Sudan, the forgotten war

On 15 April 2023, at dawn, Khartoum awoke to the sound of shelling. Explosions echoed through the streets of the Sudanese capital, from the upmarket neighbourhoods in the north to the working-class suburbs in the south. Columns of black smoke rose above the city of five million inhabitants, the former junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, once a symbol of Sudan's transition to democracy. That morning, two men who had shared power at the head of a military junta since 2019 decided to settle their differences with weapons. On one side was General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the regular army that has ruled the country almost uninterruptedly since independence in 1956. On the other was General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, known as "Hemedti", commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary militia descended from the infamous Janjaweed of Darfur.

In less than 72 hours, war broke out across the capital. What many had believed to be a temporary barracks dispute would, within a few months, become the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet. Nearly two and a half years later, Sudan officially has more than 15 million displaced persons, the largest exodus in the world, and some 30 million people in need of urgent assistance, more than half of its total population. Famine, officially declared in ten areas of the country, is spreading inexorably. Death tolls vary depending on the source, with the highest estimates reaching 150,000 in a country where "those who could have counted the dead are themselves dead or displaced," as a Yale University researcher bitterly summed up.

What is happening in Sudan, however, is not just another civil war on a continent that has seen too many. It is a conflict that superimposes deep historical divisions – ethnic, tribal and regional – on an international geopolitical competition of rare intensity. The United Arab Emirates, Russia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and even Ukraine: no fewer than ten foreign powers are fighting each other through militias and drones on Sudanese soil. Meanwhile, the world looks the other way. Overshadowed by the noise of the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza and tensions in the South China Sea, the Sudanese drama struggles to find its place in the news. One of the world's most serious crises remains, for the most part, a forgotten war.