Sudan

Sudan's civil war began on 15 April 2023 in Khartoum, when fighting broke out between two factions that had, until that moment, jointly controlled Sudan's military government: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan (Sudan's de facto head of state), and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as "Hemedti." Both men had cooperated in the October 2021 coup that destroyed Sudan's civilian transitional government. Now they were at war with each other, with the rest of Sudan caught between them.

The RSF — a paramilitary force of approximately 100,000 fighters — moved rapidly to seize Khartoum and other major cities. Within weeks, they controlled most of the capital and had launched offensives across Darfur, Kordofan, and Gezira state. The SAF, Sudan's regular army, initially lost ground badly but regrouped and mounted a counteroffensive in late 2024. In March 2025, the SAF recaptured most of Khartoum — the government, which had relocated to Port Sudan, returned to the capital in January 2026. Fighting continues in Kordofan, Darfur, and Blue Nile state. In early 2026, the conflict in Kordofan intensified, with near-daily drone strikes causing substantial civilian casualties.

The scale of the humanitarian catastrophe is almost incomprehensible. The former US envoy for Sudan estimated as many as 400,000 deaths; the IRC puts the figure at over 150,000. The UN records at least 11,300 civilians killed in 2025 alone — nearly triple 2024's figure, in a single year of a war already ongoing for two years. Twelve million people have been displaced — more than any other conflict in the world. Four million have fled to neighboring countries: Chad (which received so many Sudanese refugees it closed its border with Sudan in early 2026), Ethiopia, South Sudan, Egypt, and Libya. Over 30 million people inside Sudan need humanitarian aid. The World Food Programme has described it as the world's largest hunger crisis. International aid has been chronically underfunded — only 36% funded for 2025.

Both sides have committed war crimes. The RSF has targeted civilians, ethnic minorities, and aid workers; committed systematic rape and sexual violence; attacked hospitals, markets, and refugee camps. The SAF has conducted indiscriminate airstrikes and barrel bombings, including on civilian areas in Khartoum, Kordofan, and other contested zones; blocked humanitarian access; and used allied militias against civilians. In July 2025, the RSF announced the formation of a parallel government, raising fears of Libya-style state fragmentation. The SAF's government has rejected any negotiations that don't begin with full RSF disarmament — an unrealistic starting point while the RSF controls half the country.

The UAE has been widely accused of supplying the RSF with weapons through Chad and Libya, sustaining the conflict. Saudi Arabia and Egypt back the SAF. The war has effectively become a regional proxy conflict layered on top of a genuine power struggle between two men who together dismantled Sudan's democratic transition in 2021 and who are now destroying the country that they fought over.

Darfur is Sudan's western region — the size of France, home to approximately 9 million people from 36–80 distinct ethnic groups. The word "Darfur" means "home of the Fur," referring to the region's largest indigenous African ethnic group. Since 2003, Darfur has been the site of two phases of mass atrocity, separated by a decade of partial, unstable peace.

The first phase began in 2003 when Darfuri rebel groups — the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — rose against the Khartoum government, protesting the systematic economic and political marginalization of Darfur's non-Arab African population. The government's response was to arm and deploy the Janjaweed — Arab tribal militias — against not just the rebels but against Darfuri civilian communities. Janjaweed attacks on villages followed a pattern: aerial bombardment by the SAF, followed by ground attacks by Janjaweed horsemen and camel riders who killed men, raped women, burned crops and homes, and drove survivors into the desert to die. Approximately 300,000–400,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2010; over 2.5 million were displaced. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for President Omar al-Bashir — the first ICC warrant for a sitting head of state — charging him with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The connection between the first and second phases of Darfur's suffering is direct and specific: the RSF is the organizational successor to the Janjaweed. Hemedti himself — the RSF commander now fighting the SAF — commanded Janjaweed units during the Darfur genocide. The RSF was formalized out of the Janjaweed by Bashir as a loyal counterweight to the regular army; it is now using the same tactics against the same communities — but with modern weapons, drones, and greater scale.

In January 2025, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally determined that the RSF and allied militias are committing genocide in Darfur. The UN fact-finding mission has described the situation around El Fasher as exhibiting "clear hallmarks of genocide" against the Zaghawa and Fur communities. When El Fasher fell to the RSF in October 2025, witnesses described RSF fighters killing civilians, committing mass rape, and destroying what remained of the city's civilian infrastructure. UN Security Council sanctions have been imposed on RSF commanders including Hemedti's brother Abdul Rahim Dagalo.

The Darfur genocide is not a historical event. It is ongoing.

Sudan is one of humanity's oldest civilized landscapes. The Nile corridor through what is now northern Sudan was inhabited continuously from at least 40,000 BCE. Around 3800 BCE, the A-Group culture developed sophisticated civilization in lower Nubia. By 2500 BCE, the Kingdom of Kerma — centered just south of the Nile's third cataract — was one of the most powerful states in Africa, trading with Egypt and controlling gold routes to sub-Saharan Africa. The Egyptians called this land "Kush" and contested it for centuries.

