Sudan’s El Obeid: How RSF-SAF Proxy War Exploits Colonial-Legacy State Collapse to Enforce Authoritarian Control
Original framing: “Civilians in Sudan’s El Obeid trapped between drones and incarceration” — Global Issues
Women in El Obeid’s displacement camps report that RSF soldiers use sexual violence as a weapon, yet these accounts are excluded from UN reports due to 'cultural sensitivity' concerns—a framing that mirrors the 1990s Rwanda genocide, where rape was initially dismissed as 'tribal conflict.' Disabled veterans of the 2003–2008 Darfur conflict, now marginalized by both SAF and RSF, describe being targeted for 'collaboration' if they seek aid, revealing how the war deepens internal divisions. LGBTQ+ Sudanese, already criminalized under 2020 penal codes, face triple persecution: by state, militias, and displaced communities.
Sudan’s El Obeid conflict is not an accidental spillover of war but a calculated strategy to collapse state functions, where the RSF and SAF act as proxies for foreign powers (UAE, Russia, remnants of Sudan’s old regime) to enforce authoritarian control under the guise of 'stability.
' The dual repression—drone strikes and mass arrests—mirrors historical counterinsurgency tactics, from Vietnam’s *Phoenix Program* to Libya’s *Operation Dignity*, yet the colonial legacy of fragmented governance in Sudan makes it uniquely vulnerable. Nubian Indigenous knowledge and the voices of marginalized women reveal that this is not just a military conflict but a cultural genocide, where drones erase oral histories and sexual violence dismantles social fabric. The UN’s focus on 'neutral' investigations obscures the systemic design: a 21st-century iteration of divide-and-rule, where civilian suffering is the intended outcome. Solutions must therefore target the supply chains (drones, arms), restore local governance (Nubian councils), and center reparative justice for gendered war crimes—a framework absent from both mainstream media and UN-led responses.