Yale HRL head: ‘2026 will be the bloodiest year of the Sudan war but the world has chosen to put its own interests above those of Sudanese people…’

‘This year will be the bloodiest year of the Sudan war, the international community is failing to act and has put its interests before the lives of Sudanese people,’ says Prof Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL).

In an exclusive interview with Radio Dabanga Editor in Chief Kamal Elsadig, Prof Raymond puts the crisis in Sudan into a historical context, pointing out that the siege and capture of El Fasher “is, given the numbers we have now speaking conservatively, a mass casualty event that rivals the initial death toll after the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, World War Two.

“The siege of El Fasher lasted three quarters as long a the siege of Stalingrad in World War Two,” however, he laments that “the world made a choice through its inaction; particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union made a collective and intentional choice that the economic, security, and diplomatic interests of the West, with the United Arab Emirates, mattered more than the lives of indigenous Sudanese people.”

However, Prof Raymond pledges that his institution, which publishes regular reports, verified by detailed satellite imagery, “will continue to closely monitor every day that passes in Sudan until this war ends, and we will continue to bear witness and speak the truth.”

Full transcript of the interview with Professor Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL):

It’s a pleasure to be here for all of us at the Yale humanitarian research lab. We are huge fans and supporters of the work of Radio Dabanga that has provided us with so much critical information about events on the ground throughout multiple regions of Sudan over many, many years. So, it’s my pleasure.

RD: Okay, so you the first one warning the world about the states in El Fasher, but still continue monitoring everything there and concerned with what’s happening. So, in your opinion, did no-one pay attention for what you’re speaking about until the crisis is the fall of El Fasher?

The fall of El Fasher and the siege itself that lasted three and a half times longer than the siege of Stalingrad in World War Two, and three quarters of the length of the siege of Stalingrad is not only an operational failure of multilateral institutions such as the UN Security Council is a collective moral failure of the international community.

I speak to a lot of governments about El Fasher, and they constantly want to tell me that the situation was complex. And I say no, it was very simple. And what I mean by that is that it was simple because the world made a choice through its inaction, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union made a collective and intentional choice that the economic, security and diplomatic interests of the West, with the United Arab Emirates, mattered more than the lives of black, indigenous Sudanese, particularly the Zaghawa and the Fur but also the Berdi.

And that choice was made in capitals around the world, and it wasn’t made once. It was made over and over again for the better part of two and a half years. And so, what happened in El Fasher is only beginning to unfold in terms of its implications for the future of not only international humanitarian law of civilian protection, but of the really showing giving lie to the lip service of Never Again.

The critical point I want to make here about El Fasher is that we are talking given the numbers we have now speaking conservatively, of a mass casualty event that rivals the initial death toll after the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, potentially during World War Two. And the fact of the matter is that because the rapid support forces in the UAE were not confronted in this clear and stark act of atrocity, intentional atrocity, against civilians, they have taken the wrong lesson. But the only lesson they can take, which is that their business model works, that they can get away with it. And so, it means that El Fasher, which was once a warning about what could happen, is now a warning again, about how El Fasher could be repeated over and over, across Sudan, if we ignore the inevitable again.

RD: Now the war in Sudan is about to be three years, and now the war is moving to report also, about, about, yes, so for, what are you going to do for Kordofan? Are you going to continue to do it and about it not to become the same as event fashion. So what you plan?

We have shifted our resources at the Yale humanitarian Research Lab decisively to focus on Dilling, El Obeid, and Kadugli and a report from a week ago is the first you’ll see in the coming days and weeks of humanitarian updates on the three cities, with an increased focus by the lab on trying to understand the positions and movement of forces by all sides, not only RSF, but SPLA N, other armed groups and SAF and SAF aligned forces to understand really two things. One, what is the humanitarian situation for civilians in the three cities and in the surrounding rural areas, particularly as it relates to food insecurity, we see Stark news from Kadugli.

