Sudanese civil war (2023–present)

Based on Wikipedia: Sudanese civil war (2023–present)

Twelve million people have fled their homes. Twenty-five million face starvation. Entire cities lie in ruins. And most of the world has barely noticed.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been tearing itself apart in what the United Nations now calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis. This isn't a conflict between rebels and a government, or between ethnic groups fighting for territory. It's something stranger and more terrible: a war between two factions of the same military government, former allies who once seized power together, now locked in a battle that has turned Africa's third-largest country into a wasteland.

Two Generals, One Throne

To understand how Sudan arrived at this catastrophe, you need to understand two men.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan commands the Sudanese Armed Forces, known by their acronym SAF. These are the conventional military: army, navy, air force, the presidential guard. Al-Burhan represents the old order, the traditional power structure that has ruled Sudan, with brief interruptions, since independence in 1956.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, commands something entirely different. The Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, grew out of the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s. If you've heard of Sudan before this war, you probably heard about Darfur, where government-backed Arab militias slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people from non-Arab ethnic groups. The RSF is the institutionalized version of those militias, given official status, government funding, and a veneer of legitimacy.

These two men worked together to overthrow Sudan's dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, during the popular uprising known as the Sudanese Revolution. They worked together again in 2021 to seize power from the civilian transitional government that had briefly given Sudanese people hope for democracy. They shared power in a military junta, each controlling his own armed force, each eyeing the other with increasing suspicion.

The arrangement was never going to last.

The Spark

The immediate cause of the war was a seemingly technical dispute: how quickly should the RSF be integrated into the regular army?

The army wanted it done in two years. The RSF insisted on ten. Behind this timeline disagreement lay an existential question. Integration would mean disbanding the RSF as a separate force, folding its fighters into units commanded by army officers. For Hemedti, this meant losing everything. His power, his autonomy, his gold mines in Darfur, his independent foreign relationships. He would go from being one of the two most powerful men in Sudan to being a subordinate general in someone else's army.

By early 2023, RSF forces were building up in Khartoum, the capital. Negotiations dragged on. On April 11th, RSF units deployed near the city of Merowe and refused government orders to withdraw. On April 15th, they attacked.

The RSF struck SAF bases across the country simultaneously, including Khartoum's international airport. They captured the state television headquarters. They closed bridges and roads. And they went hunting for al-Burhan himself, attempting to capture or kill the head of state in the opening hours of what Hemedti apparently hoped would be a swift coup.

It didn't work. Al-Burhan survived, though his headquarters was besieged. The quick victory Hemedti sought turned into a grinding war that has now lasted more than two years.

A Nation Divided

The fighting quickly spread beyond the capital.

Khartoum, a city of five million people, became a battlefield. The city is actually three cities that grew together: Khartoum proper, Omdurman across the White Nile, and Bahri to the north. For months, different neighborhoods changed hands as RSF technicals (pickup trucks mounted with heavy weapons) battled army tanks and the air force bombed its own capital.

In Darfur, the war took on an even darker character. The RSF's roots as an Arab militia force meant that its advance through the region reignited the ethnic violence of two decades earlier. In cities like Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, RSF fighters and allied Arab militias systematically targeted the Masalit people. Survivors described executions, mass graves, entire neighborhoods emptied at gunpoint. The United States government would eventually determine, in January 2025, that what happened constituted genocide.

This is important to understand: the RSF is not just another military faction. Its history is inseparable from ethnic cleansing. Its fighters include men who participated in the original Darfur genocide. When they captured territory, they didn't just defeat enemy soldiers. They targeted civilians based on ethnicity, looted homes, burned villages, and committed sexual violence on a massive scale.

The Collapse of Everything

War is always devastating. But Sudan's war has been uniquely catastrophic because it destroyed a country that was already fragile.

Sudan gained independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956. In the nearly seven decades since, it has experienced twenty attempted coups, more than any other African nation. It has endured two civil wars against its southern regions that killed 1.5 million people and eventually led to South Sudan's independence in 2011. It has weathered the Darfur genocide. It has been ruled by Islamist dictators, military juntas, and briefly, very briefly, by civilians. Through all of this, its institutions remained weak, its infrastructure underdeveloped, its people among the poorest on Earth.

The current war didn't just damage this fragile country. It shattered it.

Hospitals closed. Power grids failed. The telecommunications company MTN shut down internet services; by late April 2023, Sudan was effectively offline. International shipping companies like Maersk paused operations. Food supplies dwindled. Schools closed. The government relocated from Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, abandoning the capital to the fighting.

By August 2025, approximately 25 million people were experiencing severe food insecurity. To put that in perspective, Sudan's population is about 48 million. More than half the country was going hungry, and in several regions, full-scale famine had been officially declared. Nearly four million children were acutely malnourished. More than 770,000 children faced imminent risk of death from starvation.

