Sudan’s Recent History
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Sudan
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Janjaweed
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War in Darfur
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The article references the 2003-2005 genocidal campaign in Darfur and its connection to the current conflict, but readers would benefit from understanding the full historical context of this region's humanitarian crises, the international response, and how the Janjaweed evolved into the RSF
Follow a line south and west from the Gaza Strip, continue through Egypt, and you’ll end up in another place where a genocide is in progress. It’s one we don’t hear much about in the United States, probably because it’s happening in an African nation, one of those places Donald Trump refers to as “shithole countries.” (Interestingly, another of the places he included under that designation during his first term in office was El Salvador, which is run by his new BDF—Best Dictator Friend—Nayib Bukele. Nothing like providing access to your national torture center to get you back on Trump’s A-list, I guess.)
The place I’m talking about is the nation directly south of Egypt and across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia: Sudan. It’s big—the 15th-largest country in the world and the third-largest in Africa—with an area a quarter the size of the United States and around 50 million inhabitants. Its name derives from the Arabic for “Land of the Blacks.” The population is 70% Arab, with the remainder being mostly of northern and eastern African descent.
Right now, about 45% of those people, 21.2 million of them, “are facing the highest levels of acute food insecurity,” according to the UN’s World Food Program. Famine has been confirmed in at least two Sudanese cities, with 20 other areas on the verge of it. And the situation is only expected to worsen next year, as what food stocks exist dry up and the fighting that has ravaged the country since 2019 continues. At least 12 million people have been displaced. To put that in perspective: compared to the ongoing genocide two countries to the north, the number of starving people in Sudan is 10 times the entire population of Gaza, while the number of displaced Sudanese is almost six times that number.
In addition to presenting the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, I suspect the situation in Sudan holds an important warning for the movement opposing Donald Trump in this country. But more on that later.
Where Is the Coverage?
Like many people, I’ve spent the years since Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel watching the buildings fall down and bodies pile up in Gaza, even as I kept wishing that the US media would do a
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