Advances by the Rapid Support Forces into Sudan's southern Blue Nile state are unlikely to be the start of a northward movement by the paramilitary to retake lost territory, analysts have said.
Instead, the fighting on a new front near the border with Ethiopia has the potential to stretch Sudan's army and leave it exposed in other areas of the country, said Sami Saeed, a prominent Sudan expert in the US.
Experts said a march north by the RSF would not progress past Damazin, the provincial capital of Blue Nile, given the city's vastness, the presence of a major army base there and the lack of support for the paramilitary among the local population.
“The Rapid Support Forces no longer has ambitions in areas where it cannot find support from the local population,” Mr Saeed told The National.
“It also cannot afford again to control new territory where its fighters will rampage against the local population, killing and looting like they did elsewhere in the recent past.”
He was alluding to the massacre of civilians in the western city of El Fasher in Darfur, when the paramilitary captured it from the army last October. The RSF is also accused of ethnically motivated killings in the Darfur town of Geneina during the war's early days.
“The RSF came in for very harsh criticism from its foreign backers as well as detractors for what it did in El Fasher and Geneina,” Mr Saeed said. “Its supporters are reluctant to deal with another episode of wholesale abuse.”
Opening a new front in the south of the country is expected to tire Sudan's army, stretching its human and material supply lines, he added. That, in turn, would leave the army more vulnerable in areas that the RSF wants to take, such as Kordofan, he said.
Nearly three years into Sudan's civil war, the RSF controls the western Darfur region and parts of Kordofan, to where fighting shifted after the army lost its last foothold in Darfur last October.
The army controls the greater capital region of Khartoum and the central, northern and eastern regions. Its government sits in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, while the rival RSF administration is in Darfur.
The capture by the RSF last week of the Blue Nile town of Al Kurmuk, near the Ethiopian border, signals a milestone in the war, said Osman Al Mirghany, a Sudanese analyst and publisher.
“The RSF fighters who captured the town came from Ethiopia, where they had been trained,” he told The National. “The operation also signals closer co-operation between the Rapid Support Forces and the rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army-North in Blue Nile.”
The RSF last year entered an alliance with the anti-government SPLA-N in Kordofan where, like in Blue Nile, it controls large swathes of territory. They have for months been trying, without success, to capture a string of army-held cities in Kordofan, such as Kadugli, Al Obeid and Dilling.
“The Rapid Support Forces may never be able to capture and hold on territory in Blue Nile,” said Ibrahim Mahdi, a retired Sudanese army general turned analyst. “It will take some small localities and soon afterwards abandon them.
“But it could also go the other way if the RSF takes full advantage of its alliance with the SPLA-N to expand the scope of its activity in Blue Nile,” he told The National. “All this points to a prolonged war with a high human cost and more economic devastation.”
Sudan's civil war is essentially a struggle for power between the armed forces, led by Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, and the RSF and its commander Gen Mohamed Dagalo. Fighting began after months of tension over their place in creating a future democratic Sudan.
The war has since claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced more than 12 million people and created the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with about half the population, 25 million people, facing hunger.
