Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: New actors in the Horn of Africa get involved in Sudan’s civil war as it enters its fourth year, Pope Leo XIV begins an 11-day trip through Africa, and the results of elections in Djibouti and Benin come in.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: New actors in the Horn of Africa get involved in Sudan’s civil war as it enters its fourth year, Pope Leo XIV begins an 11-day trip through Africa, and the results of elections in Djibouti and Benin come in.

Three Years of Civil War

Sudan’s civil war, often referred to as the “forgotten war,” entered its fourth year on Wednesday, with little sign of resolving anytime soon.

The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began on April 15, 2023, when fighting broke out after a monthslong simmering dispute over plans to incorporate the 100,000-strong RSF into the military.

Since then, the war has grown into what many experts consider to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, an estimated 19 million face acute hunger, and around a quarter of Sudan’s population of 52 million has been displaced.

A United Nations probe found “hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur communities in the RSF’s massacre of civilians during its takeover of the city of El Fasher last October. The U.N. has also said that drone strikes from both sides have killed civilians indiscriminately in the Kordofan region and Blue Nile state—the new epicenters of the conflict.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has continued to fuel the conflict by backing the RSF. Even while Iranian drones and missiles struck the UAE amid the Iran war, Abu Dhabi continued to deliver weapons to the RSF, including via the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, according to a recent Le Monde report.

Even more worrying, new actors within the Horn of Africa are joining the conflict. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab reported last week that Ethiopia’s military is supporting the RSF; it also found through open-source intelligence and satellite imagery that the RSF has been staging attacks on Sudan’s Blue Nile state from an Ethiopian army base across the border.

Meanwhile, Egypt, a longtime SAF ally, has conducted drone strikes on RSF supply convoys since late last year as fighting has drawn near the country’s border with Sudan.

As war has threatened to engulf the wider region, negotiations through the so-called Quad nations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—have failed to make inroads to peace, and multiple cease-fire resolutions have been ignored.

An international conference in Berlin on Wednesday, co-hosted by Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the African Union, and the European Union, marked the latest attempt to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

Germany announced on Wednesday that the conference raised more than $1.5 billion for humanitarian aid in Sudan. Last year, the U.N.’s coordinated aid plan for Sudan was funded at less than 40 percent.

The Berlin conference, which did not include the warring parties, was denounced by Kamil Idris, Sudan’s new prime minister appointed by the SAF. “If the Berlin conference … does not involve the government of Sudan, I can promise you, and I can say with total confidence in a blunt way that it is a total failure,” Idris said.

However, the cooperation of SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemeti,” in previous talks has not proved fruitful either.

Many security experts maintain that for any cease-fire to hold, it would have to be accompanied by pressure on regional backers including the UAE and Egypt to stop arming the parties.

“There is a genocide in Sudan. It is being carried out by the RSF with the UAE’s help. To make truces … truly sustainable and successful, both entities must be held accountable for their crimes—and removed from the negotiating table,” Suha Musa, a Sudanese analyst, wrote in Foreign Policy in November.

Meanwhile, Sudanese-British billionaire businessman Mo Ibrahim wrote in the Financial Times this week that the “UAE, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and others must stop supplying arms.”

To guarantee real momentum—and be more than “another box-ticking exercise”—Mohamed Osman, a Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that the Berlin conference must “finally galvanize international momentum to deter further atrocities, advance justice, and protect civilians, including local aid workers.”

Wednesday, April 15: The U.N. Security Council discusses Africa’s Great Lakes region.

Thursday, April 16, to Friday, April 17: The U.N. Security Council discusses the U.N. Mission in South Sudan.

Tuesday, April 21: The European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council discusses Ukraine and Sudan.

Chagos deal shelved. On Saturday, Britain paused legislation to hand the Chagos Islands, its last African colony, back to Mauritius. The move comes in the wake of a major legal setback and U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued criticism of the deal in recent months.

