In April this year, The International Rescue Committee (IRC) placed Sudan at the top of its watchlist, a barometer of countries most likely to experience a humanitarian crisis. April 2024 marked one year since fighting erupted, with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) engaging in a civil war that has had a disastrous effect on the Sudanese population. The IRC noted that the current conflict has directly killed at least 14,700 people, injured almost 30,000 and displaced millions more.
The war’s origins are complicated and opaque. Led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the SAF is Sudan’s official armed force. On the opposing side is the RSF, once part of the country’s official military, now a paramilitary group of unofficial militias led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. Both generals fought side-by-side in the military coups d’état that removed two Sudanese presidents – Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and Abdalla Hamdok in 2021 – and accounts vary as to what happened next. Susan Stigant, director of Africa programs for the United States Institute of Peace, has suggested the two men clashed over who would take over institutions in the country’s capital Khartoum after seizing governmental control in 2021. The generals then split into two opposing factions and declared war on one another.
The World Peace Foundation’s executive director, Alex de Waal, sees links between both sides in the civil war and countries in the surrounding region. Keen to take advantage of Sudan’s geographical importance as a sea bridge between Africa and the Middle East, de Waal posits that regimes in Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others are spurring the fighting factions on in the hope of gaining a foothold in Sudan in the future.
The UK government has indicated the warring factions are exploiting existing ethnic divisions and conducting ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a conclusion echoed by Human Rights Watch and borne out by Reuters. In November 2023, the news agency reported rival militia forces were sexually assaulting and raping women based on their tribal backgrounds. Sudan has suffered a long history of internal ethnic violence based on its racially and religiously diverse society. The Minority Rights Group report identifies 70% of its population as Sudanese Arabs, with the remainder split between numerous ethnic groups, including the Masalit people, originating from different areas of the African continent.
Petty grievances, geopolitics and the exploitation of discord have led to devastation in Sudan, a country already suffering economic catastrophe. The United Nations Refugee Agency’s 2024 Sudan report lists continual historical shortages of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, limited communications and power and escalating prices of essential items. And the war between the RSF and the SAF has pushed Sudan beyond the brink of despair.
The United Nations says that Sudan is facing “a crisis of epic proportions; it is also wholly man-made.” Some 25 million Sudanese citizens (around half the country’s population) now need lifesaving medical and nutritional assistance. Almost nine million have been forced to flee their homes. In a recent Guardian report, Dr Haroun Adam Haroun talked of an acute wave of malnutrition, women having miscarriages and mounting cases of malaria in the country. The World Health Organisation warns fighting has put two thirds of Sudan’s main hospitals out of service and that half a million people have fled to neighbouring Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Sudan, fuelling what The Norwegian Refugee Council is calling it “the largest war-related displacement crisis in the world, surpassing even Ukraine and Syria.”
Furthermore, food shortages and the cessation of farming are forcing Sudan towards widespread famine. The World Food Programme is predicting the planet’s largest hunger crisis in the country, with almost five million Sudanese people now in emergency levels of hunger. The Programme estimates that 90% of those in emergency are stuck in areas of heavy fighting. So, while countries like the UK are putting together aid packages that include food and support for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, the Programme says that delivery is proving impossible due to roadblocks, bureaucratic impediments and threats of violence from local militia.
The war continues. Villages and settlements are being burnt to the ground, ordinary civilians are forced to leave their homes in terror and are beginning to starve, aid is blocked and children are being slaughtered. And, for now at least, there is no end in sight.
Simon Coates is a London-based writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications including The New European and Scottish newspaper The National
