Written By | International News Agencies
Army chief and Sovereignty Council leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan
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Addis Ababa/Khartoum
What happened
Sudan's fractured opposition drew a hard line this week against the head of the country's military government, rejecting an internal "Sudanese-Sudanese dialogue" proposed by army chief and Sovereignty Council leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and declaring they will neither take part in it nor recognize any outcome it produces. The decision, announced at the close of two days of consultations in the Ethiopian capital on August 22 and 23, came with an alternative roadmap of its own — a sign that more than 16 months after Sudan's civil war entered its fourth year, the country's civilian and political forces remain as far as ever from agreement not just with the generals fighting the war, but with each other about how to end it.
The Addis Ababa gathering brought together a wide swath of Sudan's non-belligerent political class: parties aligned with the "Sudanese Declaration of Principles," the Popular Congress Party, the National Umma Party, civil society organizations, women's and youth networks, and independent public figures and academics who have kept their distance from both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Among those in attendance were Abdalla Hamdok, the former prime minister who now heads the Sumood civilian coalition; Abdel Wahid al-Nur, leader of the Sudan Liberation Movement; Umma Party figure Mubarak al-Fadel; and Wajedi Sleh, a senior Baath party member. Their stated purpose was to assess Sudan's deepening humanitarian catastrophe, find a path to stop the fighting, and chart a route back toward the democratic transition that was derailed by Burhan's October 25, 2021, coup.
Why it matters now
The rejection lands at a delicate moment. Burhan announced on August 14 that he would back an internally organized dialogue and offered participants legal, political and security guarantees — including the suspension of pending criminal proceedings, temporary protection from arrest over private legal claims, and immunity for statements made during the process. On its face, the offer looked like an overture toward the civilian and political groups that have spent the war caught between two armed camps. The Addis Ababa coalition's answer, delivered in a joint position paper, was an unambiguous no.
The groups' objections went beyond tactics to the legitimacy of the process itself. They described Burhan's initiative as a unilateral exercise confined to areas under the exclusive control of the SAF and subject to its security apparatus — a process that would, in their words, legitimize the reality of war and entrench the de facto partition of Sudan into rival zones of control. The position paper further charged that the initiative serves as political cover to perpetuate the military rule established by the 2021 coup while opening a "backdoor" for the return of the dissolved National Congress Party and the Islamic Movement, the political vehicle of former President Omar al-Bashir's regime. It also faulted the process for decoupling political talks from an immediate ceasefire, unimpeded humanitarian access, and accountability for continuing atrocities — treating politics and survival as separate tracks when, the coalition argues, they cannot be.
The rival roadmap
Rather than simply reject Burhan's plan, the Addis Ababa participants set out a competing framework built on what they called three integrated, concurrent tracks: an urgent humanitarian track to address the crisis facing millions of displaced and hungry Sudanese; a permanent ceasefire track; and a political track restricted exclusively to civilians, addressing governance, equal citizenship, the construction of a single professional national army, the dismantling of remnants of the former regime, and transitional justice. The document sorts Sudan's political landscape into three currents — anti-war forces aligned with neither belligerent, forces aligned with the SAF, and forces aligned with the RSF — and insists that participation by both armed factions be confined strictly to the ceasefire and humanitarian tracks, with the National Congress Party and its affiliates excluded entirely from the political process.
On the question of outside mediation, the coalition affirmed the Quartet Roadmap of September 12, 2025, as the framework it considers most credible, citing its clear timeline and its commitment to a civilian-led future. It also expressed openness to engaging with a separate Quintet Mechanism, on the condition that Sudanese ownership of any settlement is preserved and that international mediators coordinate into a single, unified track rather than allow the warring parties to exploit divisions among outside powers — a dynamic that has repeatedly stalled past mediation efforts in Khartoum, Jeddah, and elsewhere.
Notably, the exclusion of the RSF and its commander, Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo, from Burhan's dialogue was a central complaint. The Addis Ababa coalition argued that no peace process can succeed while one of the two principal belligerents is locked out of the room, even as it stopped short of embracing the RSF's own political project.
Background: a war without an end in sight
Sudan's civil war erupted on April 15, 2023, when simmering rivalry between Burhan's army and Hemedti's RSF — former partners in the 2021 coup — exploded into open combat in Khartoum and quickly spread nationwide. More than three years on, the toll is difficult to overstate. According to the United Nations' International Organization for Migration, the conflict has killed at least 59,000 people and forced roughly 14 million Sudanese from their homes, with about 8.6 million displaced inside the country and the rest scattered across borders in Chad, South Sudan and Egypt. The UN's human rights office reported that more than 500 survivors of sexual violence were identified in 2025 alone and that a record 11,300 civilians were killed that year.
The fighting shows no sign of abating even as the political class debates how to talk about ending it. The IOM warned on August 20 that more than 200,000 people have been newly displaced in Sudan's Kordofan region amid intensifying combat and drone strikes on infrastructure in el-Obeid, the region's largest city, where displacement in the Sheikan district has surged 25% over the past eight months. El-Obeid's population, roughly 750,000 before the war, has swollen to an estimated 3.4 million as people flee fighting elsewhere, according to figures cited by Sudan Tribune. "The warning signs are impossible to ignore," IOM Director General Amy Pope said in a statement accompanying the report. "Across Sudan, families are fleeing violence, losing access to water, electricity and healthcare, and now facing the added burden of destructive floods." Seasonal flooding in North Darfur has separately damaged nearly 1,350 homes and displaced more than 1,000 families in the Tawila area.
Analysis: entrenchment, not resolution
The Addis Ababa rejection illustrates a structural problem that has dogged Sudan's peace efforts since the war began: nearly every actor with leverage has an incentive to control the terms of any political settlement rather than share them. Burhan's dialogue, run inside SAF-controlled territory and excluding the RSF, would almost certainly produce an outcome that entrenches his own authority and forecloses paths back to power for the RSF — a result the Addis Ababa coalition views as no different in substance from continuing the war by other means. At the same time, the anti-war coalition's own roadmap, however principled in its call for exclusively civilian political leadership, has no enforcement mechanism and no army behind it; its leverage depends entirely on international mediators choosing to make Sudanese civilian ownership a precondition of their engagement, which past experience suggests is far from guaranteed.
The reference to the Quartet Roadmap and the newer Quintet Mechanism signals that outside powers remain central to whatever comes next, and the coalition's insistence on a "unified" mediation track is effectively an acknowledgment that competing international initiatives — some backing Burhan's government, others engaging more openly with the RSF or civilian actors — have so far worked at cross purposes. Whether that changes will likely depend less on Sudanese consensus, which remains elusive, than on whether the powers backing the rival mediation efforts decide the costs of continued fragmentation now outweigh their individual strategic interests in Sudan's outcome.
What to watch
In the near term, expect Burhan's government to press ahead with its internally organized dialogue regardless of the Addis Ababa rejection, since it controls the territory and security apparatus needed to convene it unilaterally. Watch for whether any of the Umma Party, Sumood, or Sudan Liberation Movement factions defect from the joint position under pressure or incentive from Port Sudan. Also worth tracking is how the RSF responds to being formally excluded from Burhan's process — historically a signal that further military escalation, rather than negotiation, may follow. Finally, the humanitarian numbers out of Kordofan and Darfur will keep climbing regardless of which political track gains traction, a reminder that for millions of Sudanese, the dialogue over how to talk about peace remains disconnected from the war still being fought around them.
