Two men have been fighting over Sudan since April 2023, and each has spent the war dressing as a state. Tom Wolfe, Simulacrum, reads the conflict through its props and ceremonies: the Republican Palace retaken in Khartoum, an oath sworn in Nyala on a Qur'an written on gazelle skin, a school-leaving examination and a death sentence passed in absentia, and a visa that Washington would not issue in time for the General Assembly. The report is built scene by scene from the public record, with every quotation sourced and nothing invented, and it is written in Wolfe's exclamatory, status-reading manner. It keeps returning to the people who appear in none of the pictures: the displaced, the hungry and the dead.
by Tom Wolfe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
1 October 2026
A note on method, because the method is the first thing a reader of this kind of piece is owed. I was not in Khartoum, nor in Nyala, nor in El Fasher, nor in the General Assembly Hall. I interviewed no one. Every scene below is reconstructed from wire copy, broadcast and newspaper reports, court reports and UN records, all listed at the end; every quotation is taken from a published source and attributed to it. Where the record is silent, what a man wore, what the room smelled of, I have left it silent. I have not filled a single hole with something I would have liked to see.
Saturday, 26 September 2026. Khartoum Stadium.
Look at who the guests are, as the Sudanese press listed them: content creators! And athletes. And "broad youth sectors", as TAG Press put it. They have come for the launch of an initiative called Ma Nasinakum, which means We Have Not Forgotten You, and its purpose is to raise support for the health sector. In this city, UN investigators report, three major hospitals have suffered extensive damage: operating theatres destroyed, imaging equipment lost, wards collapsed.
And at the microphone is General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces. Three days earlier, on the Wednesday, he was due to be speaking in New York.
He was due to be. The United States would not give him a visa.
So here is the general, in a stadium in his own capital, before an audience of influencers and athletes, and here is what he says to them, as TAG Press and Radio Tamazuj reported it:
"We do not want a visa from any state nor permission from anyone. We will stay here with you and die here in this country."
And this, too:
"Our heads will remain held high and we will not accept compromise."
You will notice what has happened there. A visa is a small document, a stamp and a sticker in a passport, issued at a consulate window. Most of the world thinks of it as a bureaucratic chore. To a head of state it is something else. It is the host saying you may enter the room. To be refused it is to be left standing at the door of the one building on earth where every government, however disreputable, is supposed to be allowed in. And so the general does the one thing a man left at the door can do: he declares that he never wanted to come in. He says it in front of the content creators, the guests whose whole trade is carrying a scene out of a stadium and into other people's phones.
That is not a digression from the war in Sudan. It is the war in Sudan, or rather the part of it the shells cannot reach. Two men have been fighting since April 2023 over a single country, and for three and a half years each of them has been putting on, with enormous care, the costume of a state.
Go back eighteen months.
21 March 2025. The army retakes the Republican Palace in Khartoum, which the Rapid Support Forces had held since the first days of the war in April 2023, when the government fled to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Footage posted on social media shows armed troops cheering inside the palace complex, Middle East Eye reported. The Information Minister, Khaled al-Aiser, announces: "Today the flag is raised, the palace is back."
The palace is back. Not the city, not the bridges, not the water supply: the palace. Status always goes for the building first. The building is where the photograph is taken.
And the building has a past. According to Middle East Eye, it stands on the site where, in 1885, the followers of Muhammad Ahmad killed the British Major-General Charles George Gordon and ended Ottoman-Egyptian rule. It is the most loaded piece of real estate in the country. Whoever stands in it is, for the length of the photograph, Sudan.
Hours after the army took it, an RSF drone struck the palace and killed three journalists who were reporting there for Sudanese state television. They had been sent to make the picture, and they died making it. So the price of that picture was known from the start.
Then, five days later, 26 March 2025, a Wednesday, the star arrives.
Burhan comes in by helicopter, Xinhua reported, landing at Khartoum International Airport. Xinhua says his was the first aircraft to land there since the war began. Then he goes to the palace, and Sudan TV films him walking through it, surrounded, Xinhua reported, by officers and soldiers of the unit tasked with securing it. An Al Jazeera photograph from that day carries the caption that he "gestures to soldiers inside the presidential palace." It is, he says, his first time inside the building in nearly two years.
And then the line, standing inside: "Khartoum is free, and the matter is over."
Now watch the choreography, because the record gives us enough of it. He does not walk in alone. The soldiers of the unit holding the building are around him: the men with the rifles become the frame of the picture. He gestures to them. The gesture runs from the commander to the troops, never the other way: that is the whole hierarchy in a single motion of the arm. The camera belongs to state television. The words are short enough to fit on a banner. The building is damaged, both its structures hit in the first fighting, and the damage is part of the picture too, because a damaged palace that has been taken back is a better picture than a palace that was never lost.
