Three years in, Sudan’s civil war has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced 14 million and collapsed a nation. So why does almost nobody talk about it?
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On the morning of 15 April 2023, gunfire erupted across Khartoum before most of its six million residents had woken. Two generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo of the Rapid Support Forces, had dispensed with any remaining pretence of partnership. Within hours, warplanes were strafing the presidential palace and tanks were rolling through residential streets. Sudan, a country nearly six times the size of the United Kingdom, began to tear itself apart.
Three years later, the war continues to rage, but the world has largely looked away.
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As of April 2026, the UN estimates that nearly 34 million Sudanese people, roughly 65 per cent of the entire population, are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. More than 14 million have been displaced, making Sudan the world’s largest displacement crisis, overtaking Ukraine and Gaza in sheer scale. Famine has been confirmed in North Darfur and parts of Kordofan. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called it ‘the world’s worst humanitarian emergency’. And yet in the week that the third anniversary passed, it barely made the front pages.
A country split along its geology
Sudan is enormous. It is the third-largest country in Africa by landmass, bordered by seven neighbours, sliced by the Nile and its tributaries, and underlaid by some of the richest gold deposits on the continent. Since April 2023, it has been carved into rough territorial halves along lines that track those underground riches almost exactly.
The SAF hold the Nile Valley corridor, from the Egyptian border south through the wreckage of Khartoum and east to the Red Sea port of Port Sudan. The RSF control most of Darfur in the west and large swathes of Kordofan in the centre.
Around four million people are facing acute malnutrition in Sudan, including 800,000 children. Image: Shutterstock
That territorial split is not accidental. Sudan is one of Africa’s largest gold producers, and its southwestern goldfields, the Jebel Amir and Songo mining areas in Darfur, sit squarely under RSF control. The conflict has become a war over who extracts, and who exports.
Remarkably, the gold flows to the same destination from both sides of the frontline, to Dubai.
Oil too plays its part in this, as in many wars. In December 2025, the RSF seized the Heglig oil field, Sudan’s largest, cutting off a critical source of state revenue. By October 2025, El-Fasher, the last major city in Darfur, had fallen after an 18-month siege, with some 90,000 civilians fleeing in its wake. The war entered its fourth year in stalemate with the SAF holding the east, the RSF entrenched in the west, and no negotiated settlement on the horizon. Both sides have ruled out compromise.
The scale of suffering
The humanitarian consequences are staggering. Famine-level conditions now exist across multiple states. Some four million people face acute malnutrition, including 800,000 children in severe distress. An 18-month cholera epidemic infected over 124,000 people before being declared over in March 2026.
Hospitals across all 18 of Sudan’s states have been damaged, destroyed, or forced to close. Children across the country have missed three consecutive years of schooling. The countries absorbing the displaced, Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, are themselves fragile and strained to breaking point.
Yet the crisis remains largely invisible to Western audiences.
Foreign journalists face a stark binary: attempt to enter RSF-held Darfur from Chad, a journey so dangerous it is near-impossible, or fly into Port Sudan and apply for a SAF-issued press permit, which is routinely refused. The Sudanese Journalists Syndicate documented 14 journalists and media workers killed in 2025 alone and 595 press freedom violations since the war began. Sudan now sits at 156th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.
Even if journalists could overcome these issues, it is still unlikely Sudan would make headlines. Gaza and Ukraine offer Western audiences legible moral frameworks and stories already embedded in public consciousness. Sudan offers neither. Instead, it is two competing military factions, a vast and unfamiliar terrain, and a conflict with roots stretching back decades. This results in the Sudan conflict falling a long way down what researchers have termed a ‘hierarchy of visibility’ in global media. Awareness produces awareness, and ignorance reproduces itself.
Even the humanitarian architecture is fracturing. The United States was Sudan’s largest single donor in 2024, contributing 44 per cent of all humanitarian funding. The dismantling of USAID in 2025 removed the largest financial prop holding that system together. More than 70 per cent of the Emergency Response Rooms, grassroots community kitchens and aid networks serving millions of the most vulnerable, were forced to close. The UN’s annual humanitarian fund for Sudan is now operating at just 23 per cent of its target.
At an international conference in Berlin convened to mark the war’s third anniversary, Germany pledged an additional €20million. Sudan’s government rejected the conference as ‘unrepresentative and unacceptable’. The UN Security Council remains deadlocked. Both sides have ruled out talks.
Sudan’s crisis is, among other things, a lesson in how journalism works. A country that is physically difficult to reach, lacks a clear Western strategic anchor, and sits beyond the familiar horizons of European news coverage falls through the cracks of the global conscience.
