Egypt and Ethiopia are fighting a proxy war inside Sudan, which makes trusting each other over a shared river a much harder task.
Thursday 30/07/2026
An Ethiopian flag flutters in the wind next to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), built along the Blue Nile, in Guba, Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia.
For most of July, the Blue Nile retreated to an extent Sudanese along its banks hadn’t seen in years. Sandbanks appeared in Khartoum. Pumps at the Al-Salha water station south of Omdurman were left stranded above the waterline, cutting drinking water to whole neighbourhoods.
Near Dongola, in Sudan’s Northern state, farmers watched the river withdraw two and a half kilometres from fields that had fed the local vegetable market for generations.
Sudan’s ministry of agriculture and irrigation was quick to tie the receding waters in the Blue Nile directly to reduced water releases from Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) upstream.
Egypt’s own water ministry has not reported any drying rivers, water shortages, or crisis on Egyptian soil during this period, quite the opposite. Lake Nasser was so full in late 2025 that Egypt had to open emergency spillways to release surplus water into the desert.
But Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty did weigh in on what happened to Sudan. Speaking at a Cairo press conference, Abdelatty said Ethiopia, “as an upstream country, cannot act unilaterally,” accusing Addis Ababa of managing the dam in a “politicised” manner and linking Ethiopia’s water retention, undertaken, he said, without coordination to Sudan’s falling levels.
This stance fits a pattern that’s held for over a decade, where Egypt has built a substantial share of its regional foreign policy (with alliances with Eritrea, Somalia, and others aimed at isolating Ethiopia diplomatically) around treating GERD as an existential threat.
What actually happened on Sudan’s Blue Nile, as independent experts have explained, is that the prior hydrological year had been unusually abundant, with river levels so consistently high that Sudan’s own pumping stations weren’t calibrated for the ordinary seasonal dip that eventually arrived. That dip coincided with the start of Sudan’s own irrigation season, a separate decline in the White Nile that has nothing to do with Ethiopia at all, and a reduction in GERD’s releases that, by this account, stayed within a fairly normal range rather than an extreme cutoff.
Several ordinary factors converged at once, GERD included, and independent engineers see no evidence this reflects Sudan entering an actual drought.
Indeed, the wider problem between Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Cairo at its core could be explained with a simple analogy. Imagine three neighbours sharing a single water tank that sits on the property of just one of them. That neighbour (Ethiopia in this case) decides how much water flows out to the other two.
The other two can measure how much water arrives at their own homes, but they have no independent way to check how much was in the tank to begin with, or exactly how the release valve was set that day. All they can do is infer backward from what shows up. That’s roughly Sudan and Egypt’s situation with GERD.
There is no data-sharing mechanism between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt as a three-way group. The trilateral talks—dragging on through repeated rounds over the better part of a decade— that might have produced one broke down, with Egypt’s own water resources minister confirming Cairo formally suspended negotiations in December 2023, accusing Ethiopia of “backtracking on agreements and stalling.”
The last trilateral attempt was the 2015 declaration, signed by all three heads of state. It contained a statement of shared goals rather than binding operating rules. It contained no fill schedules, minimum releases, or data-sharing obligations: the day-to-day mechanics a real coordination system actually needs.
As a result, a decade-plus dispute over a shared river, and the three countries most affected by it still have no binding framework governing how it’s filled, operated, or communicated about. Nearly everything else in this dispute, from the mutual suspicion, and the dueling narratives, grows out of that single unresolved gap.
To complicate the picture further, a document later obtained by Al Jazeera revealed that Sudan and Ethiopia signed a detailed bilateral technical agreement on October 26, 2022, in Khartoum. It was signed by Ethiopia’s delegation head, Seleshi Bekele, and Sudan’s, Professor Seif Eldin Hamad Abdalla, and it sat unreported for nearly three years, only surfacing via a document Al Jazeera itself described as “secret,” in September 2025, the same month Ethiopia officially inaugurated the dam.
In other words, Sudan quietly built its own direct information channel with Ethiopia, independent of Egypt, at a level of technical detail nothing in the trilateral process has ever matched.
That agreement commits Ethiopia to filling the reservoir only during the rainy season (July–October), sets a permanent operating band for the dam’s water level, guarantees a minimum downstream release, and requires daily data exchange on water levels and releases at both GERD and Sudan’s own Roseires dam, with named contact points in each country’s water ministry, plus mandatory emergency notification if either side detects a problem or if GERD suffers a sudden unplanned shutdown.
It’s unclear from the public record whether this joint technical committee has kept meeting regularly, or whether the information it’s supposed to generate has actually been reaching the people who decide how to run Sudan’s own reservoirs. A former head of that very committee raised exactly this question publicly in July 2026, essentially asking, in print, whether his own former institution had lapsed.
It likely did. Relations between Sudan and Ethiopia deteriorated sharply this year, after Sudan accused Ethiopia of complicity in drone strikes on Khartoum’s airport and recalled its ambassador — an accusation compounded by the Sudanese government and independent reporting that Ethiopia was hosting bases used by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Sudan’s army’s battlefield rival. Ethiopia answered by revoking the credentials of Sudan’s own ambassador-designate.
A quiet technical committee is hard to keep alive when the two foreign ministries are expelling each other’s diplomats.
Solving the Nile crisis more durably among its three main players would require exactly the kind of sustained, verifiable trust that Sudan’s war has made increasingly difficult to build. Egypt is the Sudanese army’s most vocal international backer. Ethiopia, for its part, has been secretly training thousands of RSF fighters at a camp near the Sudan border, according to a Reuters investigation. The construction of that camp is reportedly tied to a serving Ethiopian army general, and is feeding recruits into the fight for Sudan’s Blue Nile state.
In effect, Egypt and Ethiopia are fighting a proxy war inside Sudan, which makes trusting each other over a shared river a much harder task.
Adding to the difficulties is the institutional hollowing-out the war has caused inside Sudan itself. Government resources are consumed by the front lines; many civil servants have been displaced, and government operations were further disrupted by the relocation to Port Sudan and back to Khartoum since its recapture in March 2025.
And given the wider reshuffling of alliances brought on by Sudan’s civil war, the quiet coordination Sudan and Ethiopia once managed in 2022 is now almost impossible to imagine, as a result of Sudan’s army having grown so dependent on Cairo for its survival.
When the 2015 Declaration of Principles was signed, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi crowned the occasion with a line that aged badly: “We have chosen cooperation, and to trust one another for the sake of development.”
Eleven years later, that trust is nowhere to be found.
Written ByElfadil Ibrahim
Elfadil Ibrahim is a writer and analyst focusing on Sudanese and Arab politics.