Transcription
It's a bit of a cliche to say, why doesn't the mainstream media care about this country or that war? But if there is any truly ignored war on earth, it's the one going on in Sudan right now.
Since 2023, Sudan has been suffering from complete state breakdown. And owing to its massive population of over 50 million people, making the current crisis not just the making of another failed state but the largest humanitarian crisis on earth. In 2025, it was the country with the highest number of people facing famine, of internal refugees, and the most mass death, beating out, not to use another cliche, these wars you might be a little more familiar with.
To fully understand the crisis, you need to understand how Sudan got to this point. But first, let me just try to share how awful Sudan's civil war is in under 6 minutes.
The chain of events started when longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was ousted after months of popular protests triggered by economic collapse. Weighing into pressure, the armies called into the capital to defend him instead turned on him in April of 2019. They forced him out, giving the military power for a few months to go through a transitional phase.
Two military sects held power together: the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. A paramilitary and business empire which grew out of the Arab Supremacist Janjaweed militia, which, by the way, translates in English to "devils on horseback." The SAF was headed by Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, while the RSF was led by General Hemedti Dalo, better known as Hemedti, also known to al-Bashir as "my protector." His career has been made through helping the Sudan government crush rebels, controlling Sudan's gold exports, and sucking up to the president.
After the transitional government, the two men who ran these militaries, big surprise, vied for control of the country against each other, rapidly degenerating Sudan into a civil war which broke out in April 2023. The main disparity was over the creation of a joint army. Burhan wanted it done by two years, while Hemedti wanted it done by 10. Naturally, they started shooting at each other to solve this debate.
Now, the SAF controls the east Nile River and coastline, posturing itself as the true government, while the RSF controls the west, including a region known as Darfur. Launching a campaign for either total control of the country or to separate as its own state. The details aren't really hashed out yet.
The subsequent fighting has torn the social fabric of Sudan apart. At least half a million have died, with 15 million displaced, overwhelming refugee camps, and 25 million suffering from hunger as farms and food stockpiles are deliberately burned. In a country made up of 40% children, 90% of them are out of school. This is total collapse.
Sudan has seen many civil wars in its history, but none reaching into its major cities. This time around, Sudan's capital and cultural center, the tri-city area of Khartoum, has seen clashes and airstrikes. So much so that Burhan has had to flee to Port Sudan. When fighting couldn't be done between these groups, the army switched to civilians, indiscriminately bombing hospitals, schools, markets, and residential areas.
Much of the fighting, though, is centered around Darfur, a notoriously arid land which has traditionally been Sudan's poorest region. There, the RSF has won victory after victory, receiving aid through a corridor it captured to East Libya.
Sudan has had a troubled history of race relations. Many elites have declared Sudan an officially Arab Islamic country, sparking decades of unrest and conflict between them and the darker-skinned, mainly Christian people of the south, culminating in South Sudan's secession in 2011. More recently, though, has been the government's and RSF's fight against the non-Arab inhabitants of Darfur, a place literally meaning "home of the Four." This is an ethnically mixed region of Fur, Masalit, and Zagawa peoples, along with many nomadic Arab tribes, many of which moved in in the 1980s.
Tension in the region over land rights, along with approval from the Bashir regime, culminated in a genocide of the native Africans by Janjaweed forces in the 2000s. A scenario that, since the most recent breakout of war, has started again.
Capturing El Fasher, which was a regional hub for the displaced people of Darfur, would mark a huge victory for the RSF. For 18 months, they sieged the city, cutting food and medical supplies, building a wall of dirt around the city, and shooting anybody who tried to escape. On October 27th, 2025, they finally captured it, starting what would become the bloodiest few weeks of the year. The mostly Arab soldiers went through the city systematically torturing and killing all inhabitants over the age of 10. This is a group whose members call for the extermination of all black skins from Darfur, shouting that women will soon have Arab babies, and who've posted these atrocities all over social media. It is an attempted ethnic cleansing of Darfur.
