Sudan’s civil war will soon enter its fourth year, with no end in sight. The conflict has drawn in other regional actors, who support and sustain the war by backing Sudan’s belligerents. This risks precipitating a much wider fallout in the region, with severe consequences in and out of Sudan. Sudanese civilians are paying the price.
Militarily, momentum has swung back and forth between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Today, the front line largely runs along west-central Kordofan, with no decisive breakthrough in sight. As the war edges towards its fourth year, the conflict is steadily regionalising into the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea, making any settlement that much harder to reach. External patrons with deep pockets are turning Sudan into an indirect theatre of confrontation. Their money, weapons and logistical support shape battlefield calculations, sustain fighting capacity, and at times shift military momentum, prolonging the conflict and reducing incentives for compromise.
On one side stands the Sudanese army, which has assembled a coalition of supporters: Egypt, Eritrea, Turkiye, Qatar, Iran and, increasingly, Saudi Arabia, initially a neutral mediator. These countries, along with the United Nations and the Arab League, recognise army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as Sudan’s head of state. Most frame their backing as support for a government confronting an internal rebellion.
On the other side, the United Arab Emirates has been the RSF’s main patron, providing financial, military and logistical support. That backing helped the RSF sustain major operations, including the long fight for el-Fasher. When the city fell after a siege stretching roughly 18 months, images and testimonies of atrocities spread: Executions, torture, abductions and sexual violence. The horror prompted a wave of critical coverage of Abu Dhabi’s role, but this has not had an effect on Emirati support.
Sudan’s geostrategic position helps explain why outside powers remain deeply invested. The country sits at the crossroads of the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and North Africa. For some regional powers, the war is not only about Sudan itself, but about their own national security interests as well as the projection of influence in a rapidly changing and contested regional order.
Sudan’s African neighbours are also being drawn into the conflict, sometimes due to direct national interests and other times due to the incentives offered to serve as transit hubs for arms and supplies. These dynamics risk worsening existing fault lines across the Horn of Africa and potentially merging multiple regional conflicts, with Sudan at the epicentre.
Tensions swallow diplomatic efforts
On September 12, 2025, after months of US-led negotiations, the Quad – the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt – proposed a roadmap to end the war. There was some initial diplomatic progress within the Quad format, including agreement on broad principles and indirect talks. In theory, alignment among these external backers could generate meaningful pressure on both the SAF and the RSF to negotiate an end to the war.
But, instead, mounting tensions between two Quad members, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, now overshadow the roadmap negotiations.
In December, those tensions erupted publicly. The UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council in Yemen launched a surprise offensive near the Saudi border against Saudi-backed forces, provoking Riyadh’s ire and triggering a rare, open rupture between the two Gulf heavyweights. Saudi Arabia publicly rebuked the UAE and demanded a full UAE withdrawal. The UAE then announced a pullout. Yet the rift has not closed. Saudi-aligned media now regularly accuse the UAE of “destabilising the region”, including in Sudan.
The UAE-Saudi feud risks deepening the intractable nature of the war. It could, for example, drive even more overt support for the army from Egypt, Turkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And few expect the UAE to scale back its support for the RSF.
The US must push harder
The US remains at the centre of the push to end the war, despite ongoing questions about whether the Trump administration is committed to seeing those efforts through. Those questions are likely to grow amid the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran, which has retaliated by also striking states across the Gulf.
All of these developments raise doubts about whether Quad negotiations over Sudan will make progress in the short term. As Gulf states respond to an unprecedented security threat, their attention is unlikely to be trained on Sudan. Yet the same crisis could also create an opening. Faced with a shared security challenge, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi may find reason to set aside some of their differences, including over Sudan. If they do, the effects could be constructive, helping revive stalled diplomatic efforts to end the war. The US and European powers, as well as other regional actors such as Turkiye, Egypt and other Gulf states, should try to help broker a Saudi-Emirati detente, and use it as a critical step on the way towards a truce in Sudan. Any such truce between the two warring parties would, in turn, need to set in motion an intra-Sudanese political process, possibly facilitated by the African Union and the UN.
There is also an urgent need to cool temperatures in the Horn of Africa, which appears on the precipice of a wider regional war driven in part by rivalries over Sudan’s conflict. It is time for African and other leaders to step up and try to ward off any escalation.
Even as the war with Iran intensifies and consumes global attention, it is vital not to forget that Sudan’s conflict is also primed to spread unless more is done to stop it.
