One of the first things we do when watching a war is to try to work out who the good guys are.

I understand the instinct. I have spent much of my career reporting from war zones, and complicated conflicts are exhausting. There are names we don't know, histories we don't understand, armed groups that split and merge, and foreign countries whose involvement is rarely straightforward. We want context, but we also want clarity. Who started it? Who is suffering? Who is responsible? And, ultimately, who should we be rooting for? Sudan makes that instinct dangerous.

The current war began on 15 April 2023, when a power struggle between Sudan's national army, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into open warfare. Their leaders, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, had previously been allies. In 2021, they jointly seized power from Sudan's civilian-led transitional government. They eventually fell out amid disagreements over the transition to civilian rule and, crucially, how and when the RSF would be integrated into the regular army. Three years later, Sudan has been devastated.

There is little difficulty identifying the horror associated with the RSF. In October last year, after an 18-month siege, its fighters captured El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the army's last major stronghold in the region. A United Nations-mandated fact-finding mission subsequently documented mass killings, sexual violence, torture, and ethnically targeted attacks against non-Arab communities. It concluded that the RSF had committed genocide against non-Arab communities in and around El Fasher.

None of that needs softening. But something interesting happens once we have identified the villain. We start looking for the hero – and Sudan doesn't necessarily give us one. Today, the RSF controls much of western Sudan, including most of Darfur, while SAF controls most of the north, east, and centre of the country. What began as a struggle between two armed forces has hardened into a country divided between rival centres of military and political power.

The army, meanwhile, presents itself as the legitimate national institution defending the Sudanese state. It's not difficult to see why the framing is attractive: a national army fighting a brutal paramilitary organisation.

Complicated

We reach for categories like these because they give us a way into an extraordinarily complicated story. They help us decide who is legitimate and who isn't, who is defending the state and who is threatening it. But they can also do some of the thinking for us. SAF's status as Sudan's national army is a fact. But being the national army doesn't mean its actions should be subjected to any less scrutiny.

In January 2025, the United States (US) sanctioned Burhan personally. The US had already determined that members of SAF had committed war crimes, and when it sanctioned him, the US Treasury accused SAF of lethal attacks on civilians, including air strikes on schools, markets, and hospitals, as well as deliberately obstructing humanitarian assistance. Hemedti had been sanctioned separately nine days earlier.

International investigations have also documented serious violations by both sides. The methods and scale are not necessarily the same, and we shouldn't pretend they are. But being horrified by what the RSF has done does not require us to stop asking difficult questions about SAF.

The brutality of one side cannot become evidence of the virtue of the other. And this is where narrative becomes part of the battlefield. We tend to think of information warfare as lies: fake photographs, fabricated casualty figures, bots, and propaganda. But some of the most effective narratives don't require a lie at all. Sometimes it’s about what we focus on.

Show people what the enemy has done. Keep their attention there. And eventually the audience can make the next leap without anyone explicitly asking them to: If they are the bad guys, the people fighting them must be the good guys. You don’t necessarily have to convince the world that you are good. Sometimes it is enough that your enemy is seen as worse.

That’s important in Sudan because both SAF and RSF are fighting for more than territory. They are also fighting over who can claim to represent Sudan and who will have political legitimacy when the shooting eventually stops. And legitimacy has consequences. It affects who governments deal with, who is sanctioned, whose claims are believed and, ultimately, who gets a seat at the table when Sudan’s future is negotiated.

Foreign Involvement

We should bring the same scepticism to the foreign powers helping to sustain the war. Considerable scrutiny has rightly focused on alleged support for the RSF from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That scrutiny is not misplaced. As recently as April, the US sanctioned a network recruiting former Colombian soldiers to fight for the RSF. The UAE has repeatedly denied providing military support to the paramilitary force. Recent investigations have continued examining the networks allegedly supplying the RSF.

But SAF isn’t fighting in an international vacuum. Its own procurement networks have sought weapons from abroad. US Treasury sanctions have documented SAF efforts to obtain Iranian drones and other military equipment, and more recent sanctions have targeted procurement networks helping to fuel both sides of the war.

If foreign support is helping to keep this war going, then we should be interested in all of it – regardless of which Sudanese side benefits. That isn’t defending the RSF or attacking SAF. It simply means asking the same questions of everyone involved. And perhaps that’s the larger problem with the way we understand wars. We use categories – army and militia, victim and aggressor, good guys and bad guys – because they help us make sense of chaos.

But once we’ve placed people into those boxes, new information has a habit of being interpreted through the story we already believe. An atrocity by the villain confirms our judgement. An allegation against the side we have decided is preferable becomes something we explain away.

Journalists aren’t immune to that. Governments aren’t either. Neither are audiences. One of the things I have learned over years of covering conflict is that context rarely makes a war simpler. Usually it does the opposite. But that’s precisely why it matters. Sometimes understanding a war requires us to hold two uncomfortable thoughts in our heads at the same time. The evidence against the RSF can be appalling, and acknowledging that doesn’t require us to confer legitimacy on SAF. Sudan has a villain. It doesn’t follow that it has a hero.