and under imminent threat of a ground assault. Crowds flooded the streets of both cities. Analyst Clément Molin, writing on X shortly after the Dilling breakthrough, called it “the biggest victory for the SAF since they liberated the capital city [of Khartoum] a year ago.”

The victories were striking not only for their tactical execution, but for their timing. Just weeks earlier, the SAF appeared to be losing the initiative across Kordofan. The paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fresh from their conquest of Darfur, had severed the road between Dilling and Kadugli and encircled both. Analysts at the Critical Threats Project were assessing that preparations for a ground invasion were underway. The scenario that haunted observers was the fall of El-Fasher.

The Shadow of El-Fasher

When the RSF seized El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, in October 2025, the international community briefly registered the scale of the catastrophe before largely moving on. The city had been under siege for more than 550 days. When the paramilitaries finally broke through, estimates of civilian deaths in a single week ranged from 60,000 to as high as 100,000 — a toll that, on raw numbers, rivals or exceeds the total civilian death toll of the Gaza conflict, concentrated into days rather than months.

The fall of El-Fasher sent shockwaves through regional capitals in a way that previous episodes of the war had not. In Cairo, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was reportedly visibly alarmed, later warning publicly that a red line had been crossed. In Riyadh, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman traveled to Washington to lobby President Trump directly for intervention to end the war.

The RSF’s pattern was now understood clearly: besiege, starve, massacre. The prospect of that pattern repeating in Kordofan — a region closer to the Nile corridor and the Egyptian border than Darfur — was intolerable to Sudan’s neighbors.

The International Rescue Committee had warned explicitly that Kordofan risked seeing massacres on the scale of El-Fasher if the RSF consolidated its grip. With the road between Dilling and Kadugli cut, and the SAF appearing overstretched, those warnings carried real operational weight.

A Shift in Regional Backing

What changed the trajectory of the conflict was not a sudden improvement in SAF tactical doctrine. Rather, it was a coordinated shift in the external backing underpinning each side — a shift driven by the deepening rivalry between two of America’s most consequential Gulf partners: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE has been the RSF’s primary external patron throughout the civil war, despite official denials from Abu Dhabi. Weapons and funds have flowed to the paramilitaries via airbases in Chad and Libya. RSF fighters have been treated in Emirati medical facilities.

The UAE’s motivations are layered: access to Sudan’s gold fields through RSF-controlled territory; a sense of obligation to the RSF dating from its participation in the Saudi-UAE coalition in Yemen; and an ideological calculation that the SAF is too entangled with Sudan’s Islamist elements for Abu Dhabi’s comfort. The UAE has long pursued a foreign policy designed to contain political Islam, particularly as it relates to the Muslim Brotherhood, and views the RSF’s explicitly secular posture as preferable to an SAF-led Sudan.

Saudi Arabia’s calculus is almost the inverse. As the Atlantic Council has noted, Riyadh views a standing state military as categorically preferable to a militia force that is institutionally weak and lacking legitimacy. The Saudis fear that an RSF-dominated Sudan would generate persistent instability along the Red Sea — which forms the kingdom’s western maritime boundary. More broadly, Riyadh has grown increasingly frustrated with what the European Council on Foreign Relations describes as the UAE’s pattern of “assertive foreign policy” that functions as a source of regional instability: backing armed factions in Sudan and Yemen, supporting General Haftar’s separatist government in Libya, and cultivating ties with Somaliland.

Layered on top of this is Saudi Arabia’s anxiety about the deepening UAE-Israel partnership, and what the ECFR describes as fears of “strategic encirclement” in Riyadh, particularly across the Red Sea and Horn of Africa. Egypt, meanwhile, brings its own calculation: deep ties to the UAE financially, but a border with Sudan and an overriding interest in preventing the state’s collapse. Cairo is also alarmed by the growing relationship between the UAE and Ethiopia, a country Egypt regards as a strategic competitor over Nile water rights and whose prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has made expansionist statements that resonate uncomfortably in Cairo.

The Coordinated Squeeze

The convergence of these interests has produced what appears to be a coordinated campaign to sever the UAE’s supply lines to the RSF — a campaign that has gone further than most outside observers recognized before the Kordofan victories.

The first clear signal came on November 5th, 2025. An Egyptian-operated Turkish drone struck a convoy of trucks carrying RSF supplies as it crossed from eastern Libya into northwest Sudan. Images of burning vehicles circulated on social media. A source later told Middle East Eye that the strike was an explicit warning: “no movement in the al-Uwaynat triangle [between Libya, Egypt, and Sudan] will be tolerated.”

The message was understood immediately: supply convoys that had previously moved with impunity because of the political cost of targeting them now faced physical interdiction.

