United States-brokered efforts to end Sudan's war have run into new obstacles, after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces rejected a proposed withdrawal, casting it as a "surrender" rather than a step toward peace [1]. The rejection stalls a negotiating track that American mediation had been trying to advance.
The US mediator Boulos has been pushing a proposed 90-day truce as a way to pause the fighting and open space for talks [1]. A three-month halt would, if it held, let aid reach civilians and give negotiators time to work through the harder questions of who controls what territory.
The scale of civilian need is the reason the timing matters. The United Nations says 33.7 million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid, a figure that reflects a war which has driven mass displacement across the country [1]. Every week the fighting continues, that number of people waits on access a truce would help provide.
The sticking point is the withdrawal the RSF refuses. A demand that one side pull back from territory it holds reads, to that side, as conceding the war, which is why the RSF's leadership framed it as surrender. The gap between a withdrawal that mediators see as a confidence-building step and one the RSF sees as capitulation is what the 90-day truce proposal is trying to bridge.
