The United Nations Security Council has warned that Sudan’s escalating and increasingly internationalized conflict risks spilling over into neighbouring countries, including Ethiopia, as fighting intensifies, weapons proliferate, and armed groups move across porous borders.
Briefing the Council, Khaled Khiari, Assistant Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, said the war has recently shifted toward Sudan’s Kordofan region, with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) capturing the town of Babanusa on 1 December and the Heglig oil field on 8 December, while major cities in South Kordofan remain under siege. He warned that the movement of armed groups across borders, already reported between Sudan and South Sudan, carries “potentially destabilizing effects” for the wider region.
Independent analyst Cameron Hudson went further, cautioning that the conflict has evolved into a fully internationalized war sustained by cross-border arms, financial, and political networks. “If we think these same networks won’t support the region’s next war in Chad or South Sudan or Ethiopia, we are mistaken,” he told the Council, underscoring the risk of contagion into fragile neighbouring states.
