By firing his deputy, Shams al-Dine Kabbashi, who was seen as too willing to negotiate and too exposed following military setbacks in Blue Nile, Sudan’s ruling general has effectively dismantled the diplomatic wing of the Port Sudan military apparatus and strengthened the most radical faction.
In the most sweeping shake-up of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since civil war broke out just over three years ago, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has moved to consolidate control at the top of the regular army.
The centerpiece of the restructuring is the abolition of the deputy commander post – a position created specifically for General Shams al-Dine Kabbashi under Decree 164 in 2023, which made him the SAF’s official second-in-command. With a stroke of the pen, Burhan has demoted Kabbashi to assistant to the commander-in-chief for construction affairs and strategic planning – a new role that no one within the SAF can yet define.
By sidelining one of the military hierarchy’s most dialogue-minded figures, Burhan is tightening his hold on the army and signaling a shift towards a prolonged war strategy, at a moment when international mediators are calling out both the SAF and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for showing no will to negotiate after more than three years of fighting.
Long seen as Port Sudan’s presentable face abroad, Kabbashi is paying the price for signing a framework agreement (later undermined) with the RSF at the Manama talks in January 2024, which had brought together, in an unprecedented move, influential figures from both warring parties. By consigning Kabbashi to vaguely defined planning duties, and with fighting spreading to South Kordofan, Burhan is locking down the decision-making space.
A hawk at the helm
On the operational level, the SAF chief is pinning the bloody stalemate in Blue Nile State on his former deputy. Despite the claimed capture – contested by the RSF – of several areas of that strategic region on the Ethiopian border, the failure to secure the southeast durably gave the high command leverage to discredit Kabbashi’s leadership.
Furthermore, by promoting General Yasser al-Atta to the post of chief of staff, replacing Mohamed Othman al-Hussein, Burhan has installed a hawk whose approach is the polar opposite of Kabbashi’s pragmatism. Al-Atta will be supported by new deputies responsible for operations, training, logistics and military intelligence.
A former commander of the Omdurman zone who trained in Iraq, the new chief of staff embodies the army’s hardline wing, which is viscerally opposed to any compromise with the RSF and systematically rejects ceasefire initiatives in favor of a war of attrition.
His appointment also marks the renewed ascendancy of those who came up under the Islamist era of Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which was in power from 1989 to 2019. In March, al-Atta announced that steps were being taken to restructure the mechanisms for organizing and integrating Islamist groups into the SAF, including the Popular Resistance militia.
Credibility undermined
This is the first reshuffle since Burhan removed his then-deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemeti”, from the Sovereignty Council a few weeks after the conflict broke out on 15 April 2023, and replaced him with Malik Agar, leader of one of the factions of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North. Several diplomats are raising concerns about the configuration of Sudan’s command structure, with Burhan said to be poorly advised by an inner circle that reinforces his belief in a military solution.
As the army chief seeks to forge the high command into a unified fighting machine, his leniency toward recent RSF defectors, including Abu Agla Keikal and Nour al-Guba, is seriously undermining his credibility with parts of his own forces.
These rallying figures, presented as war trophies, are generating mistrust within the high command. According to those close to Burhan, this open-door approach to defectors takes priority over his personal image: punishing those who come over to his side, the thinking goes, would dry up the flow of such arrivals, one of his main tools for destabilizing his adversary’s organization from within (24/04/26).
