The Media Line: Iran Regains Foothold in Sudan as RSF Completes Darfur Conquest With Ethnic Massacres 

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Iran Regains Foothold in Sudan as RSF Completes Darfur Conquest With Ethnic Massacres 

“What looks like a local conflict is actually part of a much larger struggle over the Red Sea’s control and African resources,” Ambassador Haim Koren, Israel’s former envoy to South Sudan, told The Media Line.

By Jacob Wirtschafter/The Media Line 

[ISTANBUL] Verified field reports and satellite imagery indicate that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have completed their takeover of Darfur after capturing El Fasher, the last major city still under army control. Humanitarian monitors reported hundreds of patients, doctors and displaced families killed inside the Saudi Hospital as RSF fighters swept through the building. 

More than 36,000 people fled on foot within two days, while roughly 177,000 remain trapped without food or medicine. Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified newly dug mass graves and burn scars consistent with heavy fighting. UNICEF has called El Fasher “an epicenter of famine and disease.” 

The city’s fall gives RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—known as Hemedti—control of Sudan’s entire western frontier and all five Darfur states. Those borders with Libya, Chad and South Sudan form arteries of a shadow economy moving gold, weapons and fuel from the Sahel to the Red Sea—the same routes Iran once used to arm Hamas and Hezbollah. 

“What looks like a local conflict is actually part of a much larger struggle over the Red Sea’s control and African resources,” Ambassador Haim Koren, Israel’s former envoy to South Sudan, told The Media Line. 

The massacres following El Fasher’s capture mark more than another episode of ethnic cleansing. They reveal a proxy war stretching from the Sahel to the Red Sea—a contest in which Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt vie for influence through Sudan’s armed factions. 

The killings in El Fasher are not without precedent—or warning. 

In December 2024, the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute, which co-founded the Save Darfur Coalition two decades ago, issued an urgent appeal warning that the atrocities were escalating toward genocide. The statement cited satellite evidence of RSF-led mass killings of Masalit and other non-Arab groups, describing the crisis as “a shameful reminder of the consequences of inadequately responding to risks of genocide.” 

The warning went largely unheeded. No emergency summit followed, and no meaningful pressure was placed on the RSF’s foreign sponsors. Instead, the pattern of targeted violence that began in western Darfur has spread eastward—consuming El Fasher and pushing millions of Sudanese further into flight. 

Sudan’s conflict pits two generals backed by rival foreign patrons against each other. 

Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the regular army, relies on Egypt and Iran. Cairo’s support reflects Nile water interests and a desire to curb Islamist networks within the officer corps. Iran’s return, by contrast, is pragmatic. “When Burhan’s people asked Israel for weapons and were refused, they renewed ties with Tehran—literally one day after Oct. 7,” Koren said. Iranian-made drones soon appeared over Khartoum. 

Hemedti’s RSF depends on the UAE, which has financed and armed the force via Chad and the Central African Republic. Magdi el-Gizouli of the Rift Valley Institute, speaking from Berlin, said the Emiratis’ motives are “largely commercial—ports, livestock and gold.” Nearly half of Africa’s gold now passes through Dubai, much of it mined in RSF-held zones. “The chaos suits them,” said el-Gizouli. “It clears the land and frees the trade.” 

Russia plays both sides. The Wagner Group initially backed Hemedti from Libya and the Central African Republic, but later tilted toward Burhan after Moscow’s alignment with Tehran. “The Sudanese, particularly Burhan’s camp, have no deep affection for Iran,” Koren said. “Their alliances are purely transactional—whoever offers the most help gets their attention.” 

Still, Koren cautioned that the situation remains fragile and unclear. “It will take time to see who gains the upper hand—Burhan or Dagalo—and what the evolving role of foreign actors will be,” he said. Their involvement, he added, extends well beyond Sudan itself: “Their interests run through the Red Sea and into the Sahel zone.” 

According to Koren, Iran’s renewed activity in Sudan—together with what he called its “Axis of Evil” partners Russia, China and North Korea, alongside proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah—transforms the conflict from a regional tragedy into a global threat. “When Iran is involved in Sudan with those partners, it becomes a bigger threat for Israel,” he said. “Therefore, the Israeli interest—like that of the United States and Europe—is to try to stabilize the situation by supporting humanitarian aid, mediation efforts and economic assistance.” 