The World Looks Away

Foreign powers have not been absent from Sudan's war. They've been present in all the worst ways.

The United Arab Emirates has been the RSF's most significant backer, shipping weapons despite international sanctions. The UAE officially denies this support, but the evidence has become overwhelming: Chinese-manufactured weapons have been traced through UAE supply chains to RSF forces in Darfur. The Emirates apparently sees Hemedti as an ally who could bring Sudan into its sphere of influence, a prize worth the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding on the ground.

Russia's Wagner Group, the private military company now renamed after the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, had established relationships with the RSF before the war. The RSF's gold mines in Darfur were part of this connection. Sudan's gold has been a source of revenue for various armed groups, and Wagner saw opportunity in the chaos.

The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and European Union have imposed sanctions on individuals and entities connected to both sides. But sanctions are a weak tool against a war driven by local power struggles and enabled by regional actors willing to ignore international norms.

What's most striking is the absence of sustained international attention. Sudan's war has created one of the largest displacement crises in modern history. More than 8.8 million people have been displaced within the country. More than 3.5 million have fled as refugees to neighboring Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, and beyond. The scale of suffering rivals or exceeds crises that dominated global headlines. Yet Sudan remains a story that struggles for attention.

The Roots Go Deep

Understanding why this war happened requires understanding the strange institution that made it possible: the RSF itself.

Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who ruled Sudan from 1989 to 2019, had a problem common to authoritarian leaders. He needed military force to stay in power, but he feared that the military itself might overthrow him. Military coups are, after all, how most Sudanese governments have ended.

His solution was what political scientists call "coup-proofing": creating multiple armed forces that could counterbalance each other. If the army grew too powerful or too ambitious, the RSF could check it. If the RSF threatened him, the army would defend him. By keeping several lions in his den, Bashir hoped none would feel confident enough to attack him.

In 2013, Bashir formally reorganized the Janjaweed militias into the RSF and placed them under Hemedti's command. He gave Hemedti gold mines as patronage. He sent RSF forces abroad to fight in Yemen and Libya, giving them experience and equipment. By 2017, a new law made the RSF an "independent security force," no longer formally part of the military chain of command.

This worked for Bashir until it didn't. In 2019, facing massive protests, he ordered the security forces to crush the demonstrators. They complied at first. The Khartoum massacre of June 2019 killed over a hundred protesters and involved both SAF and RSF forces. But eventually, the military and the RSF calculated that Bashir was more of a liability than a protector, and they removed him together.

What Bashir created to protect himself became the very thing that destroyed Sudan's chance at peace.

The War Itself

Military conflicts are usually described in terms of battles won and lost, territory gained and surrendered. Sudan's war has followed a rough pattern, but the human reality is messier than any map can show.

In the first months, the RSF seemed to have the upper hand. They controlled large parts of Khartoum. They swept through Darfur, capturing city after city. By late 2023, they controlled most of Sudan's western regions and had made significant advances in Kordofan and Gezira states.

The SAF, meanwhile, relied on its air power and its control of the country's east, including Port Sudan, which became the de facto capital. The army bombed RSF positions from the air, sometimes hitting civilian areas. It maintained control of the Ethiopian border, through which it could receive supplies.

Various rebel groups complicated the picture further. The Sudan Liberation Movement, a Darfuri rebel group that had fought against Bashir's government, split between factions supporting different sides. The Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North, remnants of the old southern rebellion now fighting in areas that remained part of Sudan after South Sudan's independence, initially attacked SAF positions before the situation evolved.

By early 2024, the SAF began to regain momentum. It made progress in Omdurman. By March 2025, it had retaken Khartoum itself, including the presidential palace and the airport. But in October 2025, the RSF captured El Fasher, the last SAF stronghold in Darfur, completing its control over the western region.

Ceasefires have been announced and violated. International mediation efforts, including talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, have produced declarations but not peace. The war continues.

What Death Looks Like

The numbers are almost too large to comprehend.

At least 61,000 people have died in Khartoum State alone, and that counts only confirmed deaths. Of those, about 26,000 were killed directly by violence. The rest died from the collapse of everything that keeps people alive: hospitals, food supplies, clean water, shelter.

Thousands more remain missing. Mass graves have been discovered in Darfur. Targeted massacres, primarily attributed to the RSF and allied militias, have killed entire communities.

Sexual violence has been widespread, used as a weapon of war. Refugees have been raped in camps. Women and girls have been assaulted during looting. The systematic nature of this violence suggests it is not incidental to the conflict but integral to the RSF's methods.

The overall death toll, encompassing violence, starvation, and disease, will likely never be known with precision. In a country where civil registration barely functions and entire regions are inaccessible to outside observers, many deaths go uncounted. What we know is certainly an undercount of the truth.

