When the guns fell silent for a few hours in April 2023, following the outbreak of fighting between Sudan’s Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, few imagined that the country would still be at war three years later. Today, as Sudan enters its fourth year of conflict, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated to levels that aid workers and United Nations officials describe as the most severe crisis of their professional lifetimes.
More than 11 million people have been displaced — a number that represents nearly a quarter of Sudan’s population — and tens of thousands are believed to have died, though the chaos of the conflict has made accurate counting impossible. Entire neighbourhoods in the capital Khartoum have been reduced to rubble. The Darfur region, site of an earlier genocide in the early 2000s, is once again a byword for atrocities against civilian populations.
The war, which erupted in April 2023 over disputes about the integration of the RSF into the regular military, has no near-term resolution in sight. Both sides remain locked in a military logic that privileges continued fighting over negotiated settlement, and the international diplomatic efforts that have attempted to broker ceasefires have consistently collapsed.
A crisis ignored by the world
The contrast between the scale of suffering inside Sudan and the attention it receives internationally is staggering. While the wars in Gaza and Ukraine have commanded sustained global media coverage and political engagement, Sudan — a country of more than 48 million people — has slipped from the headlines even as its people die in conditions of extreme deprivation.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres marked the third anniversary in April 2026 by calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, describing the conflict as a “nightmare” that the international community had a collective responsibility to address. His appeal reflected growing frustration within the UN system about the difficulty of generating meaningful pressure on the warring parties.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who hosted a donor conference in Berlin in April 2026 that pledged $1.3 billion in humanitarian assistance, described the situation as “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, which is not very often in the public eye.” The characterisation was stark, but the conference itself underscored the structural problem: donors pledging money to address a crisis that political solutions have failed to prevent.
Neither the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan nor the RSF under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti — were invited to the Berlin conference. Khartoum condemned the gathering as “surprising and unacceptable,” in a pattern of diplomatic paralysis that has characterised the international response since the war began.
The destruction of civilian infrastructure
The human toll is not simply a product of battlefield casualties, though those have been enormous. It is the systematic destruction of the systems that sustain life — water supply, hospitals, food markets, schools — that has created the catastrophic conditions now described by every major humanitarian agency operating in Sudan.
The World Food Programme has warned that nearly half of Sudan’s population faces acute food insecurity, with several regions at risk of famine. Community kitchens operated by aid organisations have been forced to halve meal portions or shut down entirely due to funding shortfalls and access restrictions imposed by both sides.
“Food is being used as a weapon of war,” said Eric Reeves, a Sudan researcher at Smith College who has worked extensively with humanitarian operations at the Chad-Sudan border. “Sieges are imposed on towns. Aid is blocked. Only when a locality surrenders is food allowed to flow. This is deliberate.”
Humanitarian access is further complicated by the fact that aid workers themselves have become targets. Both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF have been implicated in attacks on aid convoys, the looting of supplies intended for civilian populations, and the harassment and detention of national and international humanitarian staff. Several NGOs have been forced to withdraw from areas where they can no longer guarantee the safety of their teams.
Doctors and medical workers have been killed, arrested, and intimidated. Healthcare facilities in conflict zones have been bombed or shelled. The systematic targeting of medical infrastructure has been documented by Human Rights Watch and other organisations as a feature, not an accident, of the war.
The regional dimension
Sudan’s crisis does not stop at its borders. More than 4.5 million Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries — Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic — creating a displacement crisis across the wider region. Chad alone has received more than one million Sudanese refugees, placing enormous strain on a country that was already one of the poorest and most fragile in the world.
The refugee camps in eastern Chad are now experiencing severe overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient food supplies. Waterborne diseases are spreading. Maternal health services are overwhelmed. Children’s vaccination schedules have been disrupted, leaving them vulnerable to preventable diseases.
The conflict’s regional reach extends into geopolitics. The UAE has been accused by multiple analysts and investigative reports of providing military support to the RSF, a charge that Abu Dhabi denies but that has become a flashpoint in the diplomatic politics surrounding the conflict. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States have attempted to broker negotiations through the so-called “Quad” format, but those efforts have stalled repeatedly.
What the world can do — and why it matters
Experts argue that there are concrete steps the international community could take to alter the calculus of the warring parties and improve the humanitarian situation. These include targeted sanctions against military leaders and their financial networks, greater diplomatic pressure on states providing external support to the RSF and the SAF, and a dramatic expansion of humanitarian funding to levels commensurate with the scale of need.
But there is also a broader argument about global attention and moral responsibility. Sudan has not become a crisis by accident. It has become one because the world has allowed it to. Three years of documented war crimes, targeted starvation policies, and mass displacement have produced a catastrophe that, in any other geopolitical context, would command the full resources and attention of the international system.
For the Sudanese civilians caught in the crossfire — and for the millions who have lost homes, families, and any prospect of normal life — the question is not whether the world is watching, but whether watching will ever be enough.