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 agreed on Monday in Addis Ababa to keep talking and to widen consultations on ending the war. A joint statement said the meeting took place under a political and humanitarian emergency that has run since fighting began in April 2023. Both sides said a comprehensive peace, reached through a Sudanese-Sudanese dialogue, was the strategic path, and that the National Congress Party and its fronts should be kept out of the political process.

The Popular Congress Party sent a delegation to sit with Abdel Wahid. The two organisations have met before in the same city. Monday's text adds an explicit endorsement of civilian anti-war groups that want a stop to the fighting and a democratic transition, and it repeats the exclusion of the former ruling Islamist party. That exclusion is the fault line that broke earlier Addis drafts. In June, consultations under an international quintet stalled when a proposed final document treated inclusivity as a rule except for the National Congress Party and the Islamic Movement. Abdel Wahid's SLM refused to sign a text with the Democratic Bloc because the Bloc would not accept a hard ban on those groups. The SLM called them a terrorist organisation and said letting them back in would reward the war.

The war itself is a fight between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces that has emptied cities, split the state and produced mass displacement. Parallel tracks already exist: army-aligned civilians who will not sit with the RSF or its Tasis political vehicle; opposition coalitions such as Sumoud under Abdalla Hamdok that will sit in a civilian process but want Islamists barred; and armed movements such as Abdel Wahid's, based historically in Darfur, that treat both the RSF and the old party as illegitimate. Monday's statement does not close those gaps. It aligns two of the civilian-adjacent organisations on a process design that writes the National Congress Party out.

Addis Ababa remains the default room because Ethiopia can host without being a party and because the African Union and outside envoys already use it. A widened consultation only matters if it pulls in the army's political allies or the RSF's, or both. Nothing in Monday's communique says that has happened. What it does say is that the Popular Congress Party and Abdel Wahid will keep meeting, will back civilian anti-war work, and will treat the old party's absence as a condition rather than a talking point.

Four years into the war, that is a positioning document. The test is whether the next Addis round includes a force that actually holds territory. Until it does, the statement is an agreement about who may not enter a room that has not yet been built.