As we have written about previously in TICP no. 67, the ongoing Third Sudanese Civil War of 2023 to the present has torn the struggling country to shreds and killed workers in droves, currently estimated to have claimed between 150,000 and 400,000 victims. In the eastern state of Darfour, vicious and bloody combat between the government of the Republic of the Sudan under President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abdelrahman al-Burhan, commonly referred to as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and the quasi-state Government of Peace and Unity under the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary led by Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa, or “Hemedti,” remains ongoing, with no end in sight. As of May, both rival governments are now funded and armed by multiple foreign governments and bolstered by mercenary groups: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and both Ukraine and, increasingly, Russia have taken to backing the SAF, while the United Arab Emirates, Chad, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Libya’s eastern Government of National Stability are supporting the RSF. Domestic irregular militias and mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group and Colombia’s Desert Wolves have also been noted as combatants, many of them hired by the UAE. The war is blatantly and nakedly one for capital; many of both governments’ backers have hedged on which proxy to side with based entirely on the material wealth of Sudan they will be granted access to in the case of their victory, whether it is Russia’s desire to secure access to the SAF’s Port Sudan on the Red Sea, or the UAE’s access to the RSF’s valuable gold mines.

Between late 2025 and the present, the siege and capture of the city of El Fasher, the SAF’s return to devastated Khartoum, and the ramping-up of combat in the Kordofan region has allowed a microcosmic look into the apocalyptic horror of modern warfare, with the RSF killing over 60,000 fleeing Sudanese men, women, and children in El Fasher alone as a part of its campaign of ethnic cleansing. Economically, the war has been utterly abysmal for the struggling state; GDP collapsed by a staggering $6.4 billion in the war’s first year, and by 2026, about $26 billion has been lost to the fighting. Industrial and agricultural production and oil extraction have fallen catastrophically and millions of Sudanese proletarians experience extreme poverty and homelessness, food and clean water scarcity, rolling blackouts, conscription, and outright mass killings on a regular basis. A humanitarian crisis has engulfed north and east Africa as millions of Sudanese workers, unable to use their financial and material wealth to easily escape the conflict, have fled to neighboring states and into overcrowded and resource-deprived refugee camps to avoid the sheer depravity of modern warfare.

Recently, the war has begun a more egregious period of spillover into the neighboring Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali and the State of Eritrea under President Isaias Afwerki, both of which have their economic and military hands in the ongoing conflict. Ethiopia and Eritrea, which have thrown support into the RSF and SAF respectively, have provided military aid in the form of militia armaments, drone attacks, training camps, and even direct military deployment. Eritrea currently hosts about 5,000 soldiers in Sudan, used to guard bridges and other strategic chokepoints and to support the SAF as it combats the RSF in Kassala and Gedaref, and Sudan has accused Ethiopia of allowing drone swarms to strike military targets in the Blue Nile State. Eritrea currently arms multiple anti-RSF militias such as the Eastern Cohort, the Eastern Sudan Liberation Force, and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM-Minnawi), while Ethiopia transports military equipment, including armored personnel carriers (APCs), from the port of Berbera into RSF territory. Both countries maintain training centers to arm and prepare militias for their respective sides, exacerbating the war and providing a picture of a much larger and more cataclysmic conflict that is yet to come.

The Sudanese war can no longer be analyzed in isolation, for it is rapidly merging with a much broader hydropolitical rupture along the entire Nile River Basin. On September 9th, 2025, after roughly fourteen years of construction, Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, and in February 2026 the Ethiopian government confirmed the full completion of the dam. With an installed capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, as of May, GERD is the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa and number seventeen of the twenty largest in the world, holding back a reservoir whose volume is roughly 1.5 times the annual flow of the Blue Nile at the Sudanese border. To the Ethiopian bourgeoisie, the dam is the centerpiece of an export-oriented strategy of regional electrical hegemony, intended to bind Sudan, South Sudan, Djibouti, and Kenya to Addis Ababa as customers and to vault Ethiopian capital into a position of regional dominance. To President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the bourgeoisie of Egypt, fully dependent on the extraction of approximately 98% of its renewable water resources from the Nile, the GERD is treated as an existential menace, a unilateral act undermining the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement which carved up the river between Cairo and Khartoum and excluded the upstream states entirely.

The Egyptian response has been the systematic, multi-front encirclement of Ethiopia. Cairo has concluded agreements to upgrade Eritrea's ports of Doraleh and Assab with facilities capable of hosting Egyptian warships, deployed troops to the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) on Ethiopia's southeastern flank, and lobbied Saudi Arabia to deepen security ties with Eritrea, in concert with its firm alignment with the SAF. The UAE which bankrolls the RSF’s gold-extraction empire in Darfour indirectly finds itself in a three-way entanglement with Addis Ababa's interests, as Ethiopia with the RSF. Conversely, Egypt arms the SAF with drones and aircraft, while Asmara funnels men and matériel along the same axis. The proxy lines of the Sudanese war thus mirror, almost perfectly, the proxy lines of what will certainly become a major conflict over control of the Nile River, and bind the two together into a single emerging theater.

