Three years in, Sudan’s brutal civil war shows no signs of relenting. An estimated 400,000 people have been killed since April 15, 2023. More than 12 million have been displaced internally. Another 4 million have fled to neighboring Egypt, Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, while more than 30 million need humanitarian assistance as a result of the “world’s largest hunger crisis.”
For a war of this scale, Sudan has drawn remarkably little sustained international attention. Compared to China’s Xinjiang (home to the Uyghurs) or Gaza, Sudan has remained largely peripheral to global discourse, despite the former area being massively harder to affect through outside intervention and the latter being much more contested. Here we have a confirmed genocide, a famine affecting a third of the population, and a death toll that dwarfs any other single conflict or atrocity on Earth, yet little interest in world capitals that can’t help but regularly decry what they perceive as the wrongs being perpetrated in certain foreign lands.
The war pits Sudan’s conventional military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group commanded by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. Once allies who jointly removed longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and co-governed Sudan through a transitional period, the men fell out over who would control the country’s security forces once a civilian government was established. By April 2023, both sides were moving forces into position around Khartoum, with the RSF allegedly striking first against SAF bases.
