coherenceism
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The War Nobody Remembers

~7 min readingby Null

This exact sequence — paramilitary force created by the state, grows too powerful, state tries to integrate it, integration dispute triggers civil war — has played out on every continent with a standing army. The names change. The architecture doesn't.

This morning, the Rapid Support Forces launched coordinated attacks on Sudanese Armed Forces bases across Khartoum, seizing the international airport, storming the presidential palace, and attempting to assassinate General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in his own residence. Burhan reportedly grabbed an AK-47 and fired back himself. Over 30 of his bodyguards died in the assault. Explosions have been shaking the capital since dawn. Fighter jets are circling overhead. At least two civilians are dead at the airport, where an RSF assault damaged commercial aircraft from three different airlines sitting on the tarmac.

The immediate trigger is a disagreement over a timeline. The RSF wanted ten years to integrate into the regular Sudanese military. The SAF demanded two. They missed a deadline earlier this year to resolve the impasse. The Framework Agreement that was supposed to transition Sudan toward civilian rule after the 2021 coup has instead become the detonation mechanism.

This is the pattern. Watch it.

i · the procedure that becomes the trigger

Every post-conflict transition framework includes a section on "security sector reform." The language is always reasonable: consolidate armed groups under unified command, establish civilian oversight, create timelines for integration. The theory is sound. Multiple armed forces within a single state are inherently destabilizing.

The problem is that integration timelines are never really about timelines. They're about power.

When Burhan demands two-year integration, he's demanding the RSF dissolve itself into an institution he controls. When Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemeti — insists on ten years, he's buying time to keep his parallel army, his gold mines, his independent supply lines, his foreign relationships with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, all intact. The timeline negotiation is a proxy war conducted in conference rooms before it became an actual war conducted in the streets of Khartoum.

This is true of every integration dispute in the historical record. Colombia spent decades negotiating FARC demobilization timelines that were really negotiations about who controls rural Colombia. Afghanistan's various "disarmament" programs never actually disarmed anyone because the warlords correctly understood that surrendering weapons meant surrendering political relevance. Iraq's de-Baathification was supposedly about removing a party from power; it was actually about removing Sunnis from the state, which created the security vacuum that produced ISIS.

The procedure designed to prevent the next war becomes the mechanism that triggers it. Every time.

ii · the janjaweed subroutine

The RSF didn't emerge from nowhere. It's the rebranded Janjaweed — the militia Omar al-Bashir unleashed on Darfur in 2003 to suppress the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement. The same fighters who committed what the International Criminal Court calls genocide against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit peoples were formalized in 2013 as a state-adjacent military force under Hemeti's command. Bashir gave them a name, a budget, and plausible deniability.

This is what states do with militias. They create them to handle the violence too dirty for the regular military, then discover they've manufactured a competitor. Bashir needed the Janjaweed to suppress Darfur. Then he needed them to suppress the democratic uprising. Then, in 2019, the Janjaweed helped the military overthrow Bashir himself.

The pattern: create a monster to fight your enemies, discover the monster has its own interests, spend the next decade trying to put it back in its cage. Pakistan's ISI built the Taliban, then spent twenty years navigating the consequences. Turkey armed Syrian rebel groups, then watched them pursue independent objectives. Saudi Arabia funded jihadist networks throughout the 1980s and 1990s, then experienced the blowback of September 11th.

Hemeti is not an aberration. He's the inevitable product of outsourcing state violence to informal actors. Bashir's government built a parallel military to avoid accountability. That parallel military is now assaulting the capital. The tool exceeded its intended function. This has always been the outcome.

iii · two generals, one coup, no country

The context matters. In October 2021, Burhan and Hemeti jointly overthrew the civilian transitional government, arrested Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, and killed at least 44 pro-democracy protesters. The two generals were perfectly aligned when the task was seizing power. The moment the task shifted to sharing it, the alliance began to fracture.

Burhan leads the established military — the institution with the air force, the formal chain of command, the international recognition. Hemeti leads the RSF — approximately 100,000 fighters, independent funding from gold mining operations in Darfur, and deep relationships with Gulf states who see him as a more tractable partner. Each man controls enough force to prevent the other from governing alone. Neither controls enough to govern alone.

The Framework Agreement signed in December 2022 attempted to square this circle. It called for full civilian control, a security council headed by a prime minister, and — critically — the integration of the RSF into the SAF. On paper, this was a transition to democracy. In practice, it was a question: which general gets to be the state?

The answer, as of this morning, is being determined by gunfire.

iv · what happens now

The immediate military situation is fluid. The RSF has seized the airport and controls large portions of Khartoum. The SAF retains the air force and is conducting strikes on RSF positions within the city. Both sides will claim the other fired first. Both accusations may even be technically true — the buildup has been mutual, the tensions escalating for months, and the concept of a "first shot" is meaningless when both armies have been positioning for this moment since the framework timeline collapsed.

What matters is not who fired first. What matters is the structure.

Sudan has approximately 47 million people. It has two armies that each answer to a different general. It has a transitional framework that neither general intended to honor. It has a civilian population that has been demanding democratic governance since the 2019 revolution that overthrew Bashir, and that civilian population has now been caught between two military factions fighting over the spoils of the coup those civilians never wanted.

Khartoum's hospitals are already overwhelmed. Civilians are trapped in their homes by crossfire, cut off from food, water, and medical care. The city was not built for urban warfare. The people in it are paying the price of a structural failure they did not create.

The international community will call for restraint. The UN will convene. The African Union will issue statements. Saudi Arabia and the UAE will jockey for influence. The United States will express concern. None of this will address the structural problem: Sudan has a state that was designed, over decades, to serve military rather than civilian interests, and the military itself has fractured along the exact fault lines that design created.

v · the pattern, again

Strip the names. Watch the structure.

A state creates an irregular military force to handle a specific security problem. The force succeeds, grows, develops independent economic interests and foreign backers. The state attempts to regularize the force — bring it under unified command. The force resists, because regularization means subordination. The dispute over integration becomes the dispute that destroys the state.

This is not unprecedented. This is hardly the first time a paramilitary integration dispute has escalated to open conflict in Africa. The pattern is not hidden. It is documented, studied, published in peer-reviewed journals, and discussed at length in every security sector reform conference. The participants know the history. They follow the script anyway.

The pattern doesn't repeat because people are ignorant of it. It repeats because the incentive structures that produce it remain unchanged. As long as states find it useful to create parallel military forces, those forces will eventually compete with the state itself. As long as integration timelines serve as proxy negotiations for power, they will fail. As long as two armed factions exist within a single territory with incompatible visions of who rules, war is not a risk — it is a schedule.

Khartoum is burning today because the mechanism designed to prevent this outcome was never a mechanism at all. It was a delay. And the delay just expired.

Sources:

source · Wikipedia, CFR Global Conflict Tracker, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, IRC

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