Compounding all of this is the deteriorating relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea over Red Sea access. Since September 2025, Prime Minister Ahmed has openly insisted that losing access to the Red Sea following Eritrea's independence was a mistake that needed to be corrected, and has called for international mediation, suggesting Ethiopia may be willing to take the Eritrean port of Assab by force at some point in the future. Asmara, for its part, has responded with general military mobilization and accusations that Addis Ababa is fabricating pretexts for invasion. Ethiopian state media and politicians have publicly demanded that Assab be returned, and Field Marshal Birhanu Jula has declared that Ethiopia will strengthen its defence forces to secure a sea outlet. The bourgeois Ethiopian press now openly speaks of a "two waters" doctrine: simultaneous control over the Blue Nile, and direct access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Eritrea/Djibouti and civil war-torn Yemen. The Eritrean state, occupying stretches of Ethiopia’s northern border territory that it seized during 2020’s Tigray War, and now openly cultivating ties with dissident Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) factions, is preparing for a war it claims it does not want.

Ethiopia’s belligerent posture matches the dramatic transformation underway within the country’s burgeoning economy, of which the GERD is one of many spectacular monuments. Under the so-called Homegrown Economic Reform Agenda pursued by the Ahmed government since 2019, Addis Ababa has accelerated its pivot away from the protectionist, state-developmentalist model that prevailed under preceding regimes and toward an outward-facing, export-oriented capitalism enmeshed in the circuits of global accumulation. The "Made-in-Ethiopia" initiative, around which Ahmed has built much of his domestic legitimacy, claims to have raised industrial capacity utilization from 47% to 66.3% in three years, substituted approximately $3.4 billion of previously imported goods with domestic manufactures, and accumulated over 413,000 registered manufacturing enterprises; the IMF-backed program now projects real GDP growth of 10.2% for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, placing Ethiopia among the fastest-growing economies on the African continent.

Twenty-four industrial parks and special economic zones, drawing Chinese capital above all but increasingly Turkish, Saudi, Emirati, and European investment in textiles, leather, agro-processing, and pharmaceuticals, sit under the umbrella of Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the $45 billion sovereign wealth fund that consolidates Ethiopian Airlines, the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Ethio Telecom, and roughly two dozen other state-affiliated enterprises into a single instrument of capital deployment. The Ethiopian bourgeoisie requires the Blue Nile's hydropower to electrify its factories, the port of Assab to disgorge its exports, and the AUSSOM mission to secure its southeastern flank, and it draws the surplus value to finance this accumulation from an enormous, atomized proletariat largely stripped of the capacity for self-organization by decades of war, ruthless state repression, and ethnic-federal fragmentation.

The financial expression of this transformation has been the systematic dismantling of one of Africa's last closed banking sectors and the construction of an entire capital market. On January 10th, 2025, Ahmed rang the inaugural bell of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (ESX), reversing a half-century freeze on stock trading dating back to the Derg's nationalizations of 1974; Wegagen Bank listed that same day, followed by Gadaa Bank in June of 2025 and the historic flotation of Awash Bank in April of 2026. The partial Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Ethio Telecom drew some 47,000 investors but raised only $24.5 million against a target of $245 million, a result that exposed both the shallowness of domestic savings and the structural inability of the national bourgeoisie to capitalize its own enterprises without foreign participation. That participation is now legally enshrined: between late 2024 and mid-2025, the Ethiopian government dissolved the half-century prohibition on foreign banking, permitting foreign banks to establish subsidiaries, open branches, and acquire up to 49% of domestic banks under a "strategic investor" framework, and on June 25th, 2025 the National Bank of Ethiopia formally began accepting foreign banking license applications.

Standard Bank of South Africa, the Commercial International Bank of Egypt, Kenya Commercial Bank, and a constellation of Gulf institutions have already positioned themselves for entry, and the ESX itself counts the Nigerian Exchange Group among its institutional shareholders. The birr has been floated, foreign exchange restrictions loosened, and the sovereign debt restructured under the G20 Common Framework, each measure binding the Ethiopian state and proletariat ever more tightly to the disciplinary mechanisms of the IMF, the World Bank, and the international bond market. For the bourgeois press, these reforms herald a long-overdue maturation, the emergence of a "frontier market" rich with "untapped potential;" for our analysis, they are the textbook signature of imperialism, the export of capital rather than merely commodities, the fusion of industrial and banking capital into financial oligarchies seeking new fields of exploitation, and the territorial partition of the Horn by competing fractions of an internationalized bourgeoisie, of which its Ethiopian segment is a junior aspirant.