The decision to pause the bill to ratify the Chagos deal, which Britain agreed to in 2024, comes several weeks after four Chagossians won a landmark case that could enable them to permanently live on the archipelago’s outer islands. The ruling could have implications for future claims on the other islands, including Diego Garcia, which hosts a vital U.S.-U.K. military base. (The deal explicitly prohibited resettlement on Diego Garcia.)

“We continue to believe the agreement is the best way to protect the long-term future of the base, but we have always said we would only proceed with the deal if it has U.S. support,” a British government spokesperson said.

Mauritian Foreign Minister Dhananjay Ramful has since vowed that his country would “spare no effort” to “complete the decolonization process,” adding that “this is a matter of justice.”

Kenya rejects U.N. findings. Nairobi has formally denied allegations in a recent U.N. report, which found that Kenyan officers deployed to help fight gangs in Haiti as part of the U.N’s Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) were involved in four cases of sexual abuse and exploitation, including against minors.

In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General ​António Guterres, Kenyan Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi wrote that a Kenyan board had investigated the claims and “found [them] to be unsubstantiated.” The U.N. report, however, said the allegations were backed by investigations conducted by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In October, the U.N. replaced the MSS with a larger multinational deployment called the Gang Suppression Force.

Papal tour. Pope Leo XIV began an 11-day tour of four African nations on Monday, which is set to include visits to 11 cities across Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea.

This marks the first papal visit in history to Algeria, a majority Muslim nation, and many Catholics see it as a kind of spiritual homecoming: St. Augustine, the 4th-century theologian who inspired the religious order that Leo belongs to, was born in Algeria. Leo is the first Augustinian pope.

Leo’s visit to the capital of Algiers coincided with two suicide bombings in Blida, around 25 miles away, which harmed several people.

Large crowds are expected during the pope’s visits to Angola, where more than half of the population is Catholic, and Equatorial Guinea, which is almost 90 percent Catholic. Catholicism is experiencing rapid growth in Africa while it continues to decline in Western nations.

Djibouti’s tick-box election. Djibouti’s longtime president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, won Friday’s election with 97.8 percent of the vote. Analysts widely see the election as a tick-box exercise, designed to provide a veneer of democratic legitimacy to Guelleh’s sixth term as president.

Guelleh, who is 78, has been in office for more than 27 years. Lawmakers voted last year to remove the 75-year age limit for presidential candidates and eliminated the requirement for a national referendum to approve the change.

Djibouti hosts a number of foreign military bases, including ones belonging to China, France, Japan, and the United States. According to some analysts, these arrangements have led the international community to often ignore the country’s democratic backsliding.

Benin’s new era? Benin’s 49-year-old finance minister, Romuald Wadagni, won a landslide victory in Sunday’s election, making him one of the youngest democratically elected presidents in Africa, where the median age of leaders is around 63.

President Patrice Talon, who is stepping down after his two-term limit, designated Wadagni as his successor. According to provisional results, Wadagni won 94 percent of the vote against Paul Hounkpe, another Talon ally who represents a small party with no seats in parliament.

Benin has been criticized for democratic backsliding under Talon. The country’s main opposition leaders are in jail. In December, around 30 people, mostly soldiers, were jailed for an apparent coup attempt.

Wadagni has overseen rapid growth, with GDP doubling during his 10 years in Talon’s administration. It is unclear whether he will reverse the violent crackdowns against political dissent and media freedom that underpinned Talon’s presidency.

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Eastern Libya’s top fixer. A report by the Sentry identifies Dubai-based Libyan businessman Ahmed Gadalla as a key shadow financier who enabled a significant part of warlord Khalifa Haftar’s failed 2019 offensive on Tripoli.

“The country’s ruling elites rely on shadowy operatives who help them manage ill-gotten funds, stealing ever-larger volumes of public wealth, laundering it, and reinvesting portions of said profits into strengthening their military capabilities in contravention of international law,” the report reads.

Gadalla’s activities in particular “extend beyond the banking sector and beyond Libya, with companies under his control also serving as vehicles for arms smuggling and other questionable transnational endeavors.”

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