The relationship between Nubia and Egypt is one of the longest, most complex, and most misunderstood in ancient history. Egypt at various periods controlled Nubia — as a colony, a vassal, a trading partner. But around 750 BCE, a Kushite king named Piye reversed the direction of power: he marched north, conquered Egypt, and established the 25th Dynasty of pharaohs — the "Black Pharaohs" of Kush. For nearly a century, the most powerful rulers of ancient Egypt were Nubian. The Kushite rulers built pyramids — steeper than Egyptian pyramids, more numerous, covering the landscapes of Meroe, Nuri, and El-Kurru. There are more ancient pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt. Most of the world has never heard of them.

After the decline of Meroe (c. 350 CE), the successor Nubian kingdoms converted to Christianity and maintained Christian kingdoms — Nobatia, Makuria, Alodia — for over a millennium, from the 6th to the 14th centuries. Arabic-speaking Muslim nomads and traders gradually moved into the region, and by the 15th century most of Sudan had converted to Islam. The Funj Sultanate (1504–1821) united much of Sudan under Muslim rule before the Egyptian conquest of 1821 brought Sudan under Mohammad Ali's expansionist empire.

British control came through the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium established in 1899 — a joint British-Egyptian administration that in practice meant British rule, with Egypt as junior partner. The British administered north and south Sudan separately, driving the economic and cultural divide that would produce two civil wars after independence. Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956. What followed was a pattern of alternating civilian governments and military coups, with two of the coups — by Nimeiry in 1969 and by al-Bashir in 1989 — lasting decades. The Nimeiry period produced the imposition of sharia law in 1983 and the reignition of the southern civil war. The al-Bashir period produced the Darfur genocide and — ultimately — the 2019 revolution.

Between al-Bashir's rule, the 2019 revolution, the 2021 coup, and the 2023 civil war, Sudan has cycled through every permutation of military and civilian governance — and the result is a country in which, as the USHMM notes, more than 2.5 million people have been killed as a result of conflicts since independence.

Sudan contains some of the most extraordinary and least-visited archaeological sites in Africa. Before the war, a small but growing number of adventurous travelers were discovering what archaeology had long known: that ancient Nubia — the territory along the Nile between today's Aswan and Khartoum — contains a civilization of world-historical importance that has been underappreciated for centuries, partly because of Egypt's cultural dominance and partly because Sudan was difficult to visit.

These sites are not currently accessible. They are listed here because they are part of Sudan's identity, because they will exist after this war ends, and because understanding them is part of understanding why Sudan matters beyond its current catastrophe.

In December 2018, ordinary Sudanese people began protesting in the streets. The immediate trigger was rising bread prices — the government had cut subsidies and the cost of basic food had become unsustainable for most families. But the protests quickly became something more: a general demand for the end of Omar al-Bashir's 30-year dictatorship, for civilian government, for the kind of country that the Sudanese Professional Association — doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, journalists — had been trying to build through legitimate channels for years.

The Sudanese Professional Association was remarkable: a cross-sectional civil society organization that organized and led the protests not with revolutionary slogans or armed cadres but with remarkable nonviolent discipline. Women were central from the beginning — the image of Alaa Salah, a Sudanese woman in a white thobe standing on top of a car with her fist raised at a Khartoum protest, became one of 2019's most reproduced photographs, circulating globally as a symbol of Sudanese women's political leadership. The protests continued for months. The regime responded with violence, with arrests, with internet shutdowns. People kept coming back.

On 11 April 2019, al-Bashir was removed from power by his own generals — Burhan and Hemedti, the two men who would later go to war with each other. The military established the Transitional Military Council. Protesters celebrated in the streets — but also understood that the military was not their ally. They continued occupying the square outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, demanding civilian rule. A civilian-military power-sharing agreement was eventually reached, establishing the Sovereignty Council with a plan to transition to full civilian government within 39 months.

On 3 June 2019, the RSF and allied security forces conducted the Khartoum Massacre: they stormed the sit-in at military headquarters and opened fire. At least 118 people were killed. Seventy people were raped. Hundreds were beaten and injured. Bodies were thrown into the Nile. The international community condemned it. The protesters organized an immediate general strike. The negotiations continued and the civilian-military deal was signed. Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok — an economist who had worked for the UN — was appointed to lead a civilian government.

That government lasted two years. On 25 October 2021, Burhan and Hemedti staged a coup — arresting Hamdok at his home at 4am, detaining civilian officials, dissolving the transitional institutions. The international community condemned it again. The US and World Bank suspended aid. Protests resumed immediately. Hamdok was briefly reinstated, resigned, and left Sudan. The military governed alone — until the two generals began fighting each other in April 2023.

The people who had put their bodies in the streets for months in 2018–2019, who had run toward tear gas and bullets to demand a civilian government, watched as the generals they had deposed staged a coup and then destroyed the country in a civil war. This is the context that makes the current catastrophe not just a military conflict but a betrayal of specifically extraordinary magnitude — because the Sudanese people had demonstrated, with remarkable courage and organization, that they wanted something different. The generals took that away from them.

This section is for aid workers, journalists, humanitarian staff, and those with compelling personal reasons to be in Sudan. Sudan is not accessible to tourist visitors under any circumstances. The following is practical information for people who must enter despite the extraordinary risks.

Emergency services in Sudan are essentially nonexistent. Hospitals are largely non-functional. There is no reliable national emergency number. Western embassies have evacuated non-essential staff and have severely limited capacity to assist citizens. If you are in Sudan, your primary contacts are your organization's security team and the nearest UN office.