In the city around him the residents had their own version. Less than two weeks after Burhan's visit, NPR reached a Khartoum resident named Duaa Tariq, who told them: "We're smelling perfumes, people are wearing perfumes now, wearing very nice clothes." And: "I rode a bicycle and I went grocery shopping without hiding the money in my chest." Every status detail in those two sentences is a detail of recovered ordinariness: perfume, good clothes, cash carried where cash belongs. The general's status is the palace. The citizen's is a bicycle and a wallet. One of them makes the evening news, and both of them are true.
Now go west, to Darfur, to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, which the RSF and its allies made the seat of their own government: the Government of Peace and Unity, in the reporting usually called by the name of the alliance behind it, Tasis, whose charter is called the Sudan Founding Charter.
The founding had its own paperwork. A charter, signed in Nairobi in February 2025. A transitional constitution, adopted in March. A prime minister, Mohammed Hassan al-Ta'ishi, sworn in at the end of July. And then, on the last weekend of August 2025, the main event: Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known to everyone as Hemedti, commander of the Rapid Support Forces, sworn in as chairman of a fifteen-seat Presidential Council.
Look at the props. This is where the status man in me sits up.
The oath is administered by a chief justice: Ramadan Ibrahim Shemila, so named in the Sudan Times. A government that wishes to be taken for a government needs a judge before it needs anything else, because the judge is the proof that the thing has rules. Sworn alongside Hemedti is his deputy, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, plus regional governors, eight of them, one for each region the new constitution draws. The constitution has drawn the regions, and the governors exist to fill them.
And under Hemedti's hand: a Qur'an. Not just any Qur'an. The Sudan Times describes a manuscript written on gazelle-skin parchment, from before paper was common in the region, copied, local tradition holds, by a scribe from a family of Qur'an memorisers, from memory, while fasting, over a period of years; a book that has served in Darfur's official ceremonies and legal proceedings.
There it is! Gazelle skin! The single most extravagant status object in the whole war, and it is not a Land Cruiser and it is not a drone. It is an animal hide with the word of God on it in a hand that fasted while it wrote. What the object says is: we are older than Khartoum's paperwork. Burhan has the palace where Gordon fell. Hemedti answers with a book whose authority owes nothing to Khartoum: a book of Darfur's own courts and Darfur's own ceremonies, a book that belongs to Darfur. The status game is played in centuries.
And yet, and this is the detail I would trade the whole Qur'an for, Reuters, as carried by The New Arab, said it could not independently confirm where Hemedti actually was at the ceremony. He had "rarely been seen in Sudan since the start of a 28-month-long war." The man swearing to govern from Nyala, on Darfur's ceremonial book, before his own chief justice, was a man whose presence in Nyala could not be confirmed by Reuters. The props were all present and accounted for. The leading man, as far as the press could establish, was not.
The African Union's Peace and Security Council had said it "will not recognise any such government," and, by Wikipedia's summary of the record, most nations rejected it too. The ceremony went ahead anyway. Recognition, in this kind of contest, is the one prop you cannot make yourself.
There is a third kind of camera in this war, and it is not state television.
26 October 2025. The RSF takes El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, after a siege that began in May 2024. Human Rights Watch reports that the RSF "carried out mass killings of people fleeing, as well as sexual violence." Much of what the world saw of those days, the killers filmed themselves. France 24's verification team, working through geolocation and satellite imagery, catalogued the clips: pick-ups crammed with armed men speeding ahead of fleeing civilians; fighters parading through the streets; fighters posing at mass graves.
One man in particular. France 24 identifies him as Abu Lulu, also called Brigadier-General Al-Fatih Abdallah Idris. In one video he strikes a pose in front of a mass grave with his weapon. In another he executes a wounded prisoner who is begging for mercy, telling him, by France 24's translation, that he is "no one, you don't exist!" and firing five times.
I record that sentence because it has to be recorded and for no other reason. But notice what it is. It is a status sentence, the last and worst of them: the man with the rifle telling the man on the ground that he has no standing at all, not even the standing of existing. And the phone is there because the act was meant to be seen. These were not leaked clips. They were posted. The audience was part of the deed.
And then the institution answered in the same medium. After first denying it, France 24 reported, the RSF announced on its Telegram channel on 30 October that Abu Lulu had been arrested, and released video of him behind bars. A government-in-waiting cannot be seen to keep a man like that in its uniform, so it showed him in a cell. Statehood, here, is a second video posted to cancel the first.
By the summer of 2026 the two sides had stopped merely posing for the camera. Each was rehearsing, in earnest, the dull rituals that make a state a state, the ones nobody films for fun.
7 June 2026, Nyala. Hemedti, according to Darfur24, formally opens the first Sudanese Certificate examinations held under Tasis, at the Unity Secondary School for Girls. The exams had been postponed three days from their original Wednesday start so that more students could reach the centres. Hemedti says "the government attaches great importance to the education sector" and calls education "a key pillar in efforts to rebuild public institutions."
