The Sentinel Briefing: December 2025
December 01 2025
El Fasher: A Chronicle of Ignored Warnings
El Fasher wasn’t an isolated atrocity. It emerged from long-running political and economic fractures that turned extraction, fragmentation, and opacity into the architecture of Sudan’s collapse.
Between August and October 2025, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab issued repeated warnings about El Fasher. They released satellite imagery showing RSF forces building earthen berms to encircle the city and block escape routes. They mapped artillery impacts on IDP camps. They documented systematic attacks on food and water infrastructure. Nathaniel Raymond and his team described what they were watching in blunt terms: a population being placed in a kill box.
Radio Dabanga, an independent broadcaster relying on networks of civilian journalists inside Sudan, had been reporting RSF troop movements and civilian displacement for months. The Darfur Women Action Group, a survivor-led organization, provided detailed testimony to the UN Security Council on ethnic targeting and sexual violence as weapons of war. African Arguments published field reporting from Darfuri journalists documenting militia tactics and siege conditions in real time.
By the time international monitors released satellite proof, Sudanese networks had been sounding the alarm for months. The warnings went to international organisations. They went to the Quad governments - the U.S., UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt - all of whom have leverage over arms flows and financing. Arms continued to reach RSF structures. El Fasher fell in October. The killings followed.
Information was never the problem.
How We Got Here
Sudan is often described as chaotic, impossible to follow, a humanitarian catastrophe spiraling beyond control. But Sudan has been one of the world’s major political crossroads for millennia: the Kingdom of Kush, Christian Nubian kingdoms that held off Arab expansion for centuries, Islamic sultanates, and one of the few anti-colonial states to briefly defeat a European empire. When the British returned in 1898, they ruled through ethnic hierarchies and administrative divisions that hardened old fractures and created new ones. Independence in 1956 left the country carrying multiple political identities without a governing project strong enough to hold them together. Coups, civil wars, and the deliberate marginalisation of western and southern regions turned violence into a recurring tool of state power.
What is happening now sits inside a governance pattern at least 140 years old: states relying on armed groups to control territory they cannot govern directly, extraction economies sustaining those groups until they start acting like parallel sovereignties, and foreign actors embedding in those networks because access matters more than stability.
The Janjaweed militias that eventually became the RSF took shape in the 1980s and early 2000s through deliberate decisions by Khartoum. Faced with drought, land pressure, and rebellion in Darfur, the government armed Arab pastoralist militias and tasked them with suppressing opposition. It was cheaper than building institutions, faster than mediation, and easier than addressing land and identity grievances that stretched back to colonial divisions and the slave economy. By the time Omar al-Bashir formalised the Janjaweed into the RSF in 2013, the group already controlled key goldfields, border corridors, and migration routes. Legal recognition acknowledged reality: the RSF had become an economic and military actor with its own revenue streams, command structure, and leverage. When Bashir fell in 2019, the RSF was too entrenched to dissolve and too profitable to dislodge.
Authority in Sudan fragments deliberately. What Khalid Mustafa Medani calls Tamkeen: security, economic, and ideological power embedded in parallel networks, means the state gets crowded by competing armed forces, each strong enough to block rivals but too weak to govern alone. The Islamist project embedded authority across loyal security bodies, patronage structures, and commercial fronts that answer to regime survival rather than public accountability. Magdi el Gizouli adds another layer: Sudan operates a dual food system, where urban consumers, especially in Khartoum, receive subsidies and prioritised supply while rural producers and peripheral regions carry the cost through low farm-gate prices, neglect, and systematic dispossession. The centre receives subsidies and guaranteed supply. The periphery produces, pays, and goes without.
The result is a political geography where extraction and abandonment structure survival. What looks like state failure is actually highly functional for moving value from the periphery to the centre and into the hands of those who control the infrastructure of violence.
