Fifteen days since the start of the clash between the army forces led by Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, the conflict has escalated with bombing, demolishing homes, taking lives, and displacing residents to other Sudanese states like Darfur.

Looking at the history of major countries in the Arab region with civilization and progress not long ago, where they ended up in ruin and displacement like Iraq and Libya, it is not surprising what is happening in Sudan now as it follows the same path.

The idea of a militia or an armed organization is not an Arab invention, as there are many groups, classes, and nobility in many countries that have formed an army led by civilians, composed of non-professional soldiers, and recognized and relied upon during wartime. Some famous examples are the samurai and knights who appeared in the early twentieth century.

Now there are militias in various forms; some are part of the regular army of the state, i.e., under its command, as in China and Switzerland, while others are armed organizations affiliated with political parties or movements, and there are defensive forces formed by citizens of a specific residential or geographic area, like the Rapid Support Forces involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan.

The conflict arose due to the desire to incorporate the Rapid Support Forces into the ranks of the Sudanese army under a single command, which was problematic; the Rapid Support Forces soldiers demanded that their leader be Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo instead of Burhan. On Saturday, April 15, the Sudanese army forces announced the deployment of Rapid Support Forces throughout the capital, intending to control it, and immediately began to attack.

What drew more attention than the start of the skirmishes was the Rapid Support Forces posting a video of Egyptian soldiers inside the Malawi military base, claiming they were detained after surrendering to them. The Rapid Support Forces quickly apologized for the video posted on their pages, attributing the mistake to young soldiers and clarifying the safety of the Egyptian soldiers and their intention to hand them over to Egypt when the situation calmed down.

After international intervention announced by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces on Friday, April 28, from the Tripartite Mechanism composed of the United Nations, the African Union, and the IGAD, and the Quadrilateral Mechanism consisting of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, and the United States, and the agreement of both parties to the conflict on the fifth truce, nothing changed, and the ceasefire did not stop. The Sudanese army stated that: "There will be no dialogue before the solution and dissolution of Hemeti's militias." Hemeti also announced that despite the defeats of his forces in some locations, "The war is back and forth, and the army has not yet taken control."

In such difficult situations that the country is going through, only the people suffer; as a Sudanese man told a reporter for one of the channels, "The war is their war, not our war." The sadness here is for the suffering of the Sudanese people, where homes are demolished, and innocent lives are taken, where electricity and water are cut off, and food and health services are scarce, where Sudanese flee to the borders of neighboring countries like Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic, with the United Nations expecting the number of displaced people to increase to 100,000 Sudanese fleeing for their lives.

The hardest part of adversity is leaving home without hope for a near or distant return.