Tens of thousands died with its capture, a fact only known because of the piles of bodies seen from satellite imagery. In a city of this size, that means at least a tenth were killed within weeks of its capture, a speed of mass death not seen in the modern world since the Rwanda genocide.
Now, it is, in all honesty, more likely than not, Sudan will collapse. At least it will collapse in its current form, with the West either formally seceding like South Sudan or creating a shadow government that basically acts as its own country without going through the increasingly useless motions of trying to become a UN member state.
How could a country get so bad to the point where nobody has the power to stop what will likely go down as one of the worst mass killings of this decade? Modern Sudanese history has been a cycle of military rulers, people getting tired of them and their despotism, overthrowing them in popular riots, only to end up with another military ruler. This has happened for three cycles, making up 52 of the almost 70 years of independent history. These chunks were the rules of Ibrahim Abboud, Jafar Nimeiri, and Omar al-Bashir, respectively, each with a couple of guys after them in the transition phase to the next military government. Sudan's current crisis is over who gets to lead the fourth.
The first two dictators basically had the same trajectories. They both came to power through a coup, led a government based on military over civilian rule, centralizing that rule around their personality, and brutally put down rebellions and protests. General Ibrahim Abboud was part of the Islamist coalition, while Colonel Jafar Nimeiri led the leftist one. Instead of tribal governments, to both of these guys, progress was going to come through the Islamization of Sudan.
As a result, the defining political problem for most of Sudanese history was what to do with the south. Christianity was a pre-colonial religion of the people who lived here, and the mountainous and jungly land of the region prevented large-scale Arab or Islamic migrations. The primary solution the northerner elites thought of was to integrate it into a larger Islamic Sudan. The first constitution of the country already sowed division when it was written for an explicitly Arab Muslim nation. Both then tried to Islamize the south, and both faced organized military backlashes in two different civil wars.
What's ironic is that part of the reason Abboud was ousted was because of fatigue the war brought, and part of the reason Nimeiri came to power was because he negotiated the end of that first war. Nimeiri then went back on that and did what the Islamist coalition couldn't do: create an officially Islamic Sudan. And he did it overnight, enforcing Sharia with one presidential decree. Again, seeing organized resistance from the south.
So, for the first five or so decades of independent Sudanese history, the defining motivating force of the military governments was to keep the south in the country through mostly violent means, killings, and burning villages. The waves of war would kill and expel millions. Mass killings which would be history-defining for most other countries were just a part of the long history of these wars.
What didn't help the peace was the discovery of oil in the south, which would represent a great help to the cotton-dependent nation. The national refinery to process it would be built near Khartoum rather than in the south where it was originally planned for, and the main port to export in Port Sudan. So, to get it here, a pipeline would have to be built across the country, keeping the South dependent on the North for economic growth, of which it saw almost none since no oil was exported until the 2000s.
Also planned was the Jonglei Canal project to transfer water from the marshy south upstream to the north. The government promised foreign investors Sudan would have a green revolution with this project, having more arable land than the rest of the Arab world combined. Southerners protested for the rights to their own oil revenue and water resources. So the government promised development projects for the south, none of which were kept. In fact, the entire canal project was scrapped when the conflict intensified.
This second bout of fighting would begin the longest civil war in African history, ending in the breakup of the country. The main resistance was the Southern People's Liberation Movement and Army led by John Garang. Originally, they wanted to found a new Sudan which was secular, democratic, and socialist, and actually had some northerners who were opposed to Islamic rule join it. The government was able to convince America to fund its campaign against these socialist agitators, while their funds came from communist Ethiopia. But after decades of fighting, the SPLM started explicitly calling for separation from the north.
What changed for them was the start of the third military cycle. Nimeiri was ousted in 1985. An ineffective administration couldn't keep power, only to be couped by the National Islamic Front in charge, al-Turabi, and al-Bashir. The new NIF government would do just as the others had done: continue fighting the South and crushing their political opponents. But just 10 years after they took charge, the NIF split, not into ideological sects, but over who should be in charge.
