By any sober measure, the fall of El Fasher is a continental event. After an 18-month siege and amid reports of mass killings, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the last major army holdout in Darfur, consolidating their control over the region and shifting the war’s center of gravity toward Kordofan and Sudan’s east. For Africa’s militaries—from N’Djamena to Juba—the question is no longer whether the RSF can metastasize beyond Sudan’s borders. It’s how long their treasuries, forces, and politics can afford the consequences if it does.
The RSF’s model of expansion
The RSF, descended from Darfur’s Janjaweed militias, has combined territorial conquest with a war economy built on gold, cross-border supply lines, and proliferating drones. Open-source investigations and UN panels have traced RSF logistics corridors through Libya, Chad, and, at points, South Sudan—arteries that let the group trade contraband, move fighters, and import materiel despite sanctions and diplomatic pressure. That networked model—not a single front—explains the RSF’s resilience and the growing regional exposure.
Gold underwrites the violence. Analyses of Jebel Amer and other mines detail how RSF-linked actors taxed, smuggled, or otherwise monetized output even as war depressed formal production—money that then cycled back into arms and patronage. Every truck that rumbles north with bullion is a balance-of-payments problem for neighbours and a munitions line for the RSF.
What El Fasher foretells for the region
El Fasher’s capture is not just a Sudanese tragedy—it’s a signal. Humanitarian monitors documented shelling of displacement camps, hospital massacres, and apparent “systematic killing” during and after the city’s fall. Such methods—siege, starvation, and terror—are designed to empty territory and deter resistance. When they succeed, refugees pour into Chad and South Sudan, border garrisons stretch, and already-thin defense budgets bend toward internal security over external deterrence.
For Chad, the threat is two-sided. Longstanding Zaghawa dynamics straddle the frontier; fighting around Kulbus and along the Jebel Oum axis has already raised the risk of spillover and militia blowback. Every RSF gain in West Darfur increases the incentive for Chadian factions to arm or align—an escalator toward the very instability N’Djamena is trying to avoid.
South Sudan faces a different calculus: oil. Its economic lifeline runs by pipeline to Port Sudan through contested terrain. If RSF reach and SAF counter-offensives keep pressurizing Kordofan, Juba’s export security weakens, revenues wobble, and the army’s ability to pay troops and mediate internal violence erodes. Neutrality buys time, not certainty.
The new costs of modern militia war
Three price tags define the next phase for African militaries.
Air and counter-drone defense. RSF has normalized the use of cheap loitering munitions and repurposed commercial drones for mass effect—from strikes on shelters in El Fasher to battlefield ISR. Counter-UAS kits, electronic warfare, and layered short-range air defense are expensive—and still playing catch-up.
Internal security overhang. Border troops redeploy inward to police smuggling corridors, camps swell into de facto cities, and intelligence services shift focus to armed-group finance. That rebalancing consumes budgets and political attention, leaving fewer resources for external threats and modernization.
Humanitarian-to-security bleed. Displacement figures in the millions translate directly into security assignments: convoy escorts, camp protection, and criminal interdiction. The IOM’s regional reporting shows how cross-border flows into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and the CAR keep ratcheting pressure on governments least able to absorb it.
Why the RSF keeps momentum
Here, the framing from Sudan War Monitor is essential: the RSF’s spread is not linear conquest but logistical persistence. Even as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) made gains in Khartoum and along parts of the Kordofan front in early-mid 2025, the RSF maintained depth in Darfur and kept its resupply lines alive through Libya and Chad. With El Fasher down, that depth is wider—and the road to Kordofan shorter.
The affordability threshold
So how long can African militaries afford this? Three thresholds will decide:
1) Border integrity vs. smuggling economics. If RSF gold and arms can still move profitably across Libya and Chad, interdiction costs will outpace interdiction gains. The moment N’Djamena can’t make the math work—politically or fiscally—is the moment porous borders become permissive corridors.
2) Pipeline security in Kordofan. Suppose RSF pushes into nodes that endanger South Sudan’s export flow for more than a few quarters. In that case, Juba’s budget shock will translate into force fragility—and potentially into proxy alignments it has tried to avoid.
3) Urban atrocity risk as policy driver. El Fasher’s fall—with UN rights offices and independent monitors logging executions and mass-killing indicators—raises the political cost of inaction for neighbours. If similar patterns emerge in El Obeid or other hubs, chancelleries in Niamey, N’Djamena, and Addis will face hard choices between “contain and cope” and riskier cross-border measures.
What would actually change the trajectory?
Shut the arteries, not just the front lines. Targeted, evidence-based sanctions and interdictions focused on RSF logistics—vehicles, fuel brokers, and specific desert waypoints—would have more effect than generic travel bans. OSINT and prior UN reporting have already identified key routes and facilitators in southern Libya and eastern Chad.
A real regional counter-drone plan. Pooled procurement of counter-UAS, shared EW libraries, and common training pipelines for border units would be cheaper than each state improvising under fire. The bill is high; the alternative is higher.
Humanitarian corridors with teeth. Air and land corridors protected by verifiable monitoring—satellite plus community liaison—can reduce the RSF’s siege leverage even when negotiations stall. The evidence record from El Fasher shows what happens without them.
Stop the gold leakage. Align customs, refinery audits, and end-buyer due diligence across the Sahel and Gulf import hubs. If illicit Darfur gold keeps clearing to the market, the RSF keeps buying time.
The bottom line
African militaries can’t “afford” the RSF’s spread in the long term because the RSF’s model externalizes its costs onto neighbours’ budgets, borders, and civilians—while financing itself through smuggling and sieges. El Fasher is a warning that the price of waiting rises faster than the price of coordinated action. The window for cheaper options—shared interdiction, joint counter-drone procurement, enforceable corridors—is measured in months, not years. Every day the arteries stay open, the RSF’s war gets less containable and more continental.