On February 10, Sudan’s largest antiwar coalition, Taqaddum, finally splintered.
The disagreement was over whether to participate in a new parallel government being set up by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the belligerent parties in Sudan’s nearly two-year war.
Formed in October 2023, the Taqaddum coalition included armed movements, political parties and civil society activists and was headed by Abdalla Hamdok, the former prime minister overthrown by Sudan’s army and the RSF in 2021.
Now, Taqaddum has split into two.
The members taking political positions in the RSF’s parallel administration are now known as Taasis (Foundation). They are mostly armed movements, analysts told Al Jazeera, who wagered on turning their weapons into leadership roles in the new RSF government.
“Armed groups don’t have a constituency, so they rely on a big, armed actor [like the RSF] as a guarantor for a political seat,” said Kholood Khair, founding director of the Confluence Advisory think tank.
Traditional political leaders, including Hamdok, who chose not to join the RSF formed a smaller antiwar coalition called Somoud (Resilience), trying to preserve their neutrality and reputations, she said.
“Political parties don’t need [a guarantor] and it would be political suicide for them to form a government with the RSF… they don’t want to be seen as forming a government with genociders,” she added, referring to the United States’ determination that the RSF committed genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Tainted label
Taqaddum was originally an antiwar coalition mediating an end to the conflict that had broken out between the RSF and the army in April 2023, following a dispute over how and when to integrate the former into the latter.
The conflict has triggered the largest humanitarian crisis by most measures, with tens of thousands killed in armed conflict, famine declared in several regions and some 12 million people uprooted from their homes.
Taqaddum was already struggling for relevance, with many of its civilian politicians perceived as being too close to the RSF during mediation talks – ostensibly aimed at ending the war and restarting a transition to democratic rule that the 2021 coup derailed.
Taqaddum’s reputation took a much bigger blow when it signed a Declaration of Principles (DoP) with the RSF in January 2024.
The DoP allegedly aimed to restore service provisions in areas under RSF control and to ensure the group would respect basic laws of war.
But the deal came days after the RSF captured Wad Madani, capital of Sudan’s breadbasket Gezira state, where it committed atrocities including rape, looting and extrajudicial killings, according to local monitors.
At the time, Taqaddum was seen by many as whitewashing RSF abuses by signing the DoP.
The agreement had also caused many Western diplomats “growing concern that parts of Taqaddum were RSF-aligned”, said Alan Boswell, an expert on Sudan for the International Crisis Group.
Hamid Khalafallah, a Sudan policy analyst and a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, agreed that the signing exacerbated Taqaddum’s legitimacy crisis.
“There was an issue of Taqaddum cosying up with the RSF or being slightly more in line with the RSF because the RSF kept saying what Taqaddum wanted to hear and the army was quite resistant [to peace talks],” Khalafallah told Al Jazeera.
New start?
Analysts told Al Jazeera that the splinter may be a “blessing in disguise” since it allows members of Somoud to distance themselves from the RSF, “reinvent themselves”, and better connect with Sudanese civilians.
Boswell believes Somoud is now less tainted than Taqaddum but also noticeably smaller as a coalition and predicts the West will “wait and see” before deciding whether to consider Somoud a neutral actor.
He also believes that, at best, Somoud may be part of a broader civilian unity government, where most officials are aligned with one of the two warring parties as part of a power-sharing agreement to end the war.
Khalafallah said Somoud should do more outreach to local organisations and activist groups and ensure its rhetoric is not disconnected from the realities of Sudanese civilians on the ground.
“They can acknowledge that people have better experiences when [the army] recaptures territory and that there is support for the army,” Khalafallah told Al Jazeera, stressing that Somoud could preserve its neutrality as such an acknowledgement would not contradict their call for the army and RSF to quickly end this war.
Somoud spokesperson Bakry Elmedni, associate professor at the School of Business, Public Administration and Information Sciences at Long Island University, says Somoud has always done outreach and believes any criticism that Taqaddum was too close to the RSF was part of an army-backed smear campaign against the antiwar coalition.
He claims the army helped write the DoP and was invited to the signing but refused to attend, instead exploiting the DoP to frame Taqaddum as a coalition that “sympathises or supports” RSF.
“We knew from day one the accusations [against Taqaddum] were part of a political campaign… Everyone knew they were lies,” he told Al Jazeera.
“However, it did affect the impression of Taqaddum, but to tell you frankly, I don’t believe there was any evidence to suggest Taqaddum was supporting the RSF.”
Many civilians across the country despise the RSF and welcome the army’s recapture of territory, saying the army brings some form of stability.
However, the army has also been accused of committing a wave of reprisal killings against perceived RSF sympathisers. Attacks are often across ethnic lines or against activists and local relief workers, say human rights groups, UN monitors and activists on the ground.
Army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah has repeatedly denied such allegations to Al Jazeera.