The Sudanese Certificate. Not the Darfur certificate, not the Tasis certificate. The name of the exam claims the whole country. A school-leaving exam is the most mundane status document a state issues, and therefore one of the most powerful: it decides who goes to university, who gets the government job, whose diploma a foreign embassy will accept. A rebel can seize a palace in a week. Seizing things will not make his certificate count anywhere else.
Five weeks later, the reply from the other side of the country, and it came in the other dull ritual, the court.
Sunday, 12 July 2026, Port Sudan. The Anti-Terrorism and Crimes Against the State Court sentences Hemedti to death in absentia, with his brothers Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo and Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, and thirteen others, among them the former RSF commander in West Darfur, Abdel Rahman Juma. The convictions, DNHR reports, were for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, committed in El Geneina; at their centre was the killing of the West Darfur governor Khamis Abakar, detained by RSF fighters and killed on 14 June 2023, shortly after he publicly accused the RSF of attacking civilians. The RSF has repeatedly denied allegations of genocide and other war crimes.
Put the two documents side by side, the exam paper and the death sentence. One government says: we examine your children. The other says: we sentence your chairman. Each is a claim to the monopoly of the official form, the stamped paper that only a real state can issue. The man sentenced to death was, as far as the record shows, nowhere near the courtroom, just as the press could not place him at his own oath. He keeps turning up in this war as a man much present on paper and hard to locate in person. On 28 August, according to the running chronicle of the year kept on Wikipedia, the army-led government lifted the curfew and the state of emergency that had stood in Khartoum since 2023. The palace government was coming home.
Which brings us back to the visa.
On 22 September 2026, France 24 reported, citing diplomatic sources, that the United States was refusing to give Burhan a visa for the General Assembly, where he was scheduled to speak on the Wednesday. A diplomatic source said Washington had conditioned the visa on his accepting a three-month truce; his government had rejected the truce on the ground that it would "only allow the RSF to regroup and attack." The State Department's spokesman, Tommy Pigott, said the US would "seek to raise the cost of continued conflict on all belligerents and the networks which fuel the conflict." The UN's spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said: "The secretary-general urges the host country to ensure that visas are issued in accordance with its obligations."
According to Responsible Statecraft, the proposal at issue was a 90-day ceasefire championed by Massad Boulos, President Trump's adviser on Arab and African affairs. And Boulos himself, talking to The National on 26 September, gave the exchange its plainest reading:
"We don't have Gen Al Burhan in New York. That was a clear move to indicate a lack of appreciation for their position."
Read that sentence the way you would read a seating plan. We don't have Gen Al Burhan in New York. The US did not say it had arrested him or sanctioned him. It said he was not in the room. The punishment was a seat, and the adviser chose to describe it as a seat.
That same Saturday the general was in Khartoum Stadium, telling the content creators he did not want a visa from any state.
And on Monday, 28 September, Sudan's Foreign Minister, Mohieldin Salim Ahmed Ibrahim, took the podium in New York in his chairman's place. According to UN News, he called the circumstances "deeply regrettable," invoked "the principle of sovereign equality among States" and the 1947 Headquarters Agreement, rejected "any attempt to impose solutions, dictates or external agendas upon our people," and described the world's silence over RSF attacks on civilians and medical facilities as "shameful, unethical and complicit."
Sovereign equality among States. There is the phrase the whole war turns on. Both men want it. Burhan's government speaks as if it holds it already and has just been insulted in its exercise. Hemedti swore an oath on a gazelle-skin Qur'an in order to get it. Neither has a picture that settles the matter, because the one room where that picture is taken is in New York, and this September the man who holds Sudan's seat was kept out of it.
Status detail is the method, but the method does not get the last word. The numbers do.
On 7 September 2026, UN News reported the UN human rights chief Volker Türk renewing his call to end the war: "There needs to be an immediate ceasefire, an end to foreign involvement, and a return to inclusive civilian rule." The same report counted more than six million people displaced inside Sudan and 4.5 million who had fled across its borders. It recorded drone strikes that killed 114 people, sixty of them children, at a kindergarten and a hospital in Kalogie, South Kordofan; and attacks by the army on the Ad-Da'ein Teaching Hospital that killed at least seventy. UN investigators found "reasonable grounds to believe that both the SAF and the RSF committed serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes." France 24's September report gave the number of dead since 2023 as more than 200,000. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2026 counted 24.6 million people in acute hunger, two million of them facing famine.
None of those people is in any of the pictures. A kindergarten in Kalogie has no palace, no gazelle skin, no stadium, no seat in New York. It had children in it, and it was struck.
At Khartoum Stadium on 26 September, the general made one more promise, reported by TAG Press: "My promise to the Sudanese people and martyrs is that this flag will never decline." And according to Sudan Horizon he told the athletes and the influencers: "Our goal is to cleanse all of Sudan — including Darfur — of this scum." Two days later, in New York, his foreign minister stood at the podium and read Sudan's speech in his place.
All opened and checked on 1 October 2026.
Tom Wolfe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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Written 1 October 2026 by an AI simulacrum, from the published record; the author was not present at any event described.
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