Trace the violence across Sudan today and the pattern lines up with extraction infrastructure: goldfields, transport corridors, airstrips, checkpoints, smuggling routes. The RSF controls many of the most important gold-producing areas in Darfur and parts of Kordofan. Investigations by SwissAid, Chatham House, C4ADS, and Noria Research converge on the same finding: in the first half of 2025, official data put production at about 37 tonnes, with roughly half believed to be smuggled rather than exported through official channels. Smuggled Sudanese gold moves through RSF- and SAF-linked networks into the UAE, particularly Dubai, which is widely identified as the primary destination and a permissive refining and trading hub.
The economics are honestly really straightforward. Independent investigations suggest RSF-linked gold exports likely generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually - revenue that directly funds the group’s military operations, including campaigns that UN observers and humanitarian organisations describe as genocidal. Once gold reaches Dubai’s open market, due-diligence gaps in Dubai’s gold sector make upstream origin difficult to trace once gold enters Emirati refineries and trading hubs; global traders and financial institutions then handle this gold as part of standard market flows. Western financial institutions clear trades. Global manufacturers source components from commodity chains designed to obscure upstream origin.
Gold is no longer the only asset reshaping the war. Russian geological teams, including entities linked to Wagner’s successor networks, have surveyed Sudanese territory for gold, chromium and manganese, and other strategic minerals, including possible rare-earth prospects. These minerals matter for batteries, defence industries, and advanced manufacturing. For Moscow, Sudan offers sanctions evasion through gold and leverage over future-critical supply chains at a time when Western powers are trying to reduce dependence on Chinese and Russian mineral sources.
The quiet signal here: instability sustains extraction. For the RSF, for commercial actors in the Gulf, and for Russian networks, durable peace would close access, invite regulatory scrutiny, and expose flows that thrive in the shadow of collapse. A ceasefire that ignores these economic incentives asks armed actors to dismantle the system paying them.
Subscribe to The Sentinel
Who Is Embedded and Why
Sudan sits at the intersection of multiple strategic systems.
Egypt backs the SAF to prevent an RSF-dominated state on its southern border and to protect its leverage over Nile water flows. The Nile remains existential for Cairo: an unstable or hostile Sudan threatens Egypt’s water security and creates a buffer zone it cannot control.
Russia is pursuing a naval base at Port Sudan to project power into the Red Sea, one of the world’s most critical shipping chokepoints. Beyond that, Russia uses Sudan for sanctions evasion through gold and positions itself to control access to minerals that matter for future manufacturing and defence industries.
The UAE has invested heavily in RSF-linked networks and the logistics infrastructure that moves gold out of Sudan into Dubai. The UAE’s Red Sea ambitions intersect with control over ports, coastal security, and future economic concessions. For years, the RSF also acted as a de facto migration force, policing routes from the Horn and the Sahel toward Libya and the Mediterranean, a role that European policies helped finance through externalised border control.
The United States reads Sudan through overlapping concerns: competition with Russia and China, Red Sea security, counter-terrorism, and efforts to diversify critical mineral supply chains away from adversarial control. Russian mining operations, potential Chinese port deals, and UAE-backed militia networks all threaten U.S. influence in a region that connects the Sahel, the Horn, and the Red Sea corridor.
Israel’s stake is rarely foregrounded in Sudan coverage, but Red Sea security matters when Houthi forces, Iranian-aligned actors, and Russian naval assets operate in adjacent waters. Since the Abraham Accords, attempts at normalisation with Sudan have been about countering Iranian presence and building intelligence partnerships in the Horn. The complication: the UAE—Israel’s Abraham Accords partner, backs the RSF, while Egypt, Israel’s core regional security partner, backs the SAF.
Alan Boswell and others have described Sudan as an example of how regional and middle powers now use local conflicts as testing grounds for influence. Control of Sudan’s resources and geography functions as proxy for influence across Africa and the Middle East.
The Mechanics of Structured Indifference
The relationship between Washington and Abu Dhabi over Sudan shows how this works. The U.S. sanctions UAE-linked logistics networks, but the targeting is strategic: constraining Russian and Iranian commodity flows, reassuring Egypt and Saudi Arabia, maintaining pressure without forcing a break. The UAE responds with public compliance: trade bans, regulatory commitments, while evidence suggests RSF financing through Emirati channels continues. Both powers position for post-conflict access and influence. Sudan’s crisis remains useful as long as it stays contained, deniable, and available for future extraction.