50% of the health services there are no longer functioning. We are hearing dire reports from UNHCR and World Food Program about food insecurity and IPC for turning into IPC five conditions so that first focus is really getting critical humanitarian information that the United Nations and the humanitarian community otherwise don’t have.

The second focus is really about Khartoum and Omdurman and so by the 26 to 27 dry season, it is possible that RSF could put Khartoum and Omdurman at risk, and I specifically use the word at risk, because the fear that would happen in the civilian population that has returned, particularly to Omdurman, but also to Khartoum, if RSF was to approach the city, would cause massive disruption to humanitarian services across the country, potentially a new UN bug out back to Port Sudan, putting delivery operations in jeopardy and in disrupting the attempt to return to civilian ministries in the capital to function, and it would most painfully cause new civilian displacement from the capital back into areas like El Gedaref and towards Shendi and also around Wad Madani.

And so we must be, we must focus. Have two lenses for looking at the cordovan situation. The first is in terms of the real suffering of civilians on the ground in these places, in real time, but also simultaneously and equally important to their suffering is the potential wider implication of the fall of the what I call the Kordofan spine of That Dilling El Obeid and Kadugli axis putting the capital at risk, and so we have to do two things at once, document the current humanitarian effect of the fighting, but also know that it is a preface to a potential attack on the capital.

I don’t think the international community, particularly the humanitarian community, and I’ll be very stark here, understands what it would mean if there was a second potential risk of Khartoum and Omdurman falling again. 2026 has the potential now to be the bloodiest year in the almost three years of war, and I can’t believe I’m saying that after El Fasher, but the fact is, is that if we are looking at a protracted fight in the court of funds, it is affecting well over a quarter of Sudan’s population, and that’s just to start.

RD: As you say, 2026 will be bloody, so I want to see your analysis and your reading for this 2026 and is there any possibility you see for peace in Sudan? What is scenarios you will see, and what are things that you want about it? And you are very worried.

So, we began at Yale humanitarian research lab at the start of the war as part of supporting the US engagement with Saudi Arabia in the Jeddah process. And so I mentioned that because not much has changed in terms of the formulation, whether it’s Jeddah, whether it’s Alps, whether it’s quad or whatever brand name is going to come next, the fundamental negotiations have failed from their very design, because they have not included the Sudanese people themselves. It has been a bilateral negotiation between two armed actors who, regardless of the crimes that RSF has committed, which include genocide, and the crimes that SAF have committed, which, in this case, in this war, does not include genocide, but also includes, in many cases, war crimes, such as against the Kanabi in El Gezira, and they are culpable for that. SAF is culpable for those crimes there and elsewhere.

They are engaged in a counter revolutionary war. And I want to use that phrase specifically. They’re engaged in the counter revolutionary war because those SAF and RSF fight. They agree on one thing, and the one thing they agree on is to prevent a return to the democratic process that began with the revolution against Bashir and NCP, and so the fact of the matter is that we the international community are aiding and abetting that counter revolutionary fight from RSF and SAF to divide a dictatorship. A dictatorship. The question is, whose dictatorship is? What they’re fighting over, and so they’re fighting over, who gets to be the dictator?

When we do not have a peace process that brings civilian voices beyond occasionally talk at them and stops there to the table. We are part of the problem, and so am I hopeful that there will be peace in 2026 I wish for it. I do not see it, because the international community has not changed the terms of the flawed design since the first round of negotiations with Jeddah, and that continues up and has only been calcified more in terms of the quad by having actual backers of the perpetrators of genocidal Violence part of the supposed framework of the peace negotiation.

And so now we need to talk about military realities. I do a lot of Twitter spaces and zoom conversations with American and other diaspora Sudanese groups. I often get a lot of criticism and pushback when I say this part that I’m about to say, where I try to speak with reality science and facts about SAF’s current military capability. I had one gentleman who yelled at me angrily on a Twitter space where he was told to keep it short, it was about eight minutes of anger about me saying that SAF has lost air superiority and air dominance against RSF.