Before that, al-Turabi's most significant addition to history was being chums with bin Laden and getting Sudan put on America's state sponsors of terrorism list, ending all American aid to the country. Long story short, as the economy waned under sanctions, al-Bashir and the National Congress Party would take charge, marking a slowdown of the war with the South. For one reason, al-Turabi was the one more concerned with pushing an Islamic Sudan's south. Secondly, the war was no longer affordable; too many human and fiscal resources were going towards it while sanctions were weighing heavy on the government. Thirdly, this new oil provided a huge incentive to end the war to get it going. And last, al-Bashir focused his military administration on another region: Darfur.
During the second civil war with the south, fighting spread to the west, as al-Bashir viewed Darfur with the same contempt that many viewed the south with. See, throughout the 1980s, a flow of nomadic Arabs came into the region to escape a decade-long war between Libya and Chad, which, by the way, in its final act, concluded with the Great Toyota War. Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi had planned on expanding his kingdom down into Chad and eventually the entire Sahara. To help with this, he set up training camps around his enemies. Darfur's unpoliced wild west was a great staging post for his fight against the Chadian Hissène Habré. But a mix of refugees, weapons, and a constant stream of racial supremacy doesn't usually end up great for the local population.
Though the two groups had coexisted for decades before, even commonly marrying into each other's families, that didn't last when the drought came. Then tensions boiled over between native farmers and the nomadic herders over what little water supplies remained. What followed was complete breakdown to the point where the police had to beg for fuel so they could do their routine patrols. And it was around this time when "devils on horseback" started to float around in relation to these new Chadian professional fighters.
When Gaddafi failed to take Chad, many nomadic Arabs stayed in Darfur. Years of Arab oppression went by before they revolted under the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement. Fearing the region would end up like South Sudan, al-Bashir empowered the Janjaweed to do as they pleased: burn villages and kill locals en masse. Because many in the forces aren't paid, they've been incentivized to loot as much as they can, leaving behind empty apartments, offices, and shops, leaving refugees to swell in makeshift tent cities in the suburbs.
The Darfurian genocide saw the deaths of at least 500,000 people throughout the second civil war. An atrocity which he played a key and personal role in, and one which also made al-Bashir the first head of state ever to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in masterminding it.
As the military shifted its focus here, it left the South to negotiate their way out of the whole mess. Al-Bashir was open to it, and in 2005, they signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement outlining the post-war divisions of wealth and power, as well as giving the South the option to secede by 2011. Part of the reason the NCP viewed the South as a distinct people rather than a vacuum to be filled. Another, the American government pressured the country into it by promising to lift their sanctions if they gave the Christians freedom, which did not end up happening. After news of the Darfur genocide broke, in 2011, with a nearly 99% margin, they voted to become independent.
However, in one agreement during the war, the South would be defined as this line, the three original provinces. But in this new CPA, they would allow South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and Abyei to join as well, creating a disputed border that lasts to this day. Kind of, Sudan doesn't really have any borders right now.
It didn't help that they agreed to split oil revenues 50/50, but around 3/4 of oil reserves were found in the South. So, before and after independence, the two halves again fought over the border, especially over the oil-rich province of Abyei, leading to more deaths, displacements, and a harsh version of Sharia being implemented in the North, a version shaped by al-Bashir. He said there would be no more question of diversity now that the South is gone, a pretty bad foreshadowing as to how he viewed how he wanted his country to run.
While the South pretty much devolved into ethnic slaughter as soon as it got independence, the decade between the end of the war and the South's independence was the only time Sudan really had an economic boom, as it used oil revenues to invest into education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Look at this graph of Sudanese foreign exchange earnings. The biggest thing here was oil, with gold barely making the same dent. 95% of foreign exchange and 60% of government revenue was tied to oil.
