#african conflicts

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Precious resources fuel conflicts in Africa. Cartoon by Mikail Çiftçi. (pub. 4 Nov 2025)

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Refugees queue at Port Sudan airport, praying and hoping to flee

Civilians are still trying to flee Sudan, boarding evacuation planes with few belongings and leaving behind their homes, relatives and live

As exhausted war refugees form a long queue near a gate at Port Sudan airport, some look up at a large banner above showing a Muslim prayer for travellers.

After nerve-wracking days on the road at risk from Sudan's rival forces, many of them quietly recite the prayer as they hope to finally escape the country.

Civilians are still trying to flee, boarding evacuation planes with just a few belongings and leaving behind their homes, relatives and lives nearly a month into Sudan's bloody conflict.

For those queueing at the airport, after their perilous journey from Khartoum, some 850 kilometres (530 miles) away by car or bus, escape from Sudan was tantalisingly close.

South Korean nationals on April 24, 2023 arrive by military aircraft at Jeddah airport in Saudi Arabia from Port Sudan. PHOTO | SOUTH KOREAN PRESIDENTIAL PALACE | AFP

But after hours of waiting, only a handful of them walked, slowly under the scorching sun, towards two planes on the tarmac, carrying children and small bags. Advertisement

Dentist Saeed Nour-Addaem Saeed, 25, was one of the lucky dozen or so evacuees who boarded an Emirati plane to Abu Dhabi.

"I was on the road for two days," said Saeed, wearing bright red shirt and white trousers, who was preparing to join his parents in the United Arab Emirates.

"I woke up to gunfire when the war broke out and I've seen horrific things since then," he told AFP.

Two years ago, despite Sudan's political turmoil, Saeed made the decision to stay after graduating from a university in the capital Khartoum, hoping to one day open a clinic.

"I don't really understand what happened. I left everything behind. My dream is broken," he said.

More than 750 people have been killed since battles erupted between the army and paramilitary forces on April 15, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Read: Fighting heaps suffering on Sudanese

About 177,000 people have fled the poverty-stricken country, while at least 736,000 are internally displaced, says UN agencies.

Safely aboard the Emirati plane, 16-year-old Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Abdul Khaleq recounted how he, his mother and sister decided to flee their home in Khartoum when the fighting closed in.

They took a public bus to Port Sudan and finally managed to board the plane. His mother was praying as it took off.

"There is no more safety, it's chaos. Many of my friends already left," said the young Sudanese, who had wanted to study electrical engineering and had plans to enrol in university.

"I think this is over now. I was actually hoping to see the country develop but now I think Sudan needs at least 10 years to regain its stability."

Those unable to escape are grappling with shortages of food and other essentials, surviving only thanks to informal charity networks.

Workers load aid supplies from WHO and UAEAID into a plane bound for Port Sudan at the Abu Dhabi International Airport on May 5, 2023. PHOTO | GIUSEPPE CACACE | AFP

Neighbouring nations have been providing aid supplies and evacuating hundreds of people of various nationalities since the beginning of the fighting.

On Wednesday, the same Emirati plane that carried the evacuees delivered tonnes of medical supplies.

UAE so far sent 10 planes

According to the UAE Ambassador Hamad Mohammed AlJneibi, his energy-rich country has so far sent 10 planes carrying more than 450 tonnes of food and medical aid.

Read: Sudanese hope on Jeddah talks

"The Emirati air bridge shall continue," he told AFP.

At the Port Sudan airport terminal, anxious passengers approached officers to ask about ways to get out of the country. Some of them carried plastic bags filled with food and fruit.

Nearby, Sudan's breakdown was all too real for by Mohammed, a 70-year-old airport employee wearing a white turban who said he was waiting to receive his late pay.

"No money. Things should get better, God willing," he said in English, sitting on a bench.

[yohane23]

African Conflicts

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Record number of U.N. peacekeepers fails to stop African wars

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, January 3, 2014

NAIROBI--The United Nations has dispatched a record number of peacekeepers in Africa in recent years, deploying soldiers to trouble spots such as the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Yet the "blue helmets" and thousands of other soldiers sent by African regional groups have failed to prevent fresh spasms of violence.

The peacekeeping forces have cost billions of dollars, largely paid by the United States and European nations. But they have been hobbled by weak mandates and a shortage of manpower and equipment. Some critics also say Washington, its allies and U.N. officials are at fault in the peacekeeping failures, for not following through with enough political pressure to prevent crises.

"The political and diplomatic elements of the international response to most Africa conflicts have been slow and ineffective," said John Prendergast, a longtime Sudan and South Sudan activist with the Enough Project, a human rights group. That, he said, "has put more pressure on peacekeeping missions to fulfill objectives for which they are totally unprepared."

In South Sudan, a power struggle that U.S. and U.N. officials were aware of for more than a year has now sparked an ethnic and political conflict that has killed hundreds, raising fears of a potential civil war.