It is just a fact of the matter that what has happened in the past year with El Fasher militarily has shown the two forces the two trends that will decide the rest of the war. The first is that SAF is running out of personnel. Recent mobilisation of PDF camps such as at Barra, including the mobilisation of women, is a sign that there is a desperate need for men and women under arms to deal with the fact that SAF has depleted much of its trained personnel.

The other issue is that SAF, in its construction under the NCP relied on relatively expensive, hard, hard to replace parts reliant machinery such as mi, 24 helicopters, T 72 tanks, MLRS, systems, etc, etc. MiGs, which relied on a pipeline, as shown very clearly in the BNP Paribas civil case, we see how the Bashir regime relied on money laundering and fraud to pay for the parts necessary to remain in power for this extremely expensive war machine.

Okay, and so now let’s flip to the other side. RSF is gaining in numbers through mercenaries, through mobilisation of Misseriya Beni Halba, they have brought other armed groups to the table with the promise of loot in Kordofan and the promise of advantage to groups like the Misseriya in their local neighbourhood. They are bringing more fighters to the table in that they have, in many cases, a back of the envelope estimate a three to one, sometimes personnel advantage in certain fights against SAF. Sometimes it’s higher.

And so they are using cheap technicals, cheaper weapons than SAF, combined with their investment in advanced weaponry supported, and this is US intelligence assessment, speaking, according to the Wall Street Journal from INR and via Defense Intelligence and State Department Intelligence and Research, we now have a group when it was the Janjaweed that fought with rusty and field rifles, camels and horses and AK47s that now have an air force in the air force that the drone warfare that was perfected in El Fasher will reverberate around the world with dire consequences for civilians.

Because they brought four drone platforms together, in particular, suicide drones with fixed wing intelligence sensor reconnaissance drones to do Rwanda, but with drones, meaning they could track civilians. And we heard from civilians on the ground in El Fasher that they saw quad copters they were being harassed by drones who are following them.

And then what do we see in the mosque attack in Daraja Ullah, that mosque attack that will stay with me for the rest of my life is we see that suicide drone hit the roof of the mosque during the Juma prayer and fragment that roof, turning it into a fragmentary grenade that killed the women and children and the doctors and community leaders inside seeking refuge with immense precision, immense precision. And so, they were able to use their ability to see the civilians and to strike them precisely with munitions very quickly.

And so now they’re bringing that plus their electronic jamming capability on communications and their force advantage with now the SPLA-N joining the fight into a hammer and an anvil where the anvil is RSF setting up bombardment El Obeid at Dilling and standing off. Well, SPLA-N begins to manoeuvre and trying to force SAF into the turtle, where it goes into its shell and hides in the city, using civilians basically as a human shield, rather than evacuate them, which is what happened in El Fasher.

And we must hold them account for that and catching them in the crossfire, often of close danger airstrikes against areas like the east of El Fasher in the early part of the siege, where civilians were still there. And so, we have this situation where RSF is trying to spring a trap on SAF when SAF is weak, to force them into the cities and then to destroy them in the cities, where civilians will bear the brunt.

Meanwhile, SAF is trying to break out into use what it has left of its advanced capabilities and its most trained and hardened fighters, its most hardened soldiers, to attempt manoeuvre to prevent from getting trapped. But what has the past two years plus told us, we can go. We can divide it into two types of losses for SAF, those where they ran away, El Geneina and civilians were slaughtered afterwards. So, if anyone says SAF is engaged in civilian protection, I have a bridge in AMD to sell you, okay? Because the fact of the matter is, is they ran to Janina. They ran from in the Bulbul massacre, from Ardamata, and the people were slaughtered. That’s the first type of loss.

The second is that they then camp in their divisional garrisons in the civilian areas. And this happened Nyala, Zalingei, El Fasher, and then when they can’t take it anymore, they attempt to run to their other closest divisional base, or in the case of El Fasher, run into Tawila, putting the people there at risk of RSF chasing them. And so, the point is, is that RSF knows that if they can force them into the second posture, if they won’t run immediately, if SAF is forced in the second posture, they are killing two birds with one stone. They are degrading the civilian population before they take control. And then they are breaking SAF.