Al-Bashir had also built a patronage network based on this oil revenue. Again, see the crash where subsidies to basic goods were given to the Sudanese middle class, bribes and development projects were given to business and local elites, and funding to private security forces were all dependent on these fields. He also siphoned billions to overseas bank accounts for himself. Thus, after the loss of this chunk in 2011, he was screwed. From its peak of $10 billion in 2010, foreign exchange earnings fell to around $300 million in 2016, 3% of what they were.
Al-Bashir then tried to ramp up pipeline costs to Port Sudan, which the South Sudanese president responded with a murder-suicide, seizing to transport all oil through the pipe. When that was resolved, and it really dawned on al-Bashir how little sources of foreign revenue he had left, he institutionalized the Janjaweed, rebranding them as the RSF and allowing them to do whatever they could to make money. He basically privatized this militia group. They exported soldiers to the Yemen civil war to make some money, got into construction, trading weapons, but most importantly, started gold production, especially after they captured the massive Jebel Amer gold mine in Darfur. Big shocker, this didn't replace Sudan's lost foreign exchange. And as an important country, losing their reserves would result in a, what we can say now, country-ending crisis.
In 2018, his patronage network formally collapsed when he ended subsidies to bread and fuel, nearly tripling the price of food for the average person, starting the protests which ousted him, taking us back to where we started. The loss of South Sudan broke al-Bashir's patronage system and left a bloated military with nothing to do. Attempting layoffs would threaten the regime, as many young military-trained men would suddenly be out of work. To give you some perspective, roughly 70% of government spending went into the army or private security groups in 2016, while 2% went to education and 1% went to health spending.
Throughout this whole thing, the RSF, likely seeing the writing on the walls, created their own streams of revenue to stay independent from the central government. A far cry from Hemedti's humble beginnings as a camel trader, he now controls the region's mines and oil refineries, cementing a literal business empire in the desert. Their most important connection is with the UAE, which is the world's hub of gold refining and trading. It's been reported that they've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold to the Emirates through Hemedti's family company, Al-Junaid, and that the Emirati government has funded the paramilitary with smuggled weapons and aid through the eastern Libyan corridor.
Of course, they officially deny all of this, but the Emirati business interests in the country are too great. It's one of the biggest gold-producing regions on Earth. And by placing a bet on the RSF winning the war or seceding, they can keep growing their position as the world's gold superpower. They also rely on Sudan for food imports, as it was an al-Bashir program to sell some of Sudan's farmland to many Middle Eastern powers for their own food security, seeing what a lack of it could lead to. Keeping Sudan semi-functioning is just in the interest of the Emirates. And according to some experts, if they withdrew tomorrow, there's a good chance the war would end real quick.
Also involved in the war are Russia's Wagner Group, also betting on the RSF to win to protect gold supplies under the Marwa Gold Company. And on the other side, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine, and the Russian government, who would all like to see some sort of stability in what they view as a geostrategically important region.
Despite all their atrocities, the RSF still wants to project themselves as a force of democracy and peace to gain governing legitimacy in a world where you don't really have to go through these motions anymore. In 2025, the RSF came together to declare a government of peace and unity, drafting a constitution for what their new country may look like. And although there's not really another government on Earth who buys this delusion, basically sanctioned by the whole Western world, there's also not a government who really cares much to do anything about it.
Meanwhile, sitting in the southern Nuba Mountains, a remnant of a past war can be found in a new form. Distracted by the civil war, the SPLM has attacked and set up a little republic of New Sudan, comprising about half a million people. They've started their own English language schools, made their own court system outside of Islamic law, and have started the fight for a Western-style secular democracy. It's a reminder as to how far Sudan has gone in its current crisis, that the issue the government has spent almost its entire existence trying to stop has just gone ahead because nobody has the capacity or care to squash these southern rebels.
Unfortunately, there's just not that much care to go around for what is almost certainly Sudan's largest crisis in its existence. Not much care for the increasingly nihilistic people living there, leaving behind no governing structure for society. And unless you're the Emirati chic, not much care from the outside world as well.
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