Chad Is In Sudan's War Now

Grant: July twenty first—a drone hits a market in Tine, Chad, seven kilometers over the border from Sudan. Miles: The market burns, two children hurt. Grant: It's happened four times before. This is the fifth, Miles. Miles: Siem corridor, five times. Grant: This is Outside In. Miles: Because that strait sits on the edge of something bigger, a civil war in Sudan that's three years old now. Now, and it stopped being just Sudan's war. Grant: Chad, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, South Sudan, five countries pulled into this thing. Miles: In the human toll stacking up behind those front lines, Grant, we're not skating past that. Grant: We're also tracking how the Sudanese army's retaking towns and a key export road across Kordofan, Miles: Right. Grant: and who's still on that ground. Miles: And the money. Gold moving out of Darfur. Oil out of Kordofan. Out of Mauritania and a fuel blockade squeezing Bamako six hundred miles west. Grant: And two stories almost nobody in the West watching yet: one in the Central African Republic, one building in Eastern Chad. Miles: But it starts at that market in Tine. Start with the video: July Twenty First, a market town called Tine and the District Governor filmed it himself. Grant: What's on it? Miles: Shops burning. A drone came in from Sudanese territory, hit the market and the Governor's own headquarters. Two kids among the injured, according to Sudan Tribune. Grant: Chad isn't even a combatant in this war. Miles: That's the point-this is the fifth cross border hit in recent months. January, an RSF incursion killed eight Chadian soldiers. March, a strike on an iftar gathering killed roughly eighteen people. Grant: So why Tine? Walk me through the geography because I keep hearing that name. Miles: It sits on a dry riverbed that's the actual border: Sudanese Tine on one side, Chadian Tine on the other. The other: same families, same market days, same wells. Grant: So it's not really two towns? Miles: It never was-which is exactly why it's turned into a staging ground, supply routes, wounded fighters crossing to rest, and now, apparently, drone flight paths. Grant: What's the humanitarian toll actually look like on the ground? Miles: MSF says it treated four hundred and fifty seven people wounded in these attacks. Attacks in Tine between February and June they had to move their own hospital because shelling reached the compound. Grant: A hospital moving because the war followed it there! Miles: And here's the piece that should worry people watching the arms picture: Bellingcat matched munitions remnants from the March strike to Chinese-made GB-series bombs. Grant: Not with the Sudanese army flies. Miles: No, the army uses Turkish and Iranian ordnance. Bellingcat says this hardware traces back to what the RSF has used before. Grant: So a paramilitary force is running air operations seven kilometers into a neutral country with foreign sourced munitions against a market and a government building. Miles: That's the read. Grant: I keep hearing people call this a Sudan story. It stopped being that a while ago. Miles: It's not contained to two sides fighting inside one border anymore. Grant: Chad's pulled in, refugee flows into Chad and beyond, weapons moving through the Gulf and into the Sahel-this is a five country war running off one civil conflict. Miles: And the engine driving all of it-the drones, the incursions, the burned markets-that engine is the front line inside Sudan itself. Grant: A front line that reportedly moved again this weekend. Miles: Which raises the question, if the fighting inside Sudan just shifted from Speaker 3: internal war to external war, Miles: Shifted, what does that mean for everyone standing next to it? Grant: Building on that spillover, the ground itself moved in Kordofan this weekend. Miles: The Sudan Tribune reports the army and the allied joint force retook Bara, Um Sayala, Jabrat al-Baraka and al-Baraka on July twenty fifth. Grant: Forget the town names for a second; the prize is the road linking them. Three hundred fifty kilometers Omdurman to El Obeid. Miles: The export corridor, RSF held it. Held it since twenty twenty three. Speaker 4: Every fuel convoy, every grain shipment, every artillery round moving west ran through that stretch. Khartoum says it's theirs again. Miles: Though Asharq Al-Awsat had both sides still claiming gains as of July twenty seventh, nothing's fully settled. Speaker 4: And TRT Afrika ran a figure from an Allied commander: sixty two RSF vehicles destroyed in the push. Miles: One side spokesman, no independent count worth remembering every time a vehicle tally gets thrown around in this war. Speaker 4: Hemetti's answer to the losses is the part that worries me. Sudan Tribune says he's handed field commanders autonomy to launch attacks on their own. Miles: That's a command structure loosening up. It was spinning at the centre, not tightening it. Speaker 4: Which means for civilians? Miles: It means whoever's holding the nearest checkpoint makes the call now, with nobody above them filtering it. Speaker 4: UNFPA's flash update on Lobeid backs that up: near-daily drone strikes on power substations, fuel stations, water facilities. Not troops, services: starve the city of power and water, and the siege- Each does the work soldiers don't have to. And meanwhile Burhan's Omdurman forces Miles: to keep pushing-all the way to the Central African Republic border. Speaker 4: That's a stated war aim, not a cease fire posture. He wants the whole map, not one province. Miles: So a recaptured road looks like a win on a briefing slide, but every town on that list had people living in it before the shooting. Speaker 4: Which is the number nobody's led with yet; how many of them are still there? Miles: And that same question bleeds straight into the child casualty numbers piling up this week. Grant: Off that reclaimed ground, Okayafrica's July 6 roundup logged more than three hundred children killed or injured in Sudan that single week. Miles: Same week, half the country's attention was on World Cup knockout games. Grant: FAO, WFP, and UNICEF put out a joint assessment in May. 19.5 million people now sit at crisis hunger levels, and 825 thousand kids under five are projected to hit severe... Miles: fear acute malnutrition before the year's out. Grant: In named farmlands in Kordofan and Nile State were then Ninety million dollar funding shortfall is hitting hardest. 