Sudan’s ongoing humanitarian crisis after more than a year of civil war shows few signs of abating. And amid the fighting, a significant and troubling development looks set to complicate the conflict and spread it beyond Sudan’s borders: the rise of “ethno-mercenarism.”
That is, soldiers of fortune recruited on the basis of ethnic affiliation, or driven by economic motivations, who have been heading to Sudan from across Africa’s Sahel region, the vast semi-arid area of the continent separating the Sahara Desert to the north from the more fertile tropical regions to the south.
