On March 6, the World Food Program issued a warning that more than 25 million people across Sudan, South Sudan and Chat were teetering on the edge of famine, in what is the “largest hunger crisis” in the world.
Nearly 10 months have passed since fighting began in Sudan, between the military chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known by his nom de guerre Hemedti, the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary.
The conflict has killed over 13,000 and displaced nearly 8 million people, also creating the world’s most severe displacement crisis.
Both the military and the RSF have resorted to indiscriminate bombing and artillery shelling, making large tracts of the country inaccessible to aid workers. The current civil war carries echoes of the humanitarian disaster that unfolded in the ethnic conflict in Darfur two decades ago in the west of Sudan.
The Sudanese military has also suspended the cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid from neighboring Chad, accusing the RSF of smuggling weapons and supplies disguised as aid.
Human Rights Watch has accused both the Sudanese military and the RSF for displaying an “utter disregarding for the laws of war” through the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in the conflict.
Even though the fighting began in the capital city of Khartoum, it has spread to Darfur in the west, and to Port Sudan in the east, where the Sudanese military has set up a de facto capital. The RSF managed to quickly take control of most of Khartoum when the war began, and has strongholds in the cities of Bahri and Omdurman, and in the western regions of Darfur and Kordofan. Burhan’s SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) controls most areas in the east of the country.
The roots of the conflict
This battle for political power between two generals traces its origins to the machinations of Sudan’s former strongman dictator Omar al-Bashir.
The RSF was formed by formalizing the infamously violent Janjaweed militias that Bashir had empowered to do his bidding in the Darfur conflict over 20 years ago.
After nearly 30 years in power, al-Bashir was ousted in a military coup by the Sudanese military and the RSF, and even though a civilian transitional government was formed, it too was displaced in a second coup in 2021. The power struggle between Burhan’s SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and Hemedti’s RSF quickly devolved into what is now widely being described as a civil war.
With the international community’s attention firmly fixated on the war in Ukraine and Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza, the conflict in Sudan has faded out of view for most, despite there being no signs of the fighting having abated.
A mounting humanitarian disaster
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk has denounced the stories of “death, suffering and despair” pouring out of Sudan. A UN report has detailed multiple indiscriminate attacks being carried out by both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Refugees fleeing to Chad have described ethnically driven killings in Darfur, especially from the state capital of El Geneina. Reuters reports that the RSF has indiscriminately targeted the Masalit ethnic group in Ardamata, a district in El Geneina in what has been described as “textbook ethnic cleansing.”
Other accounts have detailed the killing of young men en masse, and rampant sexual violence against women and children. Sudan was also hit with a widespread internet outage in February, which was blamed on the RSF.
Numerous attempts at a ceasefire have failed, and with the SAF controlling the port in the east, there is no guarantee of humanitarian aid and supplies reaching the population inland.
South Sudan is also on the verge of a crisis, as its economy and oil sector have been widely disrupted by the war in the north.