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    "parsed_content": "The conditions that created Sudan\u2019s civil war will likely recur if its military remains fragmented and dependent on semi-autonomous militias.\nNearly three years into the Sudanese Civil War, US diplomacy remains focused on an immediate and necessary objective: securing a humanitarian truce, stopping the fighting, and getting aid to civilians. But a ceasefire, urgent as it is, will not resolve one of the problems that helped bring Sudan to this point.\nEven if Washington and the international community secure an agreement between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), they will still face a difficult question: What happens to the other armed forces that have grown stronger during the war?\nSudan could emerge from this conflict not with two competing armies, but with five or six significant armed forces, each with its own commanders, weapons, political relationships, and areas of influence. The danger is that ending the SAF-RSF war without addressing this proliferation could replace one confrontation between two major forces with a more fragmented and potentially harder-to-manage security crisis.\nThere is a familiar pattern in modern Sudanese conflicts. When the army has failed to confront internal rebellions, successive governments have turned to recruiting forces outside the formal military, arming them, or cooperating with them. These arrangements provided short-term manpower but repeatedly weakened the state\u2019s control over the monopoly on the use of force.\nThe clearest example of this is the Janjaweed. Khartoum relied on these Arab militias during the Darfur War, but they did not disappear when their direct role changed. Instead, parts of this formation later evolved into the RSF paramilitary, which gained legal recognition, weapons, resources, and growing political influence. By April 15, 2023, a force that had once fought alongside the state went to war against it.\nThat experience should have shown the danger of empowering armed forces outside the regular military framework. Instead, the current war has expanded this model rather than curbing it.\nTo confront the RSF, the Sudanese army has relied on a broad array of allies: Darfuri armed movements, local forces, mobilized civilians, ideological groups, and other military formations. Among the most prominent is the Joint Force, along with its affiliated armed movements, including the Sudan Liberation Movement led by Minni Arko Minnawi and the Justice and Equality Movement led by Gibril Ibrahim. Other forces, including Sudan Shield and the Al-Baraa bin Malik Battalion, have also gained greater military standing during the war.\nThese groups are neither identical nor interchangeable; each has its own history, social base, political agenda, and relationship with the army. But the war has strengthened these armed actors, giving them more fighters, weapons, regional influence, and political weight than they had before April 2023.\nThe broader lesson from the RSF\u2019s trajectory, then, is not simply that one paramilitary force became excessively powerful. The lesson is that Sudan cannot continue empowering armed partners to confront immediate security threats and then assume they will relinquish their weapons and influence once the conflict ends.\nOne of the clearest examples of this pattern is the Joint Force\u2014the group of armed movements that entered the political and military scene through the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement (which ended the Darfur War after the collapse of the government of Omar al-Bashir and the 2019 Sudanese Revolution) and secured important positions under that settlement. But the security track of the transitional process did not keep pace with the political track. These movements gained political representation, while the harder work of integrating their forces and restructuring the security sector remained unfinished.\nThis arrangement was meant to be temporary, a step toward integrating those forces into a unified national army. But the same problem recurred: who gives up political influence willingly? Rather than gradually phasing out these movements as parallel forces, the current war has extended their political presence\u2014indeed, granting them greater standing within state institutions than they held when the agreement was signed.\nWhen discussing the building of a unified national military institution, a fundamental question arises: who should be allowed to join it? Some of these forces are implicated in well-documented serious violations, while others simply lack genuine military experience that would qualify them for integration into a regular army. Between these two considerations, determining which categories can be accepted into the new military institution\u2014and which must be excluded or held accountable first\u2014is essential to any credible integration process. Otherwise, integration risks reproducing the very problem it is meant to solve.\nFor Washington, the risks posed by the continued presence of multiple armed forces in Sudan extend well beyond Sudan itself. Security fragmentation creates opportunities for outside powers, including terrorist groups, Russia, and Iran, to build direct relationships with local armed groups and exploit the weakness of the state to expand their influence. The continued spread of weapons also puts greater pressure on neighboring countries, particularly Egypt and Chad, which already host large numbers of Sudanese refugees, while increasing the risk of cross-border arms trafficking and broader regional security threats. The danger extends to the Red Sea, where a weak and fragmented Sudan could create a security vacuum that armed actors or transnational networks could exploit, threatening one of the region\u2019s most important maritime corridors.\nDisarmament and military integration, therefore, should not be treated as issues to be addressed only after a ceasefire. This should be part of the negotiating process from the beginning. Washington should make the future of Sudan\u2019s armed formations a priority in any political settlement, linking future power-sharing arrangements to clear and measurable progress on disarmament and the creation of a unified national military.\nThis will require supporting transparent mechanisms to identify armed formations, track weapons, map where these forces operate, and monitor compliance with agreed steps toward disbandment or integration. Integration into a unified national army should also be subject to rigorous vetting, so that commanders accused of serious abuses cannot escape accountability simply by moving into a new military structure.\nIn short, the US objective should go beyond ending the war between the SAF and RSF. It should also prevent Sudan from emerging from this conflict with several new parallel armies that carry the seeds of the next war.\nAbout the Author: Areig Elhag\nAreig Elhag is the Arabic content editor at The Washington Institute. Before she joined the institute, Elhag held senior roles at the US-funded Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN), where she served as senior interview producer and presenter of the award-winning television program Between Two Niles, focused on Sudan. She holds BS and MS degrees in science from Sudan University of Science and Technology, as well as an executive master\u2019s degree in international relations and a graduate certificate in US national security from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.",
    "published_at": "2026-09-16T00:00:00+00:00",
    "author_name": "Areig Elhag",
    "site_name": "The National Interest",
    "section": "Feature",
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    "ai_headline": "Sudan\u2019s Fractured Fighters",
    "ai_simplified_title": "US Diplomacy Addresses Sudan's Fragmented Military and Militia Proliferation",
    "ai_excerpt": "The Sudanese civil war is exacerbated by a fragmented military and reliance on semi-autonomous militias. US diplomacy aims for a truce, but long-term stability requires addressing the proliferation of armed groups and integrating them into a unified national army.",
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        "Sudan Civil War",
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