Saudi and Egyptian airspace was subsequently closed to Emirati cargo flights assessed to be carrying weapons for the RSF. Somali ports were reportedly shut to ships carrying materiel for the conflict. And in perhaps the most strategically consequential maneuver, Egypt took direct aim at one of the RSF’s most important logistics enablers: General Khalifa Haftar, the UAE-backed strongman who controls eastern Libya.

According to reporting by Middle East Eye, Egypt summoned Haftar’s son to Cairo, where he was subjected to a blunt dressing-down over his father’s facilitation of weapons flows to the RSF through Libyan territory, including the use of Al-Kufra airport for UAE arms shipments. He was reportedly shown what was presented as a secret Emirati plan to carve up Libyan territory in ways that would reduce Haftar’s domain — and offered Egyptian financial backing to replace lost Emirati support. Al-Kufra airport has since been shut down to relevant flights, and RSF supply routes from Libya appear to have been severely disrupted or eliminated.

The introduction of advanced Turkish drone systems has added a further dimension. Beyond the Turkish TB2 Bayraktar systems the SAF had previously operated, more capable Akinci drones — with greater range, payload, and targeting sophistication — have now appeared in Sudanese airspace. The New York Times reported they are being flown out of an Egyptian airbase, representing a significant escalation in the depth and quality of external support reaching the SAF.

Battlefield Consequences and Limits

The operational impact of this external shift was visible in the Kordofan campaigns. As the Critical Threats Project assessed following the Kadugli breakthrough, the SAF’s advance “sets conditions for it to reconnect Dilling, el Obeid, and Kadugli, which would relieve pressure on el Obeid and create a potential second axis of advance toward the RSF’s center of gravity in western Sudan.” Analyst Cameron Hudson went further on X, writing that “the momentum shift in the conflict suggests the Army is on a trajectory toward retaking much of the country, even Darfur.”

General al-Burhan, in a public statement following the victories, vowed to send the SAF into Darfur and recover “every inch of Sudan” — a declaration that sits in uncomfortable tension with reports from Trump’s senior advisor on African affairs, Massad Boulos, that a joint US-Saudi-Egyptian-Emirati peace framework had already been agreed in principle.

Most analysts, however, urge considerable caution about SAF ambitions. Andreas Krieg of King’s College London’s School of Security Studies told Anadolu Ajansı that the SAF can plausibly generate momentum in Kordofan, where the terrain and logistics work in its favor — “the hinge between the center and the west” — but that a sustained drive into Darfur to recapture and hold territory is a substantially different undertaking, one the SAF is unlikely to accomplish with its current capabilities.

That assessment is complicated further by the RSF’s decision to open a new front in the southern state of Blue Nile, where the paramilitaries and their allies in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North have had early tactical successes. As ACLED has analyzed, the RSF’s push in Blue Nile is aimed at reopening the contest for central Sudan — Khartoum, Sennar, and al-Jazirah states — by threatening to flank SAF positions along routes the military has held since early 2025. Early reports suggest the RSF struck across the border from Ethiopian territory, raising the prospect that Addis Ababa may be moving toward more direct involvement on the RSF’s behalf.

The Danger of Escalatory Entrenchment

The fundamental risk sharpening into focus is that the external dynamics driving the SAF’s recent momentum may not hold — and that the UAE, stung by setbacks elsewhere, responds with deeper investment in the RSF rather than accommodation.

In Yemen, a Saudi-backed faction appears to have largely dismantled its UAE-backed counterpart, representing a significant strategic defeat for Abu Dhabi in its own backyard. One reading of that outcome is that the UAE is overextended and weakening. But analyst Cameron Hudson has offered a different interpretation, writing on X that he has heard Abu Dhabi has made clear internally “that their accommodation of Saudi demands ends in Yemen and would not extend to Sudan” and that the UAE intends to “double down” on its RSF support.

If that assessment is correct, the coming months may see an intensification of proxy competition rather than its resolution: Abu Dhabi working to route support through Ethiopia and South Sudan as Libyan channels close; Riyadh, Cairo, and Ankara tightening the noose through drone operations and airspace controls; and the SAF and RSF serving as instruments of a rivalry whose ultimate stakes extend far beyond Sudan’s borders to the entire Red Sea strategic environment.

The civilians of Sudan — already subjected to what the United Nations has described as one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth — remain the primary victims of this competition. The SAF’s victories in Dilling and Kadugli brought real relief to populations that had endured months of blockade and the threat of massacre. Whether those victories represent a turning point in the war or merely a momentary shift in a conflict whose underlying drivers remain unresolved is a question that the geopolitics of the Gulf may answer before the battlefield does.