The Myth of a State

In foreign ministries and at the United Nations, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is still treated as the “Government of Sudan” - a sovereign institution defending the country against rebellion. Diplomatic cables speak of “preserving stability” and “protecting state institutions.” This framing offers the SAF a powerful shield: legitimacy.

But that legitimacy is built on a dangerous illusion. The SAF is no longer a national army defending civilians. It is the most entrenched perpetrator of violence against them.

By integrating jihadist militias into its command structure and waging an indiscriminate air war on its own cities, the SAF has forfeited any moral claim to statehood. What the world insists on calling “the state” now functions as an overdog with sovereign impunity, protected by diplomatic inertia while it devastates civilian life.

The Privilege of Power

The SAF’s greatest weapon is not its fighter jets or drones, but its legal status. Because it is treated as Sudan’s legitimate authority, it can deny humanitarian visas, block cross-border aid, and still purchase weapons through state channels. Meanwhile, every atrocity it commits is softened into “collateral damage.”

This double standard is visible in the international response. While non-state actors are scrutinised and sanctioned, the SAF continues to receive diplomatic cover and material support. Investigations have confirmed that Iran has supplied drones used in the conflict, helping sustain the army’s air campaign under the banner of “supporting institutions.”

The result is an imbalance of accountability: the side with planes and embassies is treated as responsible; the side without them is treated as criminal.

War from Above

When the SAF loses territory on the ground, it punishes from the sky. The line between terrorism and military combat is becoming blurred as markets, bridges, hospitals, and water plants have become routine targets.

Human rights organisations have documented repeated airstrikes on civilian neighbourhoods and markets across Darfur and Kordofan while Human Rights Watch reports that the Sudanese army has used barrel bombs and indiscriminate aerial attacks, killing dozens of civilians including children.

Independent satellite analysis by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab shows a consistent pattern: markets damaged, residential zones cratered, and no evidence of military necessity. These are terror tactics designed to make civilian life unliveable in “enemy” territory.

More recently, allegations of chemical weapons use have introduced a new and dangerous threshold. The deployment of chemical agents in contested regions suggests an escalation of the same logic already governing the SAF’s air campaign: when conventional violence fails to secure control, the army seeks to make entire areas uninhabitable.

The international silence surrounding these allegations once again reflects how sovereignty shields the most powerful violator.

The Shadow State

Equally alarming is the SAF’s turn inward toward Islamist militias. The Baraa bin Malik Brigade’s fighters function as ideological shock troops, motivated by religious zeal rather than national service. It is not a rogue formation but is fully integrated into the army’s operations.

Investigations by Reuters and Middle East Eye also document how former regime loyalists and Islamist networks have been absorbed into the SAF’s ranks to compensate for battlefield losses.

This turn should not come as a surprise. The SAF has always had Islamist roots, shaped during decades of military-Islamist rule under Omar al-Bashir. Officers were trained not only as soldiers but as guardians of an ideological order that treated dissent as treason and pluralism as threat. Under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, that legacy has not been dismantled but reactivated.

This has consequences beyond the battlefield. In the states of Gezira and Sennar, civilians have been targeted on the basis of ethnicity and accused of being “sleeper cells” solely because of their tribal affiliation. This is not the logic of citizenship, but the ugly writhings of the ideology of Jihad.

The war didn’t create this dynamic, but it did bring it into the open. The militarised religion and political loyalties which have long existed within the security services have now become a defining feature of Sudan’s conflict which the world needs to acknowledge.

The Return of the Ghost Houses

Aerial violence has come along with the revival of Sudan’s darkest security practices: arbitrary detention, torture, and disappearances. Activists and young men in SAF-controlled areas have been seized and held in “ghost houses” - the same unofficial detention centres used by the old intelligence services.

Amnesty International reports widespread abuses by SAF military intelligence, including deaths in custody and torture of civilians accused of disloyalty. These are not excesses of war. They are institutional methods of repression.

A state that causes its own citizens arbitrarily to disappear cannot claim to be defending them.

A Militia with a Flag

The SAF has become what it once claimed to oppose: a radicalised militia, armed with jets and draped in the language of sovereignty. It bombs markets, deputises jihadists, and revives torture chambers. Yet it still benefits from diplomatic recognition.

The international community must abandon the fiction that stability can be built on this institution. Treating the SAF as Sudan’s default government rewards violence and entrenches impunity. Peace will not come from preserving a hollow “state,” but from confronting the reality that Sudan’s army has turned against its own people.

A militia with an air force is still a militia. A flag does not make it legitimate.