A chronicle of collapse and international neglect in Sudan

Two years into a war that has gutted a nation and scattered its people across borders, Sudan has become the scene of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis — and perhaps its most ignored.
What began as a power struggle between two generals has metastasized into a devastating civil war marked by ethnic massacres and the deliberate destruction of urban centers. As the dust settles over the ruins of Khartoum, and famine tightens its grip on Darfur, one thing is clear: Sudan is bleeding while the world watches in silence.
In 2019, the ouster of President Omar Bashir after three decades of autocracy offered Sudan a brief glimmer of hope for the ascent of democracy. Those hopes were extinguished in 2021 when Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, respectively the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, hijacked the transition and seized power for themselves. In April 2023, their uneasy alliance collapsed into open warfare. What followed was not just a military conflict but the systematic unraveling of a country of 46 million people.
The statistics read like a catalog of human catastrophe. More than 15 million people have been forcibly displaced, a figure that dwarfs the effects of the civil war in Syria and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. More than half of Sudan’s population, 30.4 million people, now requires humanitarian assistance. At least 25 million are facing a food crisis, with 750,000 on the edge of famine. In a camp outside Al-Fasher, 13 children die every day from hunger and disease.
These numbers are not projections or worst-case estimates. They are today’s reality, unfolding in real time.
The RSF, originally spawned from the Janjaweed militias that ravaged Darfur in the 2000s, has revived its genocidal tactics, with chilling precision. In West Darfur entire towns have been emptied. Men and boys, infants included, have been murdered on ethnic grounds.
Women have been systematically targeted, with survivors reporting that their attackers jeered at them, using slurs and threats of forced pregnancies to produce “enemy” children. The rampant use of gender-based violence has not been incidental; it is a tactical choice, deployed to humiliate, destabilize, and ethnically reengineer.
If the RSF has committed war crimes, the SAF has not emerged with a clean reputation either. Its strategy of recapturing territory has relied heavily on scorched-earth tactics. In Khartoum, artillery and airstrikes have reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. The capital’s airport is unusable, hospitals have been flattened, and cultural institutions looted. In its efforts to claim control, the army effectively annihilated the very infrastructure that once made Khartoum a functioning metropolis.
Now, 80 percent of health facilities in conflict zones are out of service. At least 100 attacks on medical centers have been documented. Sudan’s health system, once one of the most developed in the region, has collapsed entirely. Water and electricity infrastructure has disintegrated. In major cities, residents go months without running water, drawing instead from the Nile or shallow wells contaminated by disease. Cholera, malaria, dengue fever, and measles are spreading unchecked. More than 15 million people now have no access to basic healthcare. 

Mass displacement has emptied towns and cities.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

The children of Sudan are being raised in this furnace. Nearly every school in the country has shut down. At the peak of the war, 19 million children were out of school. Before the conflict, 7 million were already missing from classrooms. Now, an entire generation has been severed from education and structure, which are key defenses against radicalization, recruitment, and despair. These children have witnessed atrocities, lost parents, and fled burning homes. They are traumatized, uneducated, and unmoored — conditions that will haunt Sudan for decades to come.
In Darfur, Kordofan, and other provinces, mass displacement has emptied towns and cities. A slow exodus continues toward Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. The camps for the homeless grow by the day, yet the funding for them shrinks. Last year, the UN requested $2.6 billion in international aid for Sudan. Barely 48 percent of that amount materialized. No peacekeeping forces have been deployed. No airlifts of food or medicine have captured international attention. The silence has been deafening.
The global response has been not only inadequate but shamefully indifferent. Sudan is not without geopolitical relevance — it has gold, oil, and access to the Red Sea — but its crisis lacks the immediacy of those that stir the Western conscience.
There is no threat to NATO, no terror group making headlines, no ideological foe to defeat. When Russia invades Ukraine or war erupts in Gaza, diplomatic corridors spring to life and resources flow overnight. In Sudan, they trickle. If they arrive at all.
International diplomacy has become a theater of impotence. Multiple ceasefire agreements collapse within days. African-led peace plans were ignored, while the UN hosted meetings devoid of Sudanese representatives. A recent summit in London featured 20 foreign ministers but neither of the warring factions.
Everyone is talking about Sudan but no one is talking to the men with guns.
Sudan’s descent is not only a moral failure, it is a strategic one. A collapsed Sudan could ignite a chain reaction across an already brittle region: more refugees, more arms trafficking, more radicalization. The longer the war drags on, the more it will cost to repair, not only in dollars but in social cohesion, institutional viability, and human potential.
Rebuilding a hospital is hard. Rebuilding trust between neighbors who participated in mutual atrocities could very well prove impossible.
And yet, still, no meaningful international mobilization has occurred. No coalition has emerged to enforce peace or protect civilians. Western capitals issue statements and impose boutique sanctions on individuals. There is outrage, but it is performative devoid of any follow-through, devoid of resolve.
What does this say about the international order? About lofty commitments to “never again?” If a nation of 46 million people can implode amid ethnic cleansing and famine, with hardly a diplomatic ripple, what principles are we defending?
Sudan is not invisible. It has been forgotten by choice.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
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