This week, the Rapid Support Forces launched a drone strike on two fuel stations in Kosti, Sudan, killing five people. Behind that attack lies a history of militias, oil, genocide, and a country that has been coming apart for decades.
Esta semana, las Fuerzas de Apoyo Rápido lanzaron un ataque con drones contra dos estaciones de combustible en Kosti, Sudán, matando a cinco personas. Detrás de ese ataque hay una historia de milicias, petróleo, genocidio y un país que lleva décadas deshaciéndose.
5 essential C1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| desgajarse | to split off, to break away (as a branch from a tree) | Después de décadas de guerra civil, el país parecía estar a punto de desgajarse en fragmentos irreconciliables. |
| impunidad | impunity | Las milicias actuaban con total impunidad, sabiendo que el gobierno nunca las responsabilizaría de sus crímenes. |
| proxy | proxy (in political/military context: a force acting on behalf of another power) | Lo que parecía una guerra civil era en realidad un conflicto de proxies entre potencias regionales con intereses encontrados. |
| desplazados internos | internally displaced persons (IDPs) | El número de desplazados internos en Sudán superó los doce millones, convirtiéndose en la mayor crisis de desplazamiento del mundo. |
| arrebatar | to seize, to snatch away | Las RSF intentaron arrebatarle el control de las rutas de suministro al ejército regular en el sur del país. |
I've been trying to figure out how to explain the Rapid Support Forces to someone who's never heard of them, and I keep landing on the same problem: the history is so dark, and so tangled, that almost any place you start feels wrong.
Es que precisamente ahí está la clave, Fletcher.
That's exactly where the key is, Fletcher.
Las RSF no son un ejército convencional que apareció de la nada.
The RSF aren't a conventional army that appeared from nowhere.
Son el producto lógico, casi inevitable, de décadas de decisiones políticas que convirtieron la violencia en una herramienta de gobierno.
They're the logical, almost inevitable product of decades of political decisions that turned violence into a tool of governance.
This week, they launched drones at fuel stations in Kosti, a city on the White Nile.
Five people dead, nine injured.
And I want to use that as a way into something bigger, because the RSF's origins tell you a lot about how modern African conflicts actually work.
Para entender las RSF, hay que remontarse a Darfur.
To understand the RSF, you have to go back to Darfur.
No al Darfur de los titulares de 2003, sino al Darfur de los años noventa, cuando Omar al-Bashir llevaba ya tiempo en el poder y se enfrentaba a una insurgencia en el oeste del país que no podía controlar con su ejército regular.
Not the Darfur of the 2003 headlines, but the Darfur of the 1990s, when Omar al-Bashir had already been in power for some time and was facing an insurgency in the west of the country that he couldn't control with his regular army.
Right, so al-Bashir's solution was to arm the Janjaweed.
Arab camel herders, mostly.
Loosely organized militias that he could deploy against Black African farming communities and then claim the government had nothing to do with it.
Exacto, y esa negación era la jugada más importante.
Exactly, and that denial was the most important move.
Al-Bashir podía decirle al mundo que él no controlaba a esos hombres, que eran conflictos tribales locales, mientras que en la práctica les daba armas, dinero y, sobre todo, impunidad total.
Al-Bashir could tell the world that he didn't control those men, that they were local tribal conflicts, while in practice giving them weapons, money, and above all, total impunity.
And that impunity produced Darfur.
The International Criminal Court called it genocide.
Villages burned, women systematically raped, somewhere between two and four hundred thousand people killed.
It's one of the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century.
Y el hombre que lideraba a los Janjaweed en aquellos años se llamaba Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, conocido por todos como Hemeti.
And the man who led the Janjaweed in those years was called Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known to everyone as Hemeti.
Un hombre sin educación formal, hijo de un comerciante de camellos del norte de Darfur, que supo leer perfectamente el momento político y convertirse en indispensable para el régimen.
A man with no formal education, the son of a camel trader from northern Darfur, who read the political moment perfectly and made himself indispensable to the regime.
Hemeti is one of those figures who keeps showing up in the story no matter which angle you approach from.
I spent some time in 2015 reporting on the Sahel, and his name came up constantly, usually in the same breath as gold smuggling and mercenary work in Libya and Yemen.
Porque Hemeti construyó un imperio económico paralelo al Estado.
