Who Are the S.P.L.M., the Rebel Group Fighting for Democracy in Sudan?
This summer, a rebel group fighting in Sudan gave permission to me and Moises Saman, a photographer, to see its enclave in the Nuba Mountains and to document its side of the country’s civil war. For two weeks we traveled mostly on quad bikes crossing muddy roads, savannas and rocky hills to meet one of Africa’s most elusive insurgent organizations: the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, known by the initials S.P.L.M.
This was a rare chance to see one of the front lines of the Sudanese war, which began in April 2023 when two generals in the capital, Khartoum, began vying for control of the country. Since then, many thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced in the fighting.
Yet compared with the two conflicts that dominate the headlines now — those in Ukraine and Gaza — the Sudan civil war remains unknown to most readers. The country is too dangerous for most nongovernmental organizations and news outlets, and the U.S. Embassy fled for Ethiopia after the fighting started. With the help of the rebels, the Nuba Mountains became our entry point.
Who are the Nuba?
The Nuba Mountains, a region in southern Sudan roughly the size of Ireland, remains one of the world’s most isolated places. Those who live there have long captured the imagination of outsiders. People as varied as George Rodger, a founding member of Magnum Photos, and Leni Riefenstahl, the former Nazi documentarian, came to the region to document its dozens of ethnic groups. This unique mix of cultures, largely Black and African, has long put the Nuba at odds with Sudan’s central government, which is run by Arab elites.
In recent years, the Nuba people have effectively broken off from Sudan, forming an enclave that runs its own schools, courts and military. Those in charge are the S.P.L.M. rebels.
What are the S.P.L.M. rebels fighting for?
Rebel groups are typically fueled by radical ideologies. What makes the S.P.L.M. unusual is that it is one of the few groups fighting for the establishment of a Western-style democracy and advocating a secular state in Sudan. Though it does so with the use of force, an important caveat.
One of the biggest mysteries is just how many fighters the S.P.L.M. commands — 20,000 was one estimate we heard, but an accurate tally is next to impossible given the blurred line between civilians and rebels. The S.P.L.M. encourages those in its territory not to identify by religion or even by tribe but rather as simply Nuba, to play down the divisions that have long plagued Sudan. It runs its own schools, where instruction is in English instead of Arabic. And it even issues birth certificates and driver’s licenses.
What is the situation now, and what do the S.P.L.M. hope for?
With the war leaving Sudan’s military and militias fighting each other, the S.P.L.M. has been moving into the vacuum. We saw multiple villages that the rebels had captured — “liberated,” in their words — after they appeared on hilltops with rocket launchers before mounting attacks against government soldiers.
We traveled to the front lines of the S.P.L.M. push against the Sudanese Army, to a provincial capital called Kadugli. The rebels took us to the top of a ridge, where the city’s residents were visible on streets that the S.P.L.M. hopes to claim next.
But the S.P.L.M.’s biggest enemy may not be government forces. It’s hunger. The war has created an influx of displaced people, and now an estimated one in four people in the Nuba Mountains has fled from another part of Sudan. On our journey, we saw the graves of infants and the elderly who we were told died of hunger this year, and we encountered children and their parents stripping bushes for edible leaves. This was a challenge that the rebels told us they had never faced before, and it will ultimately test their ability to run this state within a state.
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