For Jerusalem, he added, Sudan’s fate is directly tied to the security of the Red Sea corridor—a maritime artery that carries 12 percent of global trade. If Iran or its partners gain a permanent foothold on Sudan’s coast, “it would reopen a front we thought was closed.” 

Sudan’s humanitarian collapse mirrors its geopolitical unraveling. Kholood Khair, founder of Confluence Advisory, spoke to The Media Line from Nairobi, where she has relocated since the war made independent work inside Sudan impossible. She said the conflict has “become a counter-revolution against the 2018–2019 uprising.” The generals, she added, are “fighting the civilians who dared to demand a demilitarized state.” 

Khair explained that both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF use hunger as a weapon, blocking aid to areas under rival control. “Hundreds of community kitchens have shut down,” she said, adding that the suspension of US aid programs “created an immediate spike in starvation.” 

Sudan now functions as a patchwork of fiefdoms—the army along the Nile and Red Sea, the RSF across the western heartland and smaller rebel movements entrenched in southern zones. “It’s not going to split neatly like Libya or Yemen,” Khair said. “This is fragmentation, not partition.” 

El-Gizouli linked that disintegration to Western neglect after the 2019 revolution. “People were happy to tweet photos of brave Sudanese women,” he said, “but nobody offered the $10 billion the economy needed. That vacuum let the generals come back, and foreign money filled the gap.” 

“The fall of El Fasher is a catastrophe and is now followed by massacres of civilians by the Janjaweed mercenary gangs,” Elmoiz Abunura, a former senior economist at Sudan’s Ministry of Energy and director of Africana studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, told The Media Line. “No patriotic Sudanese can celebrate or rejoice over this.” 

Across the region, Sudan’s war has become another proxy contest in an already crowded strategic arena. But the true front line lies in the Red Sea basin, where Gulf capital, Iranian ambition and African instability collide. 

For Tehran, re-establishing a foothold in Sudan revives a weapons pipeline once severed by sanctions and creates a potential launch point within reach of Israel and the Suez corridor. Koren warned that the alignment of Iran with Russia, China and North Korea—and their use of regional proxies—extends far beyond Sudan. “What happens in the Horn and the Sahel no longer stays there,” he said. “It feeds directly into global security.” 

In Abu Dhabi, officials portray their role as humanitarian, but analysts, including el-Gizouli, said Emirati-chartered cargo flights continue landing in eastern Chad with supplies for RSF-held zones, while gold from those areas flows through Dubai. 

Russia seeks naval access on the Red Sea, and China watches closely: Nearly a fifth of its energy imports transit these waters. 

Western engagement, meanwhile, has faltered. Under the Biden administration, the US funded Sudanese mutual-aid networks—local emergency rooms and community kitchens—that proved far more efficient than UN agencies at delivering relief. Those initiatives kept millions alive during the early months of the war. 

That approach ended abruptly when the Trump administration ordered a suspension of US development and humanitarian programming in January. The “stop-work” directive—issued just four days after inauguration—shuttered hundreds of local kitchens and halted support for independent relief groups. The result, Khair said, was “an immediate spike in starvation.” 

The United Nations now calls Sudan the world’s largest hunger crisis. “The world simply doesn’t want to look,” Koren observed. “Western governments, human rights advocates, even journalists—they focus elsewhere.” 

The war has also erased what remained of Sudan’s normalization with Israel. The 2020 Abraham Accords, signed by a transitional government hoping to end decades of isolation, are now frozen. Burhan’s alignment with Iran and Hemedti’s dependence on the UAE have made the prospect politically untenable. 

Khair said the country’s future no longer rests with its generals or their foreign backers but with ordinary Sudanese trying to hold communities together. 

“Peace will not come from Abu Dhabi, Riyadh or Cairo,” she said. “It will come from within Sudan itself—through the civil-society groups literally sewing together the social fabric the war is tearing apart.”