Because Hemeti built a parallel economic empire alongside the state.
Las minas de oro de Jebel Amer, en Darfur, fueron durante años controladas por sus hombres.
The gold mines of Jebel Amer in Darfur were for years controlled by his men.
Se estima que en algunos períodos exportaba más oro que el propio gobierno sudanés de manera oficial.
It's estimated that during some periods he was exporting more gold than the Sudanese government itself did officially.
Which is the thing that people miss when they think of this as just another African warlord story.
This isn't a man living in the bush with a gun.
He's operating financial networks across the continent, he's got political relationships with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.
He's a regional power.
Y eso nos lleva al momento en que todo cambia: 2019.
And that brings us to the moment when everything changes: 2019.
Al-Bashir cae después de treinta años en el poder, derrocado por una combinación de protestas populares y un golpe militar.
Al-Bashir falls after thirty years in power, toppled by a combination of popular protests and a military coup.
Hemeti, que había sido su perro de presa, se convierte de repente en uno de los árbitros del nuevo orden.
Hemeti, who had been his attack dog, suddenly becomes one of the arbiters of the new order.
There's something almost Shakespearean about that, isn't there.
The man you created to do your dirty work outlasts you.
Al-Bashir is sitting in a Sudanese prison, and Hemeti is sitting at the negotiating table.
Completamente.
Completely.
Y durante los dos años siguientes, entre 2019 y 2021, Hemeti y el general del ejército Abdel Fattah al-Burhan fingieron gobernar juntos en una especie de consejo soberano de transición.
And during the two years that followed, between 2019 and 2021, Hemeti and the army general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan pretended to govern together in a sort of transitional sovereign council.
Dos hombres que controlaban las dos fuerzas armadas más poderosas del país, sonriendo para las cámaras mientras se preparaban para matarse.
Two men who controlled the two most powerful armed forces in the country, smiling for the cameras while preparing to kill each other.
And the spark, when it came in April 2023, was about something that sounds almost bureaucratic: a dispute over how to integrate the RSF into the regular Sudanese army, and who would command the resulting merged force.
Burocrático en la superficie, pero debajo de eso había algo mucho más primitivo: el poder absoluto.
Bureaucratic on the surface, but underneath that was something much more primitive: absolute power.
Ninguno de los dos estaba dispuesto a quedar subordinado al otro, porque en Sudán, perder el control de las armas equivale a perder la vida, literalmente.
Neither was willing to be subordinated to the other, because in Sudan, losing control of the weapons is literally equivalent to losing your life.
The fighting that broke out in Khartoum that April was some of the most intense urban combat the continent had seen in years.
I was watching the footage coming out and thinking, this is a capital city, this is a place with universities and hospitals and coffee shops, and it looked like Stalingrad.
Lo que muchos occidentales no comprenden es la escala humana de lo que siguió.
What many Westerners don't understand is the human scale of what followed.
Hablamos de más de doce millones de desplazados internos, la mayor crisis de desplazamiento del mundo en este momento, superando incluso a Siria en términos absolutos.
We're talking about more than twelve million internally displaced people, the world's largest displacement crisis right now, surpassing even Syria in absolute terms.
Y hay una hambruna declarada en varias regiones.
And there is a declared famine in several regions.
Twelve million.
And the coverage in the Western press has been, let's be honest, almost nonexistent compared to conflicts where Western interests are more directly implicated.
I find that genuinely troubling.
Hay una razón histórica para eso que vale la pena señalar.
There's a historical reason for that worth pointing out.
Sudán fue durante décadas un país bajo sanciones internacionales, considerado un estado paria, patrocinador del terrorismo.
Sudan was for decades a country under international sanctions, considered a pariah state, a terrorism sponsor.
Osama bin Laden vivió allí en los años noventa.
Osama bin Laden lived there in the nineties.
Eso construyó una narrativa que hizo muy difícil que Occidente desarrollara una relación empática con el país.
That built a narrative that made it very difficult for the West to develop an empathetic relationship with the country.
Which is a kind of collective punishment for a population that had absolutely nothing to do with those decisions.
The people dying in Kosti this week, they didn't invite bin Laden.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y ahora, volviendo al ataque de esta semana, Kosti no es una ciudad cualquiera.
And now, returning to this week's attack, Kosti is no ordinary city.
