“The generation whose consciousness was not shaped by the war the Houthis waged against Aden in 2015 can see a version of it today in the current war in Sudan,” commented the Aden-based journalist Abdel-Hakim Mahmoud this week.
He sees this less as an oddity than as a bitter reality, as the consciousness of the new generations is formed by a conflict in this country or that in the Arab region.
These conflicts share many of the same features: the allies of yesterday are the enemies of today, a political transition and democratisation process unravels, and the rising generation’s hopes and aspirations evaporate as the promise of the simplest democratic process, namely the recourse to the ballot box, gives way to a recourse to the gun.
The current Sudanese and Yemeni crises share a common denominator: the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF). A large contingent of these, estimated in the thousands, has been fighting on the side of the Yemeni government at the border between northern and southern Yemen, and it does not appear that it will return to Sudan.
The leader of the Yemeni Ansarullah (Houthi) Movement, Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi, has said that any of them who wish to return to Khartoum may do so. None of them have taken him up on his offer, and it is doubtful that any will. For many members of the RSF forces, staying in Yemen may be their best option, since a ceasefire is in place and a de-escalation process has been started. They are also collecting a decent salary while in Yemen.
Another factor that the Sudanese and Yemeni crises have in common is the huge challenge of military integration. In Sudan, the start of this process almost seemed within reach, as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and RSF were on the verge of finalising an agreement towards that end when the conflict broke out.
In Yemen, integration between the Houthi forces and the Yemeni government forces is virtually mission impossible. Their respective creeds could not be further apart. Whereas the government forces fight beneath the banner of the unified nation-state, the Houthis raise the banner of the “Quranic March,” a sectarian-ideological movement cloned from the Iranian revolutionary model for Tehran’s regional proxies.
With both the RSF and the Houthis, the question of how to merge formations and arms into the official army will present an obstacle to a settlement, given the many structural differences.
It is the very nature of the militia structure of the Houthi forces that was instrumental to their ability to exhaust the government’s regular army. The latter also split when a contingent of the army remained loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh at the time he allied himself with the Houthis, even if a significant portion of it was subsequently reabsorbed into the army after the alliance fell apart.
In Sudan, the army has taken back the soldiers it assigned to the RSF, but the latter retains a considerable attritional capacity as it relies on guerrilla and urban warfare. However, regardless of whatever military support the RSF receives from abroad, it will never find the amount of support that the Houthis have received from Iran.
Another feature of both the Houthi Movement and the RSF is how they set their sights on power. The Houthis set out from their base in Saada in 2014 to march on the Yemeni capital Sanaa, oust the government, and derail attempts to revive a stalled political process. In a similar geographical context, the RSF emerged from the cauldron of the conflict in Darfur in Sudan, entered into an alliance with the regime of former Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir, and developed an ambition to gain control of Khartoum.
Both paramilitary forces expanded and grew more powerful as they forged networks of foreign alliances with powers eager to take advantage of the fragility of the state. Both the Houthis and the RSF claimed to support the revolution that overthrew the regime (the Saleh regime in Yemen and the Al-Bashir regime in Sudan), only for the Houthis to subsequently side with Saleh in order to oust the transitional government in Sanaa and for the RSF to turn against the leader of the transitional government in Khartoum.
RSF Commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), who had previously turned against his former ally Al-Bashir, now claims he is trying to prevent the return of the former regime. Meanwhile, he is running a parallel economy centred around Jebel Amer, the location of one of the largest gold mines in Africa.
The Houthis can also boast considerable wealth, derived in part from tax and other levies and in part from their own parallel economy.
The Yemeni Civil War has posed a direct threat to the Gulf region, and both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been targeted by Houthi missiles. This may not be applicable to the Sudanese case, but foreign interventions can still have an escalatory effect, sharpening polarisation and generating a cycle of ongoing war.
While Yemen only has two neighbouring countries, Sudan has eight. This greatly increases the chances of outside meddling in Sudan, whether by regional or international actors, but the impacts are likely to be more internal than external.
According to Lieutenant General Shams Al-Din Kabbashi, a commander of the SAF, two of Sudan’s neighbours support the RSF while the other six have called for non-intervention. Soon after the outbreak of the conflict in Khartoum, the Western media circulated reports that Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army, was supplying the RSF with weapons. Haftar has denied such claims.
Recalling the Sudanese Civil War that led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Cairo is concerned by the implications of a vulnerable central state in Sudan. It does not want to see a Yemeni scenario across its southern borders that could present a national security threat. It is as much in Egypt’s interest as it is in that of the Sudanese people to put paid to the scenario of a new war in Sudan.
Yemen may be one of the arenas of competition between the US and China, with the latter recently brokering the landmark agreement between Saudi Arabia and China and reviving hopes for peace in Yemen. Yemen’s coastlines along the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea form a part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Washington also has longstanding interests and influence in the Middle East, and Yemen lies on the maritime route between the West and the Indo-Pacific region.
In Sudan, on the other hand, the competitor of the US is Russia, which is seeking to develop port facilities in Port Sudan that will make it easier for Russian ships that run on diesel to refuel. The Russian facilities in the Syrian port of Tartus help serve this purpose, but this goal has not yet been achieved in Sudan.
It seems that Russia is also attempting to play the Wagner Group card in Sudan, judging by reports that this is supporting the RSF. Both Wagner and the RSF have denied the claim. Wagner also has relations with the SAF, so it would be a difficult balance to maintain support for both, and ultimately Moscow will have to take sides if the war continues.
The US has been using its evacuation of US citizens from Sudan as a pretext for sending in warships to the area of the sort not normally used for evacuating civilians. Military experts in Egypt believe that the purpose may be to preempt Russia and to establish a military presence there.
Each instance of conflict in the region has its own course and character, but just as the chapters of one conflict often bear an eerie resemblance to the chapters of another, the same thing might apply to their future trajectories.
The crisis in Sudan is clearly deteriorating in terms of the humanitarian situation, and the war will further aggravate the economic straits in the country. Even before the fighting broke out, a third of the Sudanese population needed support from humanitarian relief and aid agencies.
A similar indicator applies to Yemen. Today, the situation in the country ranks as the worst man-made humanitarian disaster in the world.
A version of this article appears in print in the 11 May, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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