In the two years and more since Sudan’s latest, and most devastating, civil war erupted in 2023, the frontlines, and with it the fortunes of the two opposing sides, have ebbed and flowed, neither gaining a decisive advantage.

But the capture of El-Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) from the Sudanese army on 27 October might yet turn out to be that decisive moment. For the fall of the largest city in the western region of Darfur to the RSF effectively divides the country up into two parts.

To the west, the leader of the rebel paramilitary militia RSF, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, better known by the mononym Hemedti, is now in control of his own statelet, encompassing Darfur and parts of the neighbouring Kordofan region. Since the fall of El-Fasher, the RSF has been fighting to take over more of Kordofan. To the east, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), commanded by General Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, the official military, control most of the bombed-out capital of Khartoum and, more importantly, the eastern region and with it the only major harbour on Sudan’s Red Sea coast. Port Sudan is thus, in effect, the capital of the SAF’s truncated kingdom, just as Hemedti will now administer his territorial gains from the relative squalor of El-Fasher.

The question now is whether the two sides will rest content, at least for a while, consolidating their rump states–or attempt to press on until the other is finally vanquished. After the army’s defeat in Darfur, Sudan’s ruling council, chaired by General al-Burhan, sounded suitably defiant and vindictive, releasing a statement warning that ‘this war will not come to an end with a truce, but when rebels are destroyed’, and calling on ‘all Sudanese to join the fight’. The RSF has been advancing on army bases in Kordofan. Nonetheless, the fall of El-Fasher clearly presents an opportunity for some hard-nosed reflection on Sudan’s future, both by the belligerents themselves and outside powers.

Many argue that the RSF is only as successful as it is because of the flow of arms, and more importantly drones, from the United Arab Emirates (although the UAE strongly denies any such involvement). Whatever the case, it will probably never have the resources, nor the numbers, to comprehensively defeat the SAF in the field and take the entire country, still Africa’s third-largest in terms of size. The SAF, for its part, despite reconquering Khartoum, the capital, earlier this year, has proved incapable of snuffing out the threat of the RSF. And now that Hemedti is digging in in Darfur, the chances of the SAF achieving any kind of military victory over their opponents have become vanishingly small. Even at the best of times — and there have been precious few of those in Sudan’s post-independence history — central governments in Khartoum have found it almost impossible to exert any meaningful control over Darfur, let alone in the face of upwards of 40,000 well drilled, merciless fighters from the RSF. The result, on the battlefield, appears to be a stalemate.

And if that continues, the de facto division of the country would only continue the process of disintegration that started the moment the country won independence from Britain in 1956. The country, then Africa’s largest, was always an artificial geographical confection, put together for the administrative and economic convenience of the colonialists. Once they left, it was ripe to fall apart. From 1956 to 2005, the largely Christian south fought an on-off civil war against the Muslim north for independence; that was finally achieved with the creation of South Sudan in 2011. Since 2003, full-scale rebellions in Darfur against central rule from Khartoum have provoked genocidal responses from the army. The Eastern Front, a coalition of rebel groups, fought another on-off war against the centre after 2005 as well.

Such a division of the original Sudan into three new entities — one official country and two de facto states — would thus merely continue the remorseless logic of geographic dissolution that has been the country’s fate over the past 70-odd years. The primary advantage of recognising such a reality, and working with it, would be to end the enormous, probably unprecedented, toll on the ordinary Sudanese who have been obliged to endure and suffer the consequences of those 70 years of fighting.

The current civil war is regularly called the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, and the appalling statistics are now, sadly, all too familiar. Over 150,000 people — perhaps as many as 400,000 according to some estimates — have been killed since April 2023. The RSF’s capture of El-Fasher was particularly bloody and brutal; the UN has called it a ‘horror show’, and the city a ‘crime scene’. Up to 14 million people have been made homeless in the war. The economy has collapsed. Almost half of the remaining population face what the World Food Programme calls ‘high levels of acute food insecurity’. Outright famine has been declared in the RSF’s latest prize of El-Fasher, and in nearby Kadugli. But we should remember that these numbers are on top of the more than 300,000 people killed during the rebellions and genocide in Darfur from 2003 to 2008. The two major phases of the north-south civil war (between 1956-1972, and 1983 to 2005) also cost up to 3 million killed from combat, disease and starvation. This has been the cumulative human cost of trying to keep Sudan intact.

In this context, the advantages of negotiating a peace deal between the RSF and the SAF based on the current military reality are obvious. Sudan, as it was before April 2023, barely functioned as a state; after the battering of the past three years, it is almost inconceivable that it can ever do so again, under either civilian or military rule. Darfur might be landlocked, but the RSF might well sign a peace deal divvying up the country because the militia would keep most of Sudan’s goldfields, which are in Darfur — the source of most of the RSF’s wealth and power. And to accept such a deal, the SAF would keep its suzerainty over Port Sudan, and maybe come to some power-sharing agreement in Khartoum.

A bit of hyper-transactional, bullying Trumpian diplomacy could probably work this through; Trump, anyway, is the only person who can force the UAE to end its support for the RSF, thereby dissuading Hemedti from fighting on. Nudged by his Saudi allies, Trump publicly stated this week that he will now work for a peace deal in Sudan.

The downside of such a deal, of course, is that it would leave the warlords, war criminals and kleptocrats firmly in charge, on both sides, pushing the dreams of a return to civilian rule even further down the line. For now, though, that might be the temporary price to pay for an end to the agony of Sudan. UN humanitarian aid to a desperate Sudanese population can get through, but the aid programmes are desperately under-funded. Any peace deal would restore some hope that such aid won’t just be pilfered, wasted or manipulated by either side for political advantage.