SAF has to if SAF is going to militarily contend they have to break the cycle, and they know that, and that’s why they are attempting to get more force to space ratio by these PDF recruitment to try to hold them off through manoeuvre into the wet season. I don’t know if it’s going to work right now. All evidence would suggest it wouldn’t ccur.

RD: So last question, so from your experiences working what messages you want to send it to all Sudanese they are hearing you now through Radio Dabanga?

I want to begin by what I said when I address the House of Commons and the House of Lords briefing at British Parliament in London in 2024 and we were in a room, and there were many Sudanese, Anglo, Sudanese, sitting along the walls, whole families, and all the people around the table who were briefing were reading their prepared statements. And I paused, and I looked at these families, and I said, I want to say, I’m sorry, the world needs to say to you, I’m sorry because you and your families and their safety have not mattered enough to us. Have not mattered the way they should, and your children deserve to live and to be kids and to do so in safety. Your elders deserve to age in safety. You deserve to live normal lives. You deserve a country, and you deserve democracy, and you deserve peace, and we just didn’t care enough.

And the message I want to say is that the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab will stand the watch every day until this war ends. We can’t change what has happened, but we can continue to bear witness, to give warning, and most of all, to tell the truth about what you and your families have suffered. That’s the message.

RD: So, for the international community?

For the international community, this is a ‘family’ broadcast, so there’s some words I want to say that may not be appropriate for a mixed audience, the international community has shown with Sudan and also with Gaza that we can no longer claim that the Responsibility to Protect agenda exists in any meaningful form as part of the global agenda. We can no longer claim that we have learned the lessons of the Holocaust, of Rwanda, of Bosnia, of Sierra Leone.

We need to speak honestly about the steps, however incremental we have made on accountability and on civilian protection and on counter genocide, counter mass atrocity, institutions, and norms that those are now worse than lip service, their lies. And so, the international community has a choice to make, and the choice is made not through a press release about the quad, by the State Department and by Bulos.

The choice is made in our actions about whether we will put the pieces in place, including a meaningful UNMISS to reinvigorate in many ways, what infuriates me is there were peacekeeping successes in Sudan, including in Abyei, including elements of UNAMID that if it had not been in the observation mission, even the observation mission not been disembowelled at the absolutely wrong moment, we may have had a chance in El Fasher.

If anyone thinks this war will end without a force, a counter force, between SAF and RSF to protect civilians, then we’re fooling ourselves. The RSF, even if the war ended today, we have to, as an international community, disarm the capability that the RSF has, while simultaneously we have to for SAF, for NIST, for multiple other armed actors, both within and adjacent to the security services. We have to create an army that serves the Sudanese people.

And so, the idea that we it’s about just stopping the shooting is, is ludicrous. This is, this is about what happens when the international community does not take A, support for local democrat movements seriously and B, support them combined with in transitional movements, combined with a security sector reform, including DRR in in disarmament, re-education, and reintegration and so and that that’s where we are.

The last thing I want to say is that people constantly act like the war in Sudan is some sort of ideological fight. And I talked about the movie Die Hard. In the first part of Die Hard, Hans Gruber, the bad guy is trying to make the whole world think that he’s a political terrorist, because it’s a bank robbery. Well, what’s happening here in Sudan is they say civil war, this is a bank robbery. And the people are being robbed are the people of Sudan, of their resources and their future, and so what? What do you have to do? We got to call the police. And that’s what we failed to do.

I want to say thank you for again, for the critical role Radio Dabanga plays. We think all the time at Yale humanitarian Research Lab about your funding; we’re constantly concerned that Radio Dabanga stays on the air for so many reasons. You bring you bring hope and you bring truth to Sudanese people, and it’s you are a vital public institution and utility like power, light, and hospitals.