Está en el estado del Nilo Blanco, que ha sido durante meses uno de los frentes más activos de la guerra.
It's in White Nile State, which for months has been one of the most active fronts of the war.
Las RSF han avanzado hacia el sur desde Jartum y están tratando de cortar las rutas de suministro del ejército regular.
The RSF have been advancing southward from Khartoum and are trying to cut the regular army's supply routes.
Fuel stations as military targets.
It sounds almost mundane compared to attacks on hospitals or government buildings, but in a country where supply chains are already broken, destroying fuel infrastructure is a way of starving a whole region of the capacity to function.
Es una táctica con un nombre en los estudios de conflicto: guerra de infraestructuras.
It's a tactic with a name in conflict studies: infrastructure war.
Y las RSF la han utilizado con una eficacia aterradora.
And the RSF have used it with terrifying effectiveness.
Sin combustible, no hay ambulancias, no hay generadores en los hospitales, no hay camiones que transporten alimentos.
Without fuel, there are no ambulances, no generators in hospitals, no trucks transporting food.
La violencia directa mata a cinco personas;
Direct violence kills five people;
la violencia indirecta mata a miles.
indirect violence kills thousands.
There's a historical parallel here that keeps occurring to me, and I want to run it by you.
The RSF, in terms of its structure, its origins as a proxy force that outlived its usefulness to the state and then turned on the state, it reminds me a lot of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Different context, obviously, but the same basic dynamic.
El paralelo es válido, aunque yo añadiría otro más cercano geográficamente: los señores de la guerra en la primera guerra civil liberia de los años ochenta y noventa.
The parallel is valid, though I'd add another one geographically closer: the warlords in the first Liberian civil war of the eighties and nineties.
Charles Taylor creó el Frente Patriótico Nacional de Liberia con apoyo exterior, y lo que siguió fue una catástrofe de proporciones bíblicas que tardó décadas en cerrarse.
Charles Taylor created the National Patriotic Front of Liberia with outside support, and what followed was a catastrophe of biblical proportions that took decades to close.
The external sponsors matter enormously here.
The UAE has been a significant backer of the RSF, partly for geopolitical reasons related to containing Islamist movements in the region, and partly, let's be direct, because of the gold.
Y por otro lado, el ejército regular sudanés ha recibido apoyo de Egipto, que tiene un interés histórico en mantener un Estado sudanés unificado y lo suficientemente débil como para no cuestionar los acuerdos sobre el Nilo.
And on the other side, the regular Sudanese army has received support from Egypt, which has a historical interest in maintaining a unified Sudanese state that is weak enough not to challenge the agreements over the Nile.
Así que estamos ante una guerra civil que en realidad es también una guerra de proxies entre potencias regionales.
So we're looking at a civil war that is in fact also a proxy war between regional powers.
The Nile angle is one that I don't think gets nearly enough attention.
Egypt's relationship with Sudan is fundamentally structured around water.
The 1959 Nile Waters Agreement gave Egypt the lion's share of the Nile's flow, and any instability in Sudan that threatens that arrangement keeps Cairo up at night.
Y hay un tercer actor que a menudo se olvida: Rusia.
And there's a third actor that's often forgotten: Russia.
El grupo Wagner, antes de su desintegración parcial después de la muerte de Prigozhin, tenía una presencia muy activa en Sudán, interesado en las bases navales en el mar Rojo y en el acceso a los recursos mineros.
The Wagner Group, before its partial disintegration after Prigozhin's death, had a very active presence in Sudan, interested in naval bases on the Red Sea and access to mining resources.
Ese legado no ha desaparecido.
That legacy hasn't disappeared.
Red Sea access.
Which connects directly to the Hormuz story we've been living through these past months.
The Red Sea corridor, the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, these aren't separate crises.
They're the same crisis playing out in different locations.
Esa es una observación muy certera.
That's a very sharp observation.
El siglo XXI está redefiniendo la geografía estratégica del mundo árabe y africano, y Sudán está en el centro de ese mapa, aunque pocas personas en Occidente sepan señalarlo en un atlas.
The twenty-first century is redefining the strategic geography of the Arab and African world, and Sudan sits at the center of that map, even though few people in the West could point to it on an atlas.
What do you think the realistic endgame looks like?
