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Sudan, Africa’s third-largest country, is on the brink of its worst famine in decades. The country has been in the grip of a civil war that has lasted for more than 15 months, causing untold devastation and horror. The number of casualties is far from clear, but the US special envoy to the region recently suggested that around 150,000 people may have died since fighting between two rival warlords erupted last year. The UN now claims that around 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation. Western officials have likened what is happening to the 2011 famine in Somalia, where 250,000 people died, half of them children.
The devastating effects of the war are already immense. Sudan faces the world’s largest internal displacement crisis, with around 11 million people forced from their homes by fighting. It also faces the world’s largest education crisis, with most schools closed and around 19 million children unable to attend class. It also faces the world’s largest hunger crisis. According to UN agencies, an estimated 26.6 million people (more than half the population) are “food insecure” and 14 regions of the country have been declared “at risk of famine.”
Sudan is being torn apart by forces loyal to two former allies: Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a faction with roots in the Janjaweed militia’s genocidal campaign in the western Darfur region two decades ago. Far from reconciling, the two sides seem bent on further blooding their enemies as the war spreads across the country since it erupted in the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023.
They blame each other for the suffering inflicted on civilians, with numerous reports of massacres, gang rapes and other atrocities. Bombing and airstrikes have destroyed neighborhoods indiscriminately. There are also documented war crimes, notably the massacres of non-Arab ethnic groups in towns and cities occupied by the RSF and allied militias. Widespread looting and violence has devastated harvests in Sudan’s agricultural sector, and relief groups say it is extremely difficult to get aid into the country.
Washington Post reporter Katherine Howreld visited Sudan in June and saw the world’s largest displacement crisis firsthand. (Video: Katherine Howreld and Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)
A team of colleagues from The Washington Post recently toured five Sudanese cities and detailed the scale of the devastation. “In emergency wards, mothers used henna-smeared hands to fan the twig-like ribcages of babies struggling to breathe, while other parents spoke of artillery shells falling in their neighborhoods, killing their children as they slept in their beds,” they reported. “Prisoners and soldiers alike spoke of the bodies of young men shot in their faraway homes, rotting in the heat and tossed into stoneless graves.”
The warring parties have agreed to join new negotiations scheduled to take place in Switzerland next month, co-led by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. “The talks in Switzerland aim to end violence across the country, enable humanitarian access to all who need assistance, and establish strong monitoring and verification mechanisms to ensure the agreement is implemented,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement last week.
The conflict has been marked by multiple false dawns, with ceasefires and armistices lasting only days or even hours afterward. Aid groups warn that the Sudanese army (which represents the faction officially recognized by the UN as Sudan’s government) is disrupting the flow of vital food aid to RSF-controlled areas in the country’s west. Supplies that cross the border are often subject to diversion and looting, and the RSF’s rampage through Sudan’s breadbasket has contributed to food shortages.
Relief organizations lack both access to at-risk communities and the resources they need to help them. A donor conference in Paris in April raised about $2 billion in pledges for Sudan, but that’s just half of what the UN has requested, and promised funds have yet to be fully disbursed.
“In a study released last week, Mercy Corps said a quarter of children in central Darfur are so severely malnourished that they could soon die,” The New York Times reported. “Experts say only the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organisation, with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to scale up the emergency response. But without smooth access to the border, delivering aid is proving extremely difficult.”
Photojournalist Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi traveled to Darfur, Sudan, in February 2024 to report on hunger in one of the world’s largest displacement crises. (Video: Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi and Zoan Murphy/The Washington Post)
The war is intensifying due to conflicting geopolitical interests. [Sudanese military] “The RSF currently receives political and material support from Egypt, Iran and Ukraine,” said Ilhan Dahir of the United States Institute of Peace. “Meanwhile, the RSF is reportedly backed by the Russian mercenary group Wagner Group and the UAE, which has reportedly sent weapons to support Hemedti as part of efforts to ‘roll back Islamist influence’ in Sudan as part of its grand strategy in the region. Continued outside interference in Sudan could prolong the war.”
A report last week by human rights group Amnesty International documented a “constant influx of weapons” into the conflict. The group documented new weapons and ammunition being brought into Sudan “in large quantities” from a variety of countries, including China, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the UAE and Yemen, and then spread across the battlefield, including the murky Darfur region, which has been under a 20-year UN arms embargo.
“Our research makes clear that weapons entering Sudan are ending up in the hands of combatants allegedly violating international humanitarian and human rights law,” Amnesty’s Deprose Muchena said in a statement. “It is clear that the existing arms embargo, which currently applies only to the Darfur region, is completely insufficient and needs to be updated and extended to cover the whole of Sudan. This is a humanitarian crisis that cannot be ignored.”
