I remember the night of June 2, 2019. We were at the barricade in Kolombia, behind the railway tracks, sleeping on the ground with 50 boys. Rapid Support Forces (RSF) trucks sat in the dark. Each time we tried to sleep, they hit the headlights. Blinding white. You jolted up, heart racing. Then they cut the lights. Laughter. Then dark again. They did this all night.
Around four in the morning, I watched RSF soldiers take off their uniforms and put on police uniforms in their headlights. At 5:05 am, they attacked. At least 128 were killed on June 3 and through the days that followed, per the Central Committee of Sudan Doctors. Kisha and Qusai were killed. Qusai’s body was thrown into the Nile.
I will not say everything about June 3. But I remember the end. They pushed us to the police club — a social hall for officers at the edge of the military compound — and celebrated. I left to check on friends. I called a friend whose number I had memorized. He said, “Ya man, Kisha died.” I could not understand. I kept saying other names. He repeated, “Kisha died.” I said goodbye and went back to throwing rocks, crying.
When I think about that night now, I do not think first about guns. I think about uniforms. They had uniforms, trucks, headlights, ammunition, orders, foreign rifles. Where did they come from? Who paid for fuel and uniforms, and who made the promise that more would always arrive?
Those questions are missing from a recent Foreign Policy op-ed — “Peace in Sudan Can Only Flower After a Weapons Embargo,” by Michael Waltz and Massad Boulos. They argue the US should expand the 2005 Darfur embargo to all of Sudan. The battlefield moved, drones are central, the old embargo was written for another country. That part is hard to dispute. Widen the embargo, freeze assets, stop shipments — maybe a gun becomes harder to find than food. But guns are not the war. They are what the war produces, and what keeps it profitable.
I learned this at tea stalls. In 2019, a man from Darfur who worked in a gold mine told me how it worked. The government had no money to pay soldiers, so it gave other men guns and told them to take what they want. Land, cows, gold. That was their salary. Those men were called Janjaweed. Then they got offices in Khartoum: suits, companies, mines, Yemen contracts, houses in the Gulf. They stopped being a militia and became a business that owned a militia.
That is why the violence looked so cruel. If your power comes from terrifying people, you must prove you are terrifying. You burn a house in front of everyone so they leave and never return. It is how you clear land without papers. One day that business drove its trucks into Khartoum. The same trucks that carted away gold were now parked in our streets. That is what April 2023 was — not two generals fighting, but a company that used to work for the state realizing it no longer needed the state.
A rifle does not arrive by itself. Somebody pays for it, drives it in, feeds the boy who carries it, and buys the gold for the next shipment. Behind them is always an airport, a warehouse, a company, a bank account. An embargo that sees the rifle but not the system will always be one step behind.
The Darfur embargo is obsolete. Imposed in 2005, nearly two decades before this war, before drones, before fighting spread to Kordofan and Blue Nile. Weapons do not respect boundaries. A missile does not ask where Darfur ends. But if Washington knows this, the question should be bigger: What makes weapons possible?
Guns are not the war. They are what the war produces, and what keeps it profitable.
For 20 years, the response has been organized so that nobody can see the whole picture. Security has its file, development has its file, migration has its own mandate, gold is someone else’s problem. On paper, border security is technical. A port is a matter of business. Gold is a commodity. In Sudan, border security pays armed men to hold the desert. The port becomes leverage over the sea. Gold becomes the salary of an army. The paper was not a mistake. It was cover.
In Khartoum in 2021, an industrial worker could work 12 hours and earn a fraction of what an RSF recruit made in a day. When a worker earns less in 12 hours than a recruit makes in a day, the militia stops being an ideology. It becomes a day job, a wage.
Gold is useful because it does not need a functioning state to become money. The mine stays in Sudan. The violence stays in Sudan. The money leaves. If the system that turns gold into cash remains open, the supply of weapons is not about one shipment. It is about cash for the next.
The nonprofit Swissaid found that UAE gold imports from Sudan rose roughly 70% in 2024, routed via Egypt, Chad, and Libya to Dubai. Bodies stay in Darfur while gold goes to Dubai. According to Swissaid and the United Nations Panel of Experts, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) needs a functioning country and open ports; the RSF needs the country fragmented to sell gold via Nyala and Amdjarass. One is a broken institution to reform; the other profits when institutions die.
That Foreign Policy article says more than a dozen countries provide support that fuels the fighting. It proposes an embargo for both sides. It sounds even-handed, but saying both sides received help is true, and treating those relationships as interchangeable is not. The RSF did not become transnational by itself. The UAE has become the primary logistics node, the last-resort buyer for Sudanese gold, and diplomatic shield for the air bridge. Cargo flights via the Amdjarass airport in eastern Chad, documented by the UN Panel of Experts, seem to supply Darfur.
The goal is not only to make weapons harder to buy. It’s to make the economy that buys them harder to keep running. Sudan does not need another promise that someone is watching. It needs a world where the people who finance war finally have something to lose.
Wars do not end because weapons run out. They end because someone stops profiting from the order they create. A checkpoint is income. A mine is income. If one faction ends this war holding the mines and another holding the coast, the guns go quiet but the system does not. You can call that peace. It is a new war with quieter guns.
A warlord does not experience an embargo as a paragraph in a Security Council resolution. He experiences whether the truck arrives, whether the account receives money, whether the gold has a buyer, and whether the airport stays open.
I remember the ground under my back between headlight flashes. And I remember Kisha’s funeral, when his sister brought tea without sugar, and my friend remembered Kisha’s joke: “Ya man, if I ever die, don’t serve tea at my funeral — without sugar.” He had said it as a joke, when death still happened somewhere else.
Now Kisha is dead. His family served tea without sugar. And my friend broke.
That cup was small, but it carried everything. The men who killed Kisha did not care about sugar or jokes. They cared about gold, trucks, uniforms, and resupply.
That is what the Foreign Policy op-ed does not and cannot see. It wants to expand the map. But the real map is drawn by gold shipments, flight logs, bank transfers, port contracts, and diplomatic relationships.
If Washington wants to stop the war, it has to follow the money, name the names, and impose costs on the patrons. Until the people who finance the war have something to lose, the headlights will keep flashing, the uniforms will keep changing, the boys like Kisha and Qusai will keep falling, families will keep serving tea without sugar, and we will keep wondering why the international community is always watching but never seeing.