135,000 people are already past that into catastrophic conditions. That's the famine threshold. Now look at the funding side. The IOM says Kordofan displacement jumped 65%, 132,000 in February to over 219,000 by late June, people fleeing the same towns the army just recaptured. Miles: recaptured, and the response plan is still short roughly $90 million. That's not weather or bad luck. That's donors in Washington, Brussels, and the Gulf capitals deciding where the money doesn't go. Grant: There's a darker number sitting under all of it. Miles: Right. Grant: The UN Human Rights Chief said drones caused more than 80% of civilian deaths in Sudan across the first four months of the year, at least 880 people. Miles: 80%! Grant: Not gunfire, not shelling, which tells you who's actually running this war now-pilots sitting somewhere with a joystick, not infantry on the ground. And nobody's rating oversight for that. Two tripwires nobody's watching, whether that ninety million dollar gap closes before the next harvest, and whether anyone puts rules around those drone strikes. Right now there aren't any. Miles: Flip that same fuel and roads logic west and you land in Mali. Holly. Grant: West now, Mali, where JNIM's blockade is squeezing a landlocked economy dry. Miles: Critical Threats Africa file tracked another countrywide JNIM offensive this month, building on the April recapture of Kidal and the killing of Mali's defense minister. Grant: Think of it like cutting a company's working capital-you don't need to seize the headquarters if you choke the cash coming in. Miles: Rio Times Online reported the corridors through Senegal and Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast carry roughly ninety five percent of Malian petroleum. Grant: And JNIM's destroyed more than three hundred tankers on those roads since last September-prices have doubled, Bamako's running rolling blackouts. Miles: African security analysis flagged something bigger on July fourth and fifth: the Azawad Liberation Front took the Anefis base after clashing with Malian troops and Russia's Africa Corps. Grant: That's twice now the FLAs taken ground the Rus- The Russians were supposed to hold, Miles: which is the actual task case for Moscow's whole mercenary model on the Sahel. Grant: So far the score card says it's losing. Miles: And the junta can't say that part out loud. Grant: Why not just admit it and rebuild with the West? Miles: Because that's admitting the whole twenty twenty one coup logic was wrong. Easier to shop for new friends. Grant: So Bamako's diversifying. Turkey for drones, China for loans, Iran rep None reportedly in the mix, too. Miles: None of them are offering boots on the ground the way France once did—its patronage without protection. Grant: Same lever we just watched pull in Sudan: control the road, control the country. Miles: Except this road runs through three other capitals, so Mali's crisis is already regional. Grant: Same question follows us east: who's actually paying for the guns in Sudan, too? Follow the money east, and it lands in Addis Ababa. Miles: The International Crisis Group reported that Sudan's army now accuses Ethiopia of hosting an RSF training base, allegedly funded by the UAE. Grant: And letting drones cross Ethiopian airspace on their way to the front. Miles: Addis Ababa denies all of it. No base, no drones, no involvement. That's their position on the record. Grant: Noted. But Crisis Group also flagged the Sudan reinforcements. Reinforce troops along Al-Fashaga and get a reef back in May. Miles: That's a farmland dispute along the border that's simmered for decades, mostly ignored. Grant: Layer that onto the GERD Dam fight over the Nile, onto a live civil war. Miles: And you've got three separate quarrels stocked on one frontier, none of them resolved. Grant: Wars this size run on cash flow, not slogans, and the RSF's cash flow is underground. Miles: Darfur's gold mines, oilfields across Kordofan—Hemedti sits on both. Grant: That's payroll for fighters, fuel for trucks, and the money behind the next drone strike. Miles: Which means the army can retake the whole export road, and the war still pays for itself. Grant: Because that cash was never coming from Khartoum's treasury in the first place. Miles: It's Gulf buyers moving gold, and a neighbor denying it's letting drones through its own sky. Grant: Two accusations, zero independent verification so far. Miles: And there's a rebellion breaking out right now that almost nobody outside Africa is watching. Grant: In a country that wasn't even supposed to be part of this map. Building on that money trail, two flags before we close out, starting in Central African Republic. Miles: Critical Threats Africa file, published July ninth, reported a new rebellion breaking out there this week. Grant: And Sudan Tribune reported army chief Burhan just ordered his forces to push all the way to that CAR border. Miles: So Sudan's civil war is now bumping up against a sixth country's line. Grant: That's the one I'm watching, where the Khartoum's push turned CAR's rebellion into another route for RSF weapons and fighters. Miles: Mines in DR Congo. Okayafrica reported Ebola deaths in the Bundibugyo outbreak passed 500 as of July 6. Grant: And unpaid health workers are threatening to strike right in the middle of it. Miles: No battlefield attached, so almost nobody outside Africa is covering that one. Grant: Last flag matters more than both, though—Chad. Miles: Sudan Tribune reported Chad launched a security operation on its border. on its border right after the drone strike we opened on. Grant: So what's the actual line? How many more strikes before N'Djamena stops calling it a security operation? Speaker 4: Right? Miles: That question decides whether this stays Sudan's war or becomes everyone's. Grant: That's the episode—five countries, one war and a road that matters more than the towns around it. Miles: Right; an endemic is decentralization order—that's the piece to sit with; no filter left on the violence! Grant: If you took one thing away, take that: this war spreads because donor capitals let the funding gap sit there. Miles: Pause—what to watch? Sudan's army chief ordered troops to clear a path to the Central African Republic border and a new rebellion just flared right in that path. Grant: Second one: DR Congo's Ebola outbreak just passed five hundred deaths, Speaker 5: Right. Grant: and health workers are threatening to walk out. Nobody in the West is covering that yet. Miles: And, Chad, after that teen strike, their threshold for hitting back is still unclear. Watch that border. Grant: Share this with someone stuck in one time zone's news; subscribe wherever you're listening. Miles: Thanks for spending the hour with us. We'll see you next week.