I've read analysts who think Sudan could fracture into multiple states the way Yugoslavia did, and others who think the military will eventually consolidate and we'll get another variant of the same authoritarian arrangement that's defined Sudanese politics since independence.
La fractura me parece el escenario más probable, y el más temible.
Fragmentation seems to me the most likely scenario, and the most frightening.
Sudán del Sur ya se independizó en 2011, un proceso que en sí mismo generó una guerra civil brutal.
South Sudan already became independent in 2011, a process that itself generated a brutal civil war.
Si ahora Darfur o el estado del Nilo Blanco buscan algún tipo de autonomía o independencia, el colapso en cascada podría ser irreversible.
If now Darfur or White Nile State seek some form of autonomy or independence, the cascading collapse could be irreversible.
South Sudan is instructive here, and not in a comforting way.
It became a nation with tremendous international goodwill, enormous oil reserves, and within two years it had descended into an ethnic civil war that killed hundreds of thousands.
The infrastructure of statehood is not the same thing as a functioning state.
Y hay algo más que no podemos ignorar: la responsabilidad de la comunidad internacional.
And there's something else we can't ignore: the responsibility of the international community.
La Unión Africana, la Unión Europea, los Estados Unidos, todos se comprometieron con el proceso de transición de Sudán después de 2019.
The African Union, the European Union, the United States, all committed themselves to Sudan's transition process after 2019.
Y cuando llegó la guerra, todos miraron hacia otro lado o se quedaron atrapados en mediaciones que no llevaban a nada.
And when the war came, all of them looked away or got trapped in mediations that led nowhere.
The Jeddah talks.
Saudi Arabia and the US co-brokered those negotiations in 2023, and they collapsed almost immediately.
I remember reading the communiqués coming out of Jeddah and thinking: nobody in that room actually has leverage over Hemeti, because the people who have leverage, the UAE, are not at the table.
Eso define la trampa diplomática en la que estamos: para presionar a las RSF, necesitas presionar a los Emiratos, y los Emiratos son demasiado útiles para Occidente en demasiados otros contextos, desde la normalización con Israel hasta las rutas de aviación, como para que nadie esté dispuesto a pagar ese precio.
That defines the diplomatic trap we're in: to pressure the RSF, you need to pressure the UAE, and the UAE is too useful to the West in too many other contexts, from normalization with Israel to aviation routes, for anyone to be willing to pay that price.
And so five people die at a fuel station in Kosti, and the world barely notices.
That's not a rhetorical flourish.
That's just the situation.
Oye, hay algo que dijiste antes que quiero recuperar, porque creo que merece un momento.
Hey, there's something you said earlier that I want to come back to, because I think it deserves a moment.
Usaste el verbo "fracturarse" y yo dije que era el escenario más temible.
You used the verb 'to fracture' and I said it was the most frightening scenario.
En realidad, la palabra que usé fue "fractura", que viene del latín "fractura", rotura.
I actually used the word 'fractura', which comes from Latin 'fractura', a break.
Pero en español tenemos también "desgajarse", que es más visual todavía.
But in Spanish we also have 'desgajarse', which is even more visual.
Desgajarse.
I don't know that one.
What does it literally mean?
Imagina una rama que se separa de un árbol, no porque alguien la corte, sino por el peso, por la tensión acumulada.
Imagine a branch that separates from a tree, not because someone cuts it, but from the weight, from accumulated tension.
"Desgajarse" es ese momento en que algo que formaba parte de un todo simplemente cede y se desprende.
'Desgajarse' is that moment when something that was part of a whole simply gives way and falls off.
Se usa para países, para familias, para instituciones.
It's used for countries, for families, for institutions.
"El país se está desgajando" tiene una pesadez que "fracturarse" no tiene del todo.
'El país se está desgajando' has a heaviness that 'fracturarse' doesn't quite capture.
That's actually a more precise image for what we've been describing.
It's not a clean break, it's not a decision anyone makes, it's just the weight of history and violence becoming too much for the structure to hold.
I'm going to remember that one.
Aunque con tu acento, si intentas usarlo en conversación, igual la gente piensa que estás describiendo un árbol.
Though with your accent, if you try to use it in conversation, people might think you're describing a tree.
Better a tree than telling someone's mother I'm pregnant.
We'll call that progress.