The Children

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Sudan's crisis is what it means for the youngest victims.

Nearly four million children are acutely malnourished. Acute malnutrition means their bodies are consuming themselves, breaking down muscle tissue to survive. More than 770,000 are at imminent risk of death, meaning that without immediate intervention, they will likely die within weeks or months.

For those who survive, the consequences will last lifetimes. Severe childhood malnutrition causes permanent cognitive damage. Children who don't get enough nutrition during critical developmental windows never fully recover. They have lower IQs, worse health outcomes, shorter lives. An entire generation of Sudanese children is being shaped by this war, and the shaping is being done by hunger.

Schools across much of the country have closed. Education, that slow accumulation of human capital that might someday help rebuild the country, has simply stopped for millions of children. They are growing up in displacement camps, in hiding, in flight. Their classrooms are rubble.

Why It Matters Beyond Sudan

Sudan's collapse sends ripples across an already unstable region.

The millions of refugees fleeing the country strain neighbors that have their own crises. Chad, one of the world's poorest countries, has absorbed hundreds of thousands. Egypt, dealing with economic troubles and political tensions, faces Sudanese refugees arriving at its southern border. South Sudan, barely a teenager as a nation and fresh from its own civil war, watches anxiously as violence spills across the boundary.

The war threatens the Nile. Sudan sits astride the great river that gives life to Egypt. Any disruption to Sudan's portion of the Nile basin affects downstream countries. The Blue Nile, which joins the White Nile at Khartoum to form the main river, flows through active war zones.

The precedent matters too. If the RSF succeeds in holding power despite committing genocide, despite international sanctions, despite the condemnation of the world community, what lesson does that teach other armed groups? That atrocity works, if you're willing to be brutal enough for long enough?

The Shape of Failure

Sudan's war is a story of compounding failures.

The failure of coup-proofing, which created the very monster it was meant to prevent. The failure of the democratic transition, sabotaged by the same generals who were supposed to oversee it. The failure of international engagement, which produced talks and declarations but not peace. The failure of the international humanitarian system, which cannot operate effectively in a country where aid workers are threatened and supplies are looted.

It's also a failure of attention. The world has limited capacity to care about multiple crises simultaneously, and Sudan has been crowded out by conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere. This is not a criticism of people who care about those conflicts. It's an observation about how human attention works and how some suffering becomes visible while other suffering remains hidden.

The Sudanese people deserve better than to be forgotten. They have endured decades of dictatorship, ethnic cleansing, economic collapse, and now this war. They rose up in 2019, risking their lives for the chance at democracy. They were betrayed by their own military, not once but twice. And now they are dying by the tens of thousands while the world's attention drifts elsewhere.

What Comes Next

As of late 2025, the war continues with no clear end in sight.

The SAF controls the east, including Port Sudan and the Red Sea coast. The RSF dominates Darfur and parts of central Sudan. Khartoum has been fought over, destroyed, and partially recaptured. Neither side appears capable of achieving total victory. Neither side seems interested in genuine peace negotiations.

The humanitarian situation will likely worsen. Famine typically peaks during the dry season when food stores run out. Aid access remains limited by insecurity, bureaucratic obstacles, and deliberate interference. Even if fighting stopped tomorrow, the infrastructure to feed people, treat the sick, and shelter the displaced has been destroyed.

The international community will probably continue its pattern of statements and sanctions, which have done little to change the calculations of either side. The UAE will likely continue supporting the RSF while denying it. Regional powers will position themselves to benefit from whatever emerges from the wreckage.

And millions of Sudanese will continue to suffer, to flee, to starve, to die, in a war that much of the world has decided not to see.

Remembering What's at Stake

Sudan is not just a crisis. It's 48 million individual human beings.

They're farmers in Darfur who watched their villages burn. They're professors in Khartoum who fled with nothing but what they could carry. They're children who don't understand why they're hungry, why they're walking, why the adults are crying. They're mothers trying to keep their families alive in displacement camps where disease spreads and food runs out.

Each of the statistics in this essay represents someone's parent, someone's child, someone's friend. The scale of the numbers makes this hard to hold in mind. Twelve million displaced. Twenty-five million hungry. Sixty-one thousand dead in one state alone. The human brain struggles to process suffering at this scale. We turn away because it's too much.

But turning away is what allows these things to continue. The RSF commits genocide in part because it calculates that the world won't care enough to stop it. The UAE supplies weapons because it believes the costs will never outweigh the benefits. Attention is not sufficient to solve such a crisis, but inattention is sufficient to enable it.

Sudan's war is a catastrophe. It's also a test of whether the international community has any meaningful commitment to the principles it claims to uphold. So far, the answer has been discouraging. But the war isn't over. Neither is the test.