A destroyed tank, a remnant from fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, in Khartoum, Sudan, on Aug. 11.Marwan Ali/The Associated Press
The Trump administration’s first attempt to negotiate peace in Sudan is hitting roadblocks from both warring parties in the devastating conflict, with the Sudanese government immediately rejecting key details of the U.S.-backed plan.
President Donald Trump has portrayed himself as a global peacemaker after launching ceasefire initiatives for several African and Asian conflicts. But until now, his administration has shied away from Sudan, often ranked as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and one of its most intractable wars.
On Friday, the United States and three of its regional allies – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – released a proposal for a three-month humanitarian truce in Sudan, to be followed by a permanent ceasefire and a nine-month transition to a civilian-led government.
Here’s what you need to know about the war in Sudan, including how the conflict started, and its human toll so far.
The transition to civilian rule must not be “controlled by any warring party,” the proposal said, in an attempt to sideline the combatants. It also called for a complete halt to the foreign military support that has fuelled the war since it erupted in 2023 – much of it allegedly from the UAE itself.
The war in one of Africa’s biggest countries has pushed 30 million people into acute hunger. It has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, forced 13 million to flee their homes, and triggered famine in the North Darfur region.
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The African Union quickly endorsed the peace plan, saying it “fully aligns” with the AU’s own road map to halt the fighting. But Sudan’s army-controlled government, which has been battling the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the past 29 months, issued a sharp critique of the proposal.
In a statement issued by its foreign ministry on the weekend, the government alleged that the peace plan would undermine the sovereignty of the Sudanese state and would elevate its bitter enemy, the RSF, to equal status with the government.
“Sudan rejects any intervention that does not respect the sovereignty of the Sudanese state, its legitimate institutions backed by the will of its people, and its right to defending its citizens and territory,” the statement said.
“The Government also rejects any attempt to equate the state with a terrorist militia that brings in foreign mercenaries to destroy Sudan’s identity.”
Achieving peace, it said, was “the sole responsibility of the Sudanese people and their national institutions” – an implicit jab at the role of the United States and its three Middle Eastern partners in promoting the new peace plan.
The army-backed government may have also been irked by a line in the ceasefire proposal that criticized the Islamists who have played a prominent role in Sudan’s government for decades and have recently helped reinforce the army.
“Sudan’s future cannot be dictated by violent extremist groups part of or evidently linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose destabilizing influence has fuelled violence and instability across the region,” the peace plan said.
Armoured vehicles from Canadian-owned company deployed in Sudan’s war zones
This line seemed to echo the rhetoric of the RSF, which often seeks to justify its actions as a fight against “radical Islamists” in Sudan’s military.
The Trump administration made this connection more explicit on Friday when it announced sanctions against a prominent Islamist in the government – Finance Minister Jibril Ibrahim – and a pro-army Islamist militia. “The U.S. government will use its tools to ensure that Sudanese Islamists never regain power in Sudan,” the sanctions announcement said.
The Sudanese government reacted angrily, saying that “such unilateral measures” will fail to achieve peace.
Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst, said the U.S.-backed peace plan failed to include a mechanism for implementing its provisions. “It’s very ambitious, especially the timelines, and has no sense of a start date,” she said in a social-media post on Monday.
In the short term, neither of Sudan’s warring parties seems likely to accept the peace plan, and there are no signs of an impending ceasefire. Fierce fighting has continued since the disclosure of the peace plan on Friday, including RSF drone strikes on army positions and a power station on Sunday.
Both sides seem eager to keep fighting. Sudan’s military believes it is winning the war, after capturing Khartoum in March and pushing back the RSF in southern regions of the country. The RSF, meanwhile, has won control of almost all the Darfur region in western Sudan, has laid siege to the city of El Fasher and has established a parallel government in the territories that it controls.
“The war, now in its third year, is a catastrophe of staggering proportions: the world’s largest hunger crisis, largest humanitarian crisis, largest displacement crisis, and yet one too often put in the ‘too difficult’ box by global politics,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary who now heads the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian group.
“The scale of suffering should jolt the conscience of the international community,” he said in a statement. “Instead, this crisis is one of the most underfunded worldwide.”