There is a question Sudan needs to confront honestly: can we distinguish between the Sudanese Armed Forces as a national institution, the leadership of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Islamist networks that have increasingly attached themselves to the war effort?

We should be able to.

That does not mean ignoring the documented presence of Islamist actors alongside the SAF. Nor does it mean overlooking the army’s record of abuses, its political history, or the responsibility of its leadership.

It means resisting a different kind of simplification.

The recent debate over Omar al-Bashir’s possible medical treatment abroad, reports of former Bashir-era figures regrouping around Burhan, and the visible presence of Islamist-linked forces around the SAF have understandably renewed scrutiny of the relationship between the army and Sudan’s former Islamist establishment. Bashir is currently under military guard in Khartoum and his family has sought permission for him to receive treatment abroad.

There is also substantial evidence that Islamist networks have regained influence during the war.

ACLED has documented the SAF’s revival of relationships with former Islamist allies, including the al-Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade and remnants of networks associated with the former regime. It describes the brigade as having developed institutional and personal ties with SAF commanders and subsequently becoming an important force within the war effort.

Those developments deserve scrutiny.

But they do not make the SAF synonymous with the NCP, nor do they make the SAF synonymous with the RSF.

That distinction matters.

The army, the commander and the political networks are not the same thing

The SAF is Sudan’s regular armed force. The RSF is a separate paramilitary organisation.

The current war began in April 2023 between those two forces, after the post-Bashir transition broke down over, among other things, the future political order and the integration of the RSF into the regular military. The House of Commons Library continues to describe the conflict in those institutional terms: the SAF, led by Burhan, and the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

That does not make the SAF politically neutral.

Nor does it make Burhan synonymous with the institution he commands.

And it certainly does not erase the army’s relationship with Islamist networks.

But these distinctions are important precisely because Sudan’s future cannot be built on analytical shortcuts.

An Islamist network operating with or alongside the SAF is not the same thing as the SAF being an Islamist organisation.

Likewise, criticism of Burhan is not criticism of every Sudanese soldier serving in the national army.

And support for the SAF’s role in preserving Sudan’s territorial integrity does not automatically amount to support for Bashir, the NCP, the Muslim Brotherhood or a return to Islamist rule.

Sudanese people can hold all of those positions simultaneously.

The false comfort of “both sides”

There is an opposite simplification that is equally problematic: treating the SAF and RSF as simply two interchangeable armed factions.

They are not.

Both have been accused of serious violations against civilians.

Both have relied on alliances beyond their formal structures.

Both have political ambitions and competing networks of influence.

But they are different organisations with different histories, structures and political relationships.

The RSF itself grew out of the Janjaweed and was formally established as a paramilitary force under Bashir. The SAF, by contrast, is the country’s regular armed force.

The RSF has since established a rival governing structure in areas it controls, while the SAF has re-established government institutions in Khartoum after retaking the capital. Sudan is now effectively divided between areas dominated by the two forces.

That reality does not tell Sudanese people which political settlement they should choose.

But it does tell us that institutional distinctions matter.

And they matter even more when international actors are trying to negotiate an end to the war.

None of this absolves the SAF

This argument should not be misunderstood as a defence of Burhan.

The SAF’s conduct must be examined. Its alliances must be examined. The role of Islamist groups fighting alongside it must be examined. Allegations of abuses by SAF forces must be investigated.

And the question of what role, if any, Islamist political organisations should have in Sudan’s future must ultimately be answered by Sudanese people through a credible political process.

But that is precisely why we need better distinctions.

The United States has recently stated that neither the SAF nor the RSF represents legitimate constitutional governance for Sudan. Sudan’s government rejected that position, arguing that Sudan’s sovereignty, unity and institutions must be respected.

Whatever one’s view of that dispute, “neither side represents a political settlement” is not the same as “both sides are the same.”

That distinction appears increasingly important in international diplomacy.

Indeed, the current US-led effort has itself exposed disagreement among external actors over whether the SAF and RSF should be treated as equivalent parties. A recent UN-focused assessment noted Saudi concerns about language treating the two forces as equivalent.

Sudan needs more than one lens

The temptation to explain Sudan through a single lens is understandable.

For some, the war is fundamentally a struggle against the Islamists.

For others, it is a struggle between two military factions.

For others still, it is primarily a proxy war driven by the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey or other external powers.

Each lens captures something.

None captures everything.

Sudan’s war operates at several levels simultaneously: institutional, political, local, regional and international.

The Islamist question is real.

The question of the SAF’s conduct is real.

The RSF’s record and political ambitions are real.

Foreign support and external enablers are real.

And the aspirations of Sudanese civilians remain real.

The challenge is not to choose one of these realities and discard the others.

It is to understand how they interact.

The question Sudan should be asking

Perhaps the more useful question is not:

”Is Burhan an Islamist?”

Nor:

”Is the SAF the same as the RSF?”

Nor even:

”Which armed faction should Sudan trust?”

The harder question is:

What institutions and political arrangements can prevent any armed organisation — military, paramilitary or ideological — from determining Sudan’s political future by force?

That question leaves room to acknowledge the SAF’s institutional status without giving its leadership a blank cheque.

It allows the role of Islamist networks to be scrutinised without declaring every supporter of the army an Islamist.

It allows the RSF’s origins, conduct and political ambitions to be examined without pretending that the two forces are identical.

And, most importantly, it puts the Sudanese people back where they belong: at the centre of the question of what comes next.

Sudan does not need another binary.

It needs clearer distinctions.

Because if we cannot distinguish the army from the men who command it, the institution from the networks around it, and both from the political future of Sudan, we risk misunderstanding the very country we are trying to help.

— Sudan Futures