Why Is Sudan at War?
13.6 million displaced. Up to 400,000 dead. A massacre in Darfur that may be the deadliest single event of the century so far. Sudan's war is the world's largest humanitarian crisis, and most people have barely heard of it. Here's why it started and why it hasn't stopped.
The scale, in four numbers
9.3 million displaced inside Sudan, plus 4.3 million refugees in neighboring countries. This is the largest displacement crisis anywhere in the world right now — larger than Ukraine, Gaza, or Syria.
Estimates vary enormously by method: ACLED's confirmed-incident count sits near 56,000, while broader mortality modeling that accounts for indirect deaths from disease and starvation runs into the hundreds of thousands.
The World Health Organization says 21 million people in Sudan “desperately” need food. Famine has been formally confirmed in multiple locations since August 2024, starting at the Zamzam displacement camp.
The RSF's October 2025 capture of El Fasher, Darfur's last army stronghold, was accompanied by what multiple rights groups call a genocidal massacre — among the deadliest single events of the 21st century.
The full explanation
It's a fight between two armies, not an army and a rebellion
Sudan's war isn't a government fighting an insurgency — it's two organized military forces fighting each other for control of the state itself. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary led by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, jointly ran the country after ousting a transitional civilian government in a 2021 coup. That partnership collapsed in April 2023 over a single unresolved question: how, and how fast, to fold the RSF into the regular army. Neither side would give up its own chain of command, and the disagreement turned into open warfare in the capital within days.
Where the RSF came from
The RSF's origins trace to the Janjaweed militias that carried out mass killings in Darfur in the 2000s, later formalized into a paramilitary force under the Bashir government and eventually built into a parallel army with its own independent funding — gold mining, mostly, along with alleged foreign backing. That gave Hemedti a force capable of genuinely contesting the state rather than simply serving it, which is precisely what made the 2023 rupture so violent: this was never a lopsided fight between a government and a militia.
Why the war spread beyond Khartoum
Fighting began in the capital but spread quickly to Darfur, Kordofan and beyond as each side sought territory and resources to sustain the war. Darfur in particular became the RSF's stronghold and the site of its worst documented atrocities, echoing the same region's history of mass violence two decades earlier. More than ten external countries have been drawn in, backing one side or the other with weapons, funding or diplomatic cover, which is a major reason repeated US, Saudi and African Union mediation efforts have failed to produce a lasting ceasefire — too many outside parties have a stake in one side winning outright.
El Fasher: the war's darkest chapter
El Fasher was the Sudanese army's last significant foothold in Darfur, and the RSF besieged it for more than a year before finally capturing it in October 2025. What followed, according to satellite evidence and survivor testimony compiled by multiple human rights organizations, was a mass killing on a scale that puts it among the deadliest single atrocities anywhere this century — estimates range from 60,000 to as high as 150,000 dead in the days during and after the city fell. The RSF disputes the highest figures. Researchers describe the pattern of killing as genocidal, consistent with the same ethnic-targeting dynamics documented in Darfur during the 2000s.
The drone war nobody's tracking closely
Sudan's conflict has quietly become one of the world's most drone-saturated wars. Both the SAF and RSF have adopted drone strikes extensively through 2026, and the UN's human rights chief told the Human Rights Council that more than 1,000 civilians were killed in drone strikes in just the first five months of the year — part of a documented 600 percent year-on-year increase in drone-related deaths. This mirrors a broader global pattern of drones becoming the dominant weapon in conflicts that draw far less international attention than Ukraine's.
Why the world stopped watching
Sudan's crisis is larger by nearly every humanitarian measure than the wars in Gaza, Syria or Ukraine, yet it receives a fraction of the media coverage and funding response. Analysts and aid officials attribute this partly to the difficulty of reporting from inside an active war zone with almost no functioning infrastructure, and partly to competition for global attention from the simultaneous wars in the Middle East and Europe. The result is what the World Food Programme has called the world “forgetting about its most brutal conflict” even as humanitarian need is projected to reach 33.7 million people — roughly two-thirds of Sudan's population — in 2026.
Sudan is tracked continuously on the main conflict dashboard, under Theaters → Africa → Sudan.
Unclassified · OSINT · Not an independent intelligence product — synthesized from open-source theater data tracked elsewhere on this site