PORT SUDAN: Famine. Massacres. And now badly needed food and other supplies are under strain. Sudan on Wednesday entered a fourth year of war that’s been called an “abandoned crisis,” as a new Middle East conflict throws into shadow the fighting that has forced 13 million people to flee their homes.
Sudan is described as the world’s largest humanitarian challenge, notably in terms of displacement and hunger. There is no end in sight to the fighting between the military and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, which witnesses and aid groups say has laid waste to parts of the vast Darfur region.
Attempts by the US and regional powers have failed to establish a ceasefire.
“We’ve lost so many people in this war,” said Hussein Mohammed Shareef, running his fingers over the scar on his head where he said an RSF sniper had shot him in the city of Omdurman, near Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.
He said at least 10 friends have been killed.
At least 6,000 died over three days as the RSF rampaged through the Darfur outpost of El-Fasher in October, according to the UN, with UN-backed experts concluding that the offensive bore “the defining characteristics of genocide.”
More than 11,000 people have gone missing over the course of the war, the Red Cross says.
The war has pushed parts of Sudan into famine.
The number of people with severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous and deadly kind, is expected to increase to 800,000, the world’s foremost experts on food security, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said in February.
About 34 million people, or almost two out of three Sudanese, need assistance, the UN says.
Only 63 percent of health facilities remain fully or partially functional amid disease outbreaks, including cholera, according to the World Health Organization. Now fuel prices have increased by more than 24 percent because of the Iran war and its effects on shipping, driving up food prices.
“A plea from me: Please don’t call this the forgotten crisis. I’m referring to this as an abandoned crisis,” the top UN official in Sudan, Denise Brown, said Monday, criticizing the international community for failing to focus on ending the fighting.
The conflict exploded from a power struggle that emerged following Sudan’s transition to democracy after an uprising forced the military ouster of longtime President Omar Bashir in April 2019.
Tensions boiled over three years later, in April 2023, between Sudan’s military chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, who chairs the ruling sovereign council, and RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who was Gen. Al-Burhan’s deputy.
Neither side can achieve a decisive victory, said Shamel Elnoor, a Sudanese journalist and researcher, adding that Sudanese “have become powerless and are subjected to foreign dictates.”
Germany was hosting a Sudan conference in Berlin on Wednesday for governments, UN agencies, and aid groups. The aim was to rally humanitarian donors and “promote an immediate ceasefire,” the German Development Ministry said.
The Sudanese government in Khartoum, however, slammed the conference as an “unacceptable” interference and said Germany didn’t consult with Sudan before convening it.
Sudan is now essentially divided between a military-backed, internationally recognized government in Khartoum and a rival RSF-controlled administration in Darfur.
The military has established control over the north, east, and central regions, including Sudan’s Red Sea ports and its oil refineries and pipelines.
The RSF and its allies control Darfur and areas in the Kordofan region along the border with South Sudan.
Both regions include many of Sudan’s oil fields and gold mines.
The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which tracks the war through satellite imagery, said this month that the RSF had received military support from a base in Ethiopia.
The RSF did not comment on the allegation.
Josef Tucker, senior analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group, said that the war could spill over Sudan’s borders, making the conflict “even more intractable.”
Three years of fighting have seen widespread atrocities such as mass killings and rampant sexual violence, including gang rapes.
Hospitals, ambulances, and medical workers in Sudan have been attacked, with more than 2,000 people killed, the WHO has said.
The International Criminal Court has said that it was investigating potential war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly in Darfur, a region that two decades earlier, during Al-Bashir’s rule, became synonymous with genocide and war crimes.
Most of the latest atrocities have been blamed on the RSF and their Janjaweed allies. The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed.
The military’s seizure of Khartoum and other urban areas in central Sudan in early 2025 did allow the return of about 4 million people to their homes, the UN migration agency said in March.
But they struggle with damaged infrastructure and other challenges.
“It’s not really a return to normal. It is trying to survive amid a new normal,” said Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, CEO of aid group Mercy Corps.
