Africa is no longer a continent of forgotten wars. From Al-Fasher in Sudan to Niamey in Niger, battles over food, faith, and survival are shaping the rules of tomorrow’s conflicts.
Hunger has become deadlier than bullets. In Al-Fasher, bread is no longer bought with money, but with loyalty. One displaced resident told me that “we no longer count the days; we count who is still alive after each night of siege.”
A mother sold her wedding ring to buy flour, only to return and find her child dead outside a hospital with no medicine.
The city is trapped in a nightmare. Just two days ago, the Sudanese militia the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed a mosque in Al-Fasher during evening prayers, killing more than 75 worshippers in cold blood as they prayed.
The survivors described the massacre as an execution: men gunned down in rows as they prayed, their bodies left where they fell. According to survivors and local emergency committees, the massacre left entire families wiped out inside the mosque. Such an atrocity, committed inside a house of worship, fits squarely within the definition of a war crime under international humanitarian law.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)’s latest briefing, more than 800,000 civilians remain trapped in Al-Fasher under siege, with food and medicine running out. Two days after the massacre of the worshippers, the silence of the international community still speaks louder than its words.
In Khartoum, the Sudanese army has reclaimed the capital from the RSF, but what it won back was a city half in ruins and half full of displaced people. Walking through its neighbourhoods after the return of state authority felt like entering a city half alive and half consumed by destruction.
Between besieged Al-Fasher and shattered Khartoum, Sudan epitomises what analysts now call the “Arc of Chaos,” a belt stretching from the Atlantic, across Mali, Niger, and Chad, to the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
This Arc has become a theatre where local wars merge with global rivalries. Drones strip armies of their monopoly over the skies. Mercenaries function as shadow armies. Resources meant to fuel prosperity instead finance destruction.
Maritime corridors that were once vital trade arteries have become chess pieces in global rivalries. As the international think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) noted in 2024, “Africa is no longer merely a site of local disputes but a global laboratory where the future rules of war are being written.”
Across the Sahel, cities tell their own stories of collapse. Khartoum’s burned-out ministries and deserted markets show how quickly modern capitals fall when war enters the streets. Al-Fasher demonstrates an even darker reality: a city starved, besieged, and massacred.
“We are living through a new Sarajevo,” one resident told me, “except the world has not come to rescue us” as it did this Balkans city in the 1990s. Sarajevo’s siege lasted 44 months, killing more than 10,000 people. Al-Fasher is enduring a similar ordeal, but without the cameras, without NATO, and without outrage.
From Sudan’s urban ruins to Sahel’s open deserts, the Arc follows a pattern: fragile states hollowed out by insurgents and warlords.
In Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and Niamey, militants do not need to occupy the capital; a single market bombing is enough to shatter trust in the state. In Mogadishu in Somalia, the Al-Shabaab group blends into daily life, turning every street into a potential battlefield.
A Malian soldier put it bluntly: “We fight in the desert as if fighting ghosts. We only see them when they strike, and then they disappear.”
Port Sudan remains Sudan’s fragile lifeline to the sea. Djibouti, perched on the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait, hosts American, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Gulf bases and is “the Hong Kong of global militaries,” as one diplomat quipped.
The Gulf of Guinea oscillates between order and piracy. The Red Sea today is to Africa what the South China Sea is to Asia: a vital artery turned battlefield, though far less guarded. For Egypt, the Arc is not distant. The Red Sea, vital for its security and trade, is increasingly vulnerable to the rivalries reshaping Sudan and the Horn of Africa.
Drones are redrawing the balance of power in the skies. In 2025, Reuters published satellite images showing the RSF operating Chinese-made CH-95 drones from a base in Darfur in western Sudan that were capable of reconnaissance and strikes over 200 km.
Amnesty International documented the use of Chinese precision munitions on both military and civilian targets, in violation of a UN arms embargo. Alongside these systems, the RSF deploys modified commercial drones like Mavic quadcopters dropping improvised explosives on airports and supply lines. What was once the monopoly of states has been eroded by militias adapting off-the-shelf technology for war.
BEYOND THE BATTLEFIELD: But the conflict is not confined to the battlefield.
