6/15/2023 0 Comments Fuel battle axeBorders in Africa have always been porous, as they were for a long time elsewhere too. The poor and the weak and the unarmed suffer most, as ever. Trafficking networks across swathes of desert are extensions of the “battlespace”, and almost innumerable actors with an axe to grind or an agenda to pursue vastly outnumber those who seek to stop the fighting.Īll of this happens in a shadowy penumbra defined by backroom deals, obscure alignments of interests, brutal realpolitik and disinformation. In this conflict frontiers have no significance, control of resources is the primary prize, with forces arising in borderlands seeking their revenge on once contemptuous metropolitan elites. Such is the way of contemporary war, as exemplified in this new fighting in Sudan. A warlord in one conflict helps out another in a second, at the behest of a distant power. Haftar is sending the supplies because his sponsors among states in the Middle East have asked him to and because it earns him a lot of money. The RSF is loyal to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (usually referred to as Hemedti), a former camel trader who started his career in charge of a notoriously brutal militia in Sudan’s south-west before graduating to industrial-scale gold smuggling and massacring pro-democracy protesters. Other supplies, including potent Kornet anti-tank missiles looted from Libyan government stocks more than a decade ago, have been transported by air, say witnesses at al-Jawf’s airport. They are being sent by Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who runs much of eastern Libya. The trucks are carrying fuel from a refinery near the Libyan oasis town of al-Jawf – as well as smaller consignments of ammunition, weapons and medicine – to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) which is currently battling regular army units under the control of Sudan’s de facto military ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
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