Above the fray of regional imperialisms, the great powers conduct their deals for influence and control. In a January 16th, 2026 letter to el-Sisi, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to restart American mediation in the GERD dispute, an offer Cairo welcomed and Ethiopia has so far stonewalled, regarding the dam's inauguration as a fait accompli. In mid-February 2026, UAE state-owned newspaper The National broke a story of an Egyptian proposal granting Ethiopia Red Sea access in exchange for binding concessions on dam filling and water releases. Egypt formally denied this proposal days later, but it carries the implicit threat that Cairo's relationships with Sudan, Somalia, and Djibouti could just as easily obstruct that access. Russia, having extracted its naval foothold at Port Sudan from the SAF, watches with interest. The fragmentation of the American hegemony; the open failure of the African Union and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD); the fractious war between Yemen’s Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) and the Iran-backed Houthi/Ansar Allah faction; the recurring Iranian crisis; and the spillover from the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb together signal the fragmentation of the Horn into a zone of permanent armed competition.

The water itself is dwindling. Climate variability, accelerating evaporation at the Egyptian city of Aswan, soil salinization in the Nile delta, and population growth in every basin state ensure that the volume in dispute shrinks every year while the number of mouths and turbines competing for it grows. Every major watercourse from the Sahel to the Indian Ocean, including the Awash, Juba, Shebelle, and Tekezé Rivers, and most prominently the Nile itself, is slowly succumbing to all of the grotesque political weaponization expected of a capitalist mode of production which precipitates exploitation above all. Within perhaps ten or so years, on present trajectories, the Egyptian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali, and South Sudanese bourgeoisies, with their respective imperialist patrons in Washington, Moscow, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Ankara, and Beijing, will be slowly but surely drawn into a series of overlapping proxy conflicts, and perhaps even a single interlocking war if conditions arise, over hydraulic infrastructure, port access, and pipeline corridors that will dwarf the carnage already visited upon the ravaged Sudanese proletariat.

The communist analysis of these developments must begin by refusing every category in which the bourgeois press and the diplomatic chanceries clothe them. There is no "Egyptian water security" to be defended, no "Ethiopian sovereign development" to be celebrated, no "Eritrean territorial integrity" to be respected, no "Sudanese national unity" to be restored. These are bourgeois fictions, mystifications by which each ruling class binds its own proletariat to the mast of its own accumulation drive and dispatches it to die for the valorization of capital. The Italian Left settled this question definitively in its analyses of both world wars: imperialist war is universal and objectively counter-revolutionary; the working class has no side to choose among bourgeois states; and the only legitimate response is the transformation of the inter-state war into civil war along class lines. Lenin's revolutionary defeatism, which the Italian Left preserved against the betrayals of the Third International after 1924, applies here without modification. The Sudanese proletarian who shoulders an SAF rifle against an RSF position, the Eritrean conscript marched to a Sudanese bridge, the Egyptian fellah enlisted to "defend the Nile", and the Ethiopian worker whipped into nationalist fervor over Assab is the same proletarian, and each is routinely murdered on behalf of fractions of capital that have no homeland and no nationality, only an insatiable appetite for surplus value.

The "anti-imperialist" frameworks that often circulate in the bourgeois left, which propose to support one country or another over alignment with the U.S., Europe, and Israel, or Russia, China, Iran, and the developing nations, must be rejected as the mirror image of the social-patriotism that destroyed the Second International. There are no historically-progressive bourgeoisies anymore. The UAE's gold mines, Russia's Red Sea base, Egypt's hydraulic monopoly, Ethiopia's electricity exports, and American mediation gambits all are expressions of the same global system, varying only in which fraction of capital momentarily holds the upper hand; to choose between them is to choose between executioners. The communist task is not, therefore, to propose a "solution" within the framework of the existing states; rather it is to insist, against every nationalist current sweeping over the proletariat from Cairo to Addis Ababa and all points in between, on the unity of the international working class against its own bourgeoisies, on the rejection of "national defense", and on the patient reconstitution of the international party of the proletariat as the only organ capable of converting the catastrophe now opening in northeast Africa into the beginning of the global revolutionary settlement that capital has been postponing for over a hundred years. The Nile will not be saved from imperialism and climate destruction by bourgeois treaties but, along with the workers of all its basin states, only when it ceases to be a frontier between alien competing interests and becomes the common possession of an associated humanity self-liberated from the bonds of capitalism, of private property, wage labor, and endless warfare.