On Friday, the warring sides held their first round of peace talks in neighboring Ethiopia, but the conflict showed no signs of abating. The U.S. State Department evacuated more of its embassy staff from the South Sudanese capital, Juba. Meanwhile, the rebel forces, which recently seized the strategic town of Bor, remained in a standoff with government troops, raising concerns that battles could flare up at any moment.

Already, nearly 200,000 people have been displaced by the fighting.

Frustration with the peacekeepers is rife. Ibrahim Muhammed, 30, fled the volatile Sudanese region of Darfur a year ago and arrived in South Sudan seeking a better future. Today, he languishes inside a U.N. peacekeeping base in the war-ravaged South Sudanese town of Malakal, living in a tent made of blankets.

"The U.N. peacekeepers have not been able to stop the violence in Darfur, and so I came here," Muhammed, a shopkeeper, said in an interview last weekend in Malakal. "But in South Sudan now, the situation is similar to Darfur. It is tribe against tribe. The peacekeepers won't be able to stop the attacks."

Toby Lanzer, a senior U.N. official in South Sudan, conceded that there are limitations to what peacekeeping forces can accomplish in trouble spots. In many situations, including South Sudan and the Central African Republic, U.N. and African forces lack resources and a sufficient number of soldiers, he added.

"There's always a temptation when people hear of 5,000 or 10,000 peacekeepers for them to think that they can do an awful lot of good, and they can," said Lanzer, the deputy special representative for the U.N. mission in South Sudan. "But what they cannot do is stabilize a situation in a whole country that is erupting into violence."

There are now more U.N. peacekeepers in Africa than at any time in history--roughly twice as many as in the early 1990s.

As of the end of November, more than 70 percent of the 98,267 U.N. peacekeepers deployed globally were in sub-Saharan Africa, according to J. Peter Pham, executive director of the Atlantic Council's Africa Center.

U.N. forces have often been limited by mandates that allow them to fight only in self-defense. Shortly before genocidal attacks erupted in Rwanda in 1994, for example, U.N. peacekeepers learned that arms were being imported illegally by an ethnic Hutu militia. But senior U.N. officials ordered the peacekeepers not to seize the weapons because it was beyond their mandate, their Canadian commander, Brig. Romeo Dallaire, later recounted in a book.

More than two years ago, the U.N. mission in South Sudan was authorized to have up to 7,500 military personnel and police officers. But it was unable to stop the ethnic and political bloodletting that had been occurring since the country declared independence from Sudan in 2011. In January 2012, the U.N. mission was heavily criticized by victims and community leaders for doing little to stop a wave of tribal killings in Jonglei state, the same region that is now a battle zone.

It was only after violence quickly spread across South Sudan in mid-December that the U.N. Security Council unanimously voted to nearly double the force to a little more than 14,000. But the peacekeepers' mandate is framed in terms of development, "as if the problems of South Sudan were merely due to the lack of material aid, as opposed to rooted in deeper conflicts," Pham said.

"While one has to be realistic--and acknowledge that the U.N. and the African Union are not panaceas and not every conflict can be foreseen, much less prevented--one should also ask what the purpose of deploying some 7,000 troops from more than 60 countries to South Sudan at the cost of close to $1 billion a year is, if they are not keeping the peace," Pham said.

But others say that if the peacekeepers had not been deployed, there would have been more chaos and deaths in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and other nations where poverty, poor governance and corruption have fueled violence.

"I think one can legitimately criticize peacekeeping operations for not doing enough," said E.J. Hogendoorn, deputy Africa director for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to prevent conflicts. "But without the physical intervention of either U.N. or African peacekeepers, those conflicts could oftentimes have escalated much more."

Lanzer, the U.N. official, said the U.N. forces have helped keep most of South Sudan relatively stable, noting that much of the chaos and violence is unfolding in four of the country's 10 states. He said the U.N. mission is fulfilling its primary mandate to protect civilians and that tens of thousands have sought refuge inside U.N. peacekeeping bases.

"We've stepped up to the plate and done the very best we could," he said.

Even with thousands of peacekeepers, a key reason for the strife in South Sudan is a refusal by the United States and European and African powers who played a key role in creating the independent nation to acknowledge its political divides and hold its leaders accountable, analysts said. For more than a year, there were clear signs of a deep split within the ruling party, pitting President Salva Kiir against his now-former vice president, Riek Machar.

Now, both men's loyalists within the army threaten to propel the country into more violence and tragedy.

"In South Sudan, there could have been a bigger international diplomatic push to address the deepening schism within South Sudan's ruling party when it began to implode in the summer," Prendergast said. "A U.N. mission alone cannot usually address these scenarios, so the countries with leverage need to show up in a major way and work to prevent potential conflagration. This didn't happen in South Sudan, and the result is obvious."