Sudan's war passed Year Four on April 15. UNHCR's headline number stands at 14 million displaced, with 4.4 million across borders into Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, and the Central African Republic. [1] Reliefweb's late-April situation analysis records 24.6 million Sudanese — more than half the population — in acute food insecurity, with famine confirmed in El Fasher (North Darfur) and Kadugli (South Kordofan). [2] On Wednesday, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, told a meeting of his officers in Nyala that his forces are prepared to fight "until 2040" if the Sudanese army wants the war to continue. [3] The Quad mediation track has not produced a documented round in 2026.
The May 7 paper opened the file on the bandwidth thesis with Soufan's "almost entirely dissipated" framing of the Quad track. Friday's Hormuz fire absorbs another marginal unit of diplomatic bandwidth into the Iran war, exactly as the May 7 paper named. The receipt of the absorption is Hemedti's forty-year horizon. Eight days into Trump's "one-week" Iran window, the Sudanese principal who would, in normal mediation conditions, be the most willing partner to a ceasefire — Hemedti, whose RSF has accepted three U.S.-brokered frameworks since 2023 — is reframing his strategic horizon in decades.
Hemedti's exact phrasing, per AfricaNews and The Sudan Times: "We do not want this war to continue. But if they [the army] want it to go on for 40 years, it will continue until they are uprooted." [4] [3] He claimed army estimates suggest the war could continue until 2033 and said his forces were prepared to fight to 2040. He further alleged that elements of the Islamic Movement embedded in the Sudanese Armed Forces were seeking to prolong the war until 2033. [3] The Sudan Times read the same Wednesday remarks as a continuation of his Nairobi-track engagement with UN special envoy Pekka Haavisto in March — a register that has been consistent since 2024: peace, on RSF terms.
The Quad architecture's collapse is the bandwidth signature. The U.S.-led mediation framework — comprising the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt — produced a Massad Boulos-announced "comprehensive peace document" on February 3, 2026, with both the SAF and RSF having "tentatively accepted" the framework and target implementation by Ramadan, February 18. [5] Implementation did not arrive by Ramadan. By April 21, the Soufan Center wrote that the Quad de-escalation effort "had almost entirely dissipated" by early 2026. [6] No Quad round has been documented since. Boulos's regional shuttle calendar — the January Riyadh-Abu Dhabi-Cairo loop that produced the February announcement — has not been resumed at principal-level. The Iran war absorbed the bandwidth required to carry that loop.
The April 14 Berlin Conference on Sudan — the German-and-French-co-hosted donor convening that produced approximately $2 billion in pledged humanitarian assistance — landed without principal-level Quad presence. Egypt sent a deputy foreign minister. Saudi Arabia sent its Berlin ambassador. The UAE's pledge was announced; no senior emissary attended in person. The U.S. delegation was led by senior State Department officials below assistant-secretary rank. The pledged $2 billion is the architecture for the humanitarian response. The political track that would couple humanitarian access to a ceasefire was not at the table.
What Year Four looks like inside Sudan: SAF controls the north, the centre, and the east, including Khartoum, recovered in May 2025. [7] RSF controls Darfur and large parts of the three Kordofan states, with a new front in Blue Nile state along the Ethiopian border. The army withdrew from the Heglig oil region in West Kordofan in late 2025; the RSF in effect controls West Kordofan now. The El Fasher siege ended in late October 2025 with the RSF capture of the city, displacing more than 107,000. [2] Returns are running at scale — IOM counts nearly four million displaced returning to Khartoum and Gezira states despite destroyed infrastructure — driven by displacement-cost arithmetic, not by safety. [2] UNHCR is funded at 16% of the $2.8 billion required for the in-Sudan response and 8% of the $1.6 billion regional refugee response.
The death toll is the slow-cooking number. BBC and New York Times reporting cited by Reliefweb places the conflict toll above 150,000 since April 2023, including an estimated 522,000 children dead from malnutrition. [2] Cholera has spread to all 18 Sudanese states, with over 113,000 cases and 3,000 deaths. The Sudanese Health Ministry's case count for the four-week period ending April 26 — the most recent available — runs above 8,000 new cholera cases. The epidemic is chronic, not acute. The institutional response calendar in 2026 has, as of Friday, scheduled no political ceasefire round.
Hemedti's "until 2040" is the cleanest framing the bandwidth thesis has acquired since the Soufan IntelBrief. The RSF's stated readiness to absorb a fourteen-year horizon implies it expects the Quad architecture to remain absent across at least the next U.S. administration. The framing is consistent with the RSF's documented pattern: accept ceasefires when offered (Geneva August 2024, Quad February 2026), absorb their failure when they collapse, and reframe the horizon downward. The army's pattern is the opposite — refuse, then continue. Burhan's "100 years" line in 2024 has its 2026 RSF counterpart in Hemedti's "40 years" line.
The Iran war's second-order ledger now reads: Lebanon ceasefire fraying at 619-vs-30 asymmetry; Sudan war reframed in decades; Quad mediation track empty; Berlin Conference humanitarian envelope without political coupling. Two wars on one diplomatic budget produces an Africa horizon measured in years.
-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo