*KORDOFAN, THE SHATTERED SKY OF THE WORLD*
_by Cristina Di Silvio_
*Where faith bends to war and law falls silent
*
There are places where History has never ended, where the sand still guards the ruins of ancient theocracies and the hum of drones merges with the echo of the muezzin. Kordofan, that vast plateau in the heart of Sudan, is one of those places today. An operational theater where tactics, logistics, religion, and international law intertwine in a spiral that seems born of the future yet sinks its roots into humanity’s darkest centuries. Now, in the heart of northeastern Africa, Kordofan resounds like a symphony of armored engines, artillery, and interrupted prayers. The regular forces of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) fight against the militia of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), born from the sands of Darfur and now an autonomous military power. On the ground, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North also operates, defending the Nuba Mountains as if they were the last cathedral of a threatened humanity. Around them, an exhausted population: hundreds of thousands of civilians forced to abandon their homes, hospitals bombed, infrastructures reduced to rubble. Humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, Protocol I, the fragile moral architecture of the postwar era struggles to survive amid the ruins. But the question whispered in the corridors of international organizations remains the same: can the law still resist when faith becomes a rifle and politics disguises itself as God? To understand Kordofan, one must abandon geography and ascend through History. Here, where military convoys now pass, once moved caravans of gold and incense. In the nineteenth century, the proclamation of the Mahdi, the Islamic redeemer who sought to purify faith and free Sudan from foreign rule, set the entire country ablaze. It was both a religious and political revolution, an experiment in African theocracy that already showed how the sacred, when fused with power, becomes explosive. Then came the colonial era. The British divided the country into two worlds: the Muslim, Arab, centralized North, and the Christian-animist, peripheral, and fragmented South. Religion became a frontier; culture became a border. And so, after independence in 1956, Sudan entered a long season of civil wars, culminating in the secession of South Sudan in 2011. Yet it was Kordofan, the bridge region between the two universes, that remained suspended, neither North nor South, with its mixed populations, contested resources, and ancient ethnic and spiritual complexity. Today, that unresolved knot burns again. In Kordofan, war is not merely a military fact: it is ritual. Every conquered village is “purified,” every defeat justified as divine punishment. The RSF invoke the order of the nation; the regular army claims the legitimacy of the State, but the logic driving them is the same: power as salvation. Meanwhile, military technology, ISR drones, mobile artillery, armored convoys, transforms the desert into a laboratory of contemporary warfare. Yet what strikes most is not the modernity of the weapons, but the archaic nature of the motives. Faith, identity, ethnicity: ancient elements returning in an age that believed itself secular. The conflict in Kordofan demonstrates that the Middle Ages never truly ended, they have merely been digitized. The Geneva Conventions demand the distinction between civilians and combatants, between sacred sites and military objectives. And yet, in this war, churches become shelters, mosques turn into hospitals, hospitals into targets. The sacred dissolves into strategy, and the law, the one meant to be universal finds itself confronting militias that recognize no authority but their own. Here lies the tragedy: religion, which should have founded ethics, is used to dismantle it. In Kordofan, prayers blur with orders to fire. The sky no longer distinguishes between the toll of a bell and the whistle of a rocket. But not all is lost. There are imams and priests working together, tending to the wounded of every faith. There are doctors who never ask who is “friend” or “enemy.” There are women teaching children to read beneath tents, as an act of resistance. They are today the silent custodians of the Geneva Conventions, not in tribunals, but in the daily gestures of those who refuse hatred. Around Kordofan, the great powers play their cautious game. Oil routes, gold mines, and corridors to the Sahel and the Blue Nile make this region a strategic nexus. Diplomacies move carefully, no one wishes to alienate tomorrow’s victor. The United States, Europe, the Gulf States, China all observe, support humanitarian operations, and strive to preserve equilibrium. But the truth is that this war, like so many African wars, lies in the world’s blind spot: everyone knows it, few truly look. Every era has had its Kordofan. In antiquity, it was the land that linked Egypt to Black Africa. In the nineteenth century, it was the cradle of Mahdism and religious revolt. In the twentieth, the frontier of North–South civil wars. In the twenty-first, it has become a mirror of global crisis — where religion loses its soul, politics its legitimacy, and law its strength. Yet if History teaches us anything, it is that every ruin can contain a seed. Kordofan today is the highest, and most terrible, proof of humanity’s ability to destroy what it believes it is defending. And yet, in the resilience of its civilians, in the tenacity of its rescuers, in the faith that survives beneath the bombs, one can still glimpse the possibility of redemption. What happens in Kordofan is not a peripheral conflict, it is a test of our civilization. If humanitarian law collapses here, it collapses everywhere. If religion continues to divide instead of recognizing the sanctity of life, then the very idea of humanity empties itself. There can be no neutrality before a bombed hospital, before a cross and crescent carved on the same wall, before a child praying beneath the bombs. Kordofan concerns us all, because it is there that the world measures the distance between what it proclaims and what it allows. Perhaps one day, when the weapons fall silent, someone will rewrite the history of this land. And then it will be said that, among the ruins, not all was lost, that there were men and women who believed in the oldest law of all: the one that commands, before every religion, that we remain human.
