Sudan's Popular Congress Party and Abdel Wahid's SLM agree to widen war-end talks

Sudan's Popular Congress Party and the Sudan Liberation Movement faction led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur said on Monday they will keep talking and will widen consultations on how to end the war. The joint statement followed a meeting in Addis Ababa. Both groups said they support civilian anti-war forces that want a full political settlement, and both said the National Congress Party and its front organisations should stay outside that process.

The wording matters because Sudanese talks keep breaking on the same two exclusions. Forces around the Sudanese Armed Forces refuse to treat the Rapid Support Forces as a political actor. Opposition coalitions refuse to let the old Islamist party back in. Abdel Wahid's movement has already walked away from an Addis document this year when the text did not bar the former regime in clear language. Monday's statement restates that bar.

The war that started in April 2023 between the army and the RSF is in its fourth year. Cities have been emptied. Famine declarations have come and gone in Darfur and Kordofan. Outside mediators, including a five-party international track that met in Addis in June, have produced papers that die when the invitation list is read aloud. Somoud, the civilian coalition associated with Abdalla Hamdok, wants a Sudanese-owned dialogue and the same NCP exclusion. The Democratic Bloc has been more willing to sit with army-aligned parties and less willing to treat the RSF's political vehicle as a counterpart.

Abdel Wahid has spent most of the last two decades outside Sudan, arguing that Darfur's war never ended and that Khartoum's elites recycle themselves under new names. The Popular Congress Party is an Islamist split from the old ruling current, not the NCP itself. An alliance between those two is not a mass movement. It is a signal that two organisations with different histories now agree on a process design: Sudanese talks, civilians in the room, NCP out.

Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has spent the northern summer meeting Democratic Bloc figures and talking about an internal dialogue of his own. That track has a different guest list. If both tracks run, Sudan will have two conversations that cannot recognise each other's outcomes. If they are forced together, the invitation fight returns on day one.

Monday's statement does not stop a drone or open a road. It adds one more signed paragraph to a stack of signed paragraphs. The test is whether the next Addis or Nairobi meeting produces a single list of participants that Abdel Wahid, Somoud and the army can all read without walking out. Until that list exists, the war's fourth year will be measured in displacement figures, not in communiques.