​​In a move that will shock absolutely nobody following the war in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) declared a three-month unilateral humanitarian truce on Nov. 24—and then promptly broke it with an attack on an army position in the West Kordofan town of Babanusa. RSF leader Hemedti billed the pause as a first step towards a political solution, but it looks like just another attempt to con mediators and journalists. As ever, those attempts have been drowned out by a stream of grim revelations, including reports that RSF fighters forcibly took blood from civilians fleeing El Fasher—prompting one commentator to label them "literal vampires." A Doctors Without Borders update found that many of the 260,000 civilians still alive in El Fasher before the RSF takeover on Oct. 26 are now dead, detained, trapped, or unable to access lifesaving aid.

Meanwhile, the Sudanese army, no paragon of peace either, has snubbed the latest US-led truce proposal as biased towards the UAE, which is said to be arming the RSF, and appears to have lost confidence in White House adviser Massad Boulos. Still, with US President Donald Trump promising to personally wade into mediation, army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal casting the conflict as a sovereign army defending civilians against a genocidal militia, not a war between two rival (and equally bad) generals. Of course, that overly convenient framing ignores the state's long record of cultivating and empowering the RSF (until their falling out in the 2023 attempted coup), not to mention the awkward fact that the two forces joined hands to stage the 2021 coup that derailed Sudan's democratic transition.

From The New Humanitarian, Nov. 28. Slightly edited, internal links added.