In Nigeria, cyberattacks have crippled banks. In Kenya and Ethiopia, telecoms networks have been paralysed. In Sudan, armies of anonymous accounts wage online wars of disinformation. Conflict in the Arc is no longer limited to bullets and bombs. It is also fought through code and narrative.
Natural wealth, meant to be a blessing, has become a curse. Sudan produces up to 100 tons of gold annually, much of it smuggled. Niger’s uranium feeds Europe’s nuclear reactors. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) supplies three-quarters of the world’s cobalt, the backbone of electric batteries.
Nigeria pumps 1.5 million barrels of oil daily. Zimbabwe adds lithium. As the International Crisis Group (ICG) warned in 2024, “resources in Africa are no longer merely economic assets, but currencies in the game of war.”
Mercenaries deepen this Arc of chaos, linking Sudan to Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR). In Sudan, fighters from Chad and Libya join the RSF, with credible reports of Colombian contractors. In Mali and the CAR, Russia’s Wagner Group, rebranded as the “Africa Corps,” controls mines and politics alike.
In Libya, Syrians and Chadians fight in ever-shifting coalitions. “When you hear foreign languages in the streets of Al-Fasher,” a Sudanese journalist told me, “you realise this war is no longer ours alone.”
Major powers crowd the Arc. The United States maintains 4,000 troops in Djibouti and an expensive drone base in Niger but prefers airpower over boots on the ground. France, once the Sahel’s gendarme, has withdrawn from Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Britain and Germany have exited too. Russia has entrenched itself through Wagner’s Africa Corps. China has strengthened its foothold with infrastructure and its Djibouti base. Turkey trains Somali forces.
Yet these interventions rarely stabilise. Despite repeated reports by Amnesty International and UN experts, the UN Security Council has remained paralysed to act, blocked by vetoes and competing interests. In the Arc of Chaos, law has become optional, and impunity the new norm.
“We have lost the initiative,” an ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) official admitted. “Our decisions no longer deter coups or stop wars.”
Behind these rivalries are shattered lives. A doctor in Darfur told me that “we treat the wounded without medicine, without equipment… just used bandages.” A teacher in Niamey explained that “our school has been closed for months, and the children now sell items in the markets instead of learning.”
A Malian soldier confessed that “we fight without pay, surviving only on what we seize from villages.” A displaced woman from Al-Fasher recounted that “I walked with my children for three days without water, only to end up in an overcrowded camp of tents.” These voices are not footnotes; they are the Arc itself.
On the Mediterranean shores of Africa, young men fleeing the Arc risk their lives on fragile boats, turning Africa’s chaos into Europe’s daily crisis.
In Khartoum, bread prices have risen by 50 per cent, while in Al-Fasher children die of hunger every day. In Niamey, blackouts last for days. Thousands of youths join militias not out of ideology but because war pays more than farming.
The consequences ripple outward. Europe faces waves of migration and supply shocks if Niger’s uranium or Congo’s cobalt is disrupted. The United States views the Arc as a frontline in its competition with China and Russia.
Unlike in Ukraine, where the Western powers mobilised instantly after the Russian invasion, Africa’s wars unfold in slow motion, with little attention. Yet the strategic consequences of losing Niger’s uranium or Sudan’s Red Sea corridor may prove just as destabilising to global security.
As the UK think tank Chatham House warned in 2024, “Africa is no longer only a humanitarian concern but a central element of Western national security.”
The Arc of Chaos is more dangerous than the Balkans or the Middle East because it concentrates all the features of modern war – strategic resources, vital corridors, drones, mercenaries, and fragile states. The Balkans conflict ended with a NATO intervention. The Middle East, despite endless wars, has largely remained contained. Africa, however, has become an open arena where the future of warfare is rehearsed in real time.
The massacre of worshippers in Al-Fasher is not only Sudan’s tragedy. It is a warning sign of a world order in which silence has replaced accountability. For the mother in Al-Fasher, the soldier in Mali, and the child in Niamey, this is not a theory. It is survival.
For the rest of the world, the Arc of Chaos is more than Africa’s tragedy; it is a mirror of our collective failure, and perhaps the blueprint of our next global war.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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