Gulf-aligned think tanks and UAE officials reject investigations linking Emirati trade to RSF finance, insisting on legality and neutrality. European analysis often centres governance reform and migration management while skirting Gulf financing. Western governments discuss “transition” and “mediation” but impose clear limits on pressure against their own partners.
When communication networks went down in El Fasher before the siege, people who had survived earlier campaigns in Darfur recognized the pattern. The blackout was preparation.
For actors extracting wealth from Sudan through gold smuggling, arms sales, migration control, mineral surveying. visibility becomes a liability. Communication blackouts erase witness. Opacity in commodity regulation makes it nearly impossible to trace transactions back to their source. Diplomatic ambiguity: carefully calibrated statements that acknowledge concern without naming sponsors, creates cover for proxy financing. Together, these form an architecture of deliberate invisibility that allows extraction and violence to continue while accountability diffuses across borders.
What institutions chose not to see was the incentive structure that made inaction more profitable than intervention. Acting would have required pressuring Gulf partners who control gold flows, disrupting Russian networks that provide sanctions evasion routes, forcing European states to confront their own migration-control arrangements, and acknowledging that multilateral institutions cannot constrain actors who sit inside their own governance structures. The gap between knowing what’s coming and having the political will or strategic interest to act on it remains unclosed.
The Pattern and Where It Replicates
Sudan’s crisis reveals a structure that replicates:
States fragment power through militias rather than building accountable institutions. Authority distributes across armed actors who compete for resources but share an interest in preventing any single institution from consolidating enough power to threaten the arrangement. Resource extraction finances these militias until they begin functioning as parallel sovereignties: control over goldfields, ports, border crossings, or other high-value assets allows armed groups to collect revenue, administer territory, and provide minimal services. Proto-governance that makes them harder to dissolve. At the same time, foreign powers embed in extraction and security networks, prioritizing access over stability. External actors: states, private military companies, commodity traders, position themselves inside these systems because instability keeps access open and scrutiny low.
Information opacity enables violence and extraction without being accountable. Communication blackouts, regulatory gaps, and diplomatic ambiguity form an integrated architecture that allows extraction to continue while responsibility diffuses across borders. At critical stress points, collapse accelerates faster than multilateral systems can respond. By the time institutions mobilize, the incentive structures sustaining the conflict are too entrenched to dislodge without disrupting relationships that matter more to key actors than resolution does.
This structure is visible elsewhere:
In the Sahel, gold and uranium finance armed groups and foreign proxies. Watch for: artisanal mining surges in Mali and Burkina Faso coinciding with Wagner logistics expansion; armed groups transitioning from predation to taxation and service provision; Russian geological surveying contracts that include security components; communication infrastructure controlled by militias rather than states.
In eastern DRC, cobalt and coltan sustain militias and transnational trading networks. Watch for: M23 and allied groups establishing administrative zones in mining areas; Chinese cobalt processing investment flowing into militia-controlled territories; parallel customs and taxation systems emerging in border regions; communication blackouts preceding territorial offensives.
This structure is already operational in the Sahel and eastern DRC. The question is whether monitoring systems will be built to detect militia sovereignty and extraction financing at formation stage, when choices still exist about intervention, positioning, or risk management, or whether the next El Fasher will also be called a surprise.
For financial institutions facing tightening conflict mineral regulations, early detection means compliance before enforcement. For defense and intelligence establishments, it means identifying supply chain vulnerabilities and strategic dependencies before they crystallize into leverage for adversaries. For institutional actors inside constrained systems, it means having the analytical infrastructure to name what they’re watching in real time, even when political structures prevent action.
---
RAKSHA Intelligence Futures maps the early conditions of geopolitical and crisis instability. We’re made up of people across assigned and chosen identities, informed by different geopolitical lineages and lived terrain.
