The world has no shortage of horrible stories — from the terror of October 7 and the widespread suffering in Gaza caused by Israel’s war to the ongoing refugee crisis in Syria, to Russia’s continuing assault on Ukraine.
But the reports coming out of Sudan these days are particularly appalling.
According to the UN, more than 8 million people have been displaced during the war, and more than 13,000 people have been killed. Almost half the population, 25 million people, are in need of humanitarian assistance — and they shouldn’t be lost in a sea of global suffering.
Almost one year ago, rival military factions in Sudan began fighting in the streets of the capital Khartoum, reigniting civil conflict that echoes the terrible ethnically motivated violence in the country’s Darfur region that shocked the world two decades ago.
The current civil war — between the government’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (called Hemedti) — has spread from the capital to other regions of the country, including Darfur in the west.
There, the majority-Arab RSF fighters are being accused of widespread, targeted killing and sexual violence against ethnic minorities in the region.
On top of that horror, the SAF and al-Burhan — the de facto leader of the country — have said they will suspend cross-border humanitarian aid delivery from neighboring Chad into RSF-controlled areas. The SAF claims, with some evidence, that weapons and supplies from the UAE make their way to the RSF via the eastern Chad-West Darfur border. But blocking aid would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis within Sudan.
While it might be easy to see this violence as cyclical or intractable, it would be a mistake to do so.
The tragedy in Sudan
Both the RSF and the SAF have shown “utter disregard for the laws of war,” as Human Rights Watch wrote in September, with both forces using…
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