When a Country Becomes a Headline No One Clicks: Sudan’s War, in Voices and Numbers
Close your eyes for a moment and picture a city where the hospital is a series of mattresses in a living room, where children nibble at animal feed because the markets are empty, and where the Nile—ancient, forgiving—flows past people who have nowhere safe to draw a glass of water. That is Al-Fashir today. That is much of Sudan, two and a half years into a war that has folded ordinary life into a calamity few outside the region seem to notice.
The scale, in blunt numerals
Numbers only go so far, but they help us map the breadth of this collapse: roughly 12 million people displaced within their country; 24 million confronting acute food shortages; as many as 150,000 dead or missing. Around 260,000 people remain trapped in Al-Fashir, in Darfur, under siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). These are not abstractions. They’re neighbors, cousins, teachers, patients.
- Displaced: ~12 million
- Facing acute food shortages: ~24 million
- Dead or missing: up to 150,000
- People trapped in Al-Fashir: ~260,000
And yet, as one humanitarian put it, “Sudan has been turned upside down. Not a single corner of the country that hasn’t been affected.” Daniel O’Malley, who leads the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Sudan, tells it plainly: the main hospital in Al-Fashir has been struck again and again—more than a year and a half of pounding, and surgical teams are operating in people’s homes. “This is not the kind of surgery that should ever be happening in a living room,” he said.
Al-Fashir: a city under glass
Walk a mile in the streets of Al-Fashir through accounts from activists and aid workers: the town is described as an “open-air morgue.” Internet blackouts make documentation rare and dangerous. When a drone and artillery strike hit a displacement camp on 11 October, local groups later reported scores killed—children and elders burned, families vanished. Photographs were few. The world’s attention was thinner still.
“We sat and watched our food disappear,” says Amal, a volunteer who fled nearby villages and now helps cook for displaced families in a cramped community kitchen. “Sometimes the electricity comes for two hours at night. We boil what we can. We count who is still alive the next morning.” Her voice—quiet, exhausted—remembers the names of those who didn’t make it.
Everyday people paying the price
On the other side of the world, in a small town in County Kerry, Dr Rania Ahmed wakes up to messages about relatives she cannot reach. A Sudan-born anaesthetist and president of the Sudanese Doctors Union of Ireland, she has watched the health infrastructure collapse in real time.
“Hospitals are in ruins. The only cancer centre in the country is destroyed,” she says. “My aunt had a stroke and had to go to three different cities for help. Most hospitals turned her away. I don’t think she’ll survive.” Her anger and grief are tethered to facts: at least 15 million children out of school, clinics destroyed, supply chains severed.
Dr Ahmed’s plea is simple and bitter: “No one is talking about it. We need to push the world—Europe, the US—to act.” It’s a plea that echoes through Sudanese diasporas from Khartoum to London to Toronto: when the camera shutters close, the hunger keeps growing.
Health threats multiply: cholera and a ruined water system
War has not been the only killer. Disease has followed the fighting. Before the war Khartoum ran 13 water-treatment plants. Today, those plants are destroyed or inoperable. People drink Nile water and fall ill. By early September, the Ministry of Health in Sudan recorded over 100,000 suspected cholera cases and more than 2,500 deaths. Preventable illnesses gain ground when hospitals are rubble and pumps are silent.
Foreign hands, local wounds
External interests have not only watched; many have helped stoke the flames. Analysts say more than ten countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia have been entangled in Sudan’s fighting. The United Arab Emirates has been accused of providing the RSF with funding and arms—claims it denies, but which some experts and lawmakers judge credible. Egypt and, to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia have aligned with the Sudanese Armed Forces.
“It’s not that outside actors started this war,” says Dr Walt Kilroy, co-director of a conflict institute who has worked in the region. “But outside interests have played a big role in prolonging it. When war acquires an identity component—as it has in Darfur, where non-Arab communities have been targeted—it gets a poisonous life of its own.”
Why would foreign states be involved? The reasons are complex—strategic influence, regional rivalry, access to resources. “Sudan, for better or worse, has some gold,” Kilroy said. In a place where politics, ethnicity, and resource extraction intersect, violence finds fuel.
Donor fatigue, a yawning funding gap
The arithmetic of indifference is stark: the UN asked for roughly €3.57 billion for urgent humanitarian and protection work in Sudan this year. Donors have delivered only about €917 million—a funding shortfall of around 74%. Cuts to major aid streams, including reductions in USAID allocations, have left grassroots organisations carrying an impossible burden.
“At one point Khartoum had 1,800 community kitchens. Now there are around 600—dropping every month,” O’Malley reports. And yet, community volunteers keep cooking. “We share what little we have,” says Hassan, a former math teacher turned volunteer cook. “If I had a car I would take my students food every day.”
What does the world owe?
These are questions not of charity alone, but of responsibility. How do we think about conflicts that don’t fit neatly into our breaking-news cycles? How do we weigh the lives of people in Darfur or Khartoum in the same way we count others closer to global power centers?
International diplomacy has tried—last month the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt called for a three-month humanitarian truce, then a permanent ceasefire. The so-called Quad has clout, and yet leverage on the ground appears to be pushing toward continued fighting, not talks. “Mediation and leverage are both essential,” Kilroy said. “But right now the leverage is pulling toward war.”
What you can do, and why your attention matters
So what can a reader do when faced with such immensity? First: bear witness. Read. Share reliable reporting. Support organisations that operate on the ground—local NGOs, medical charities, water-and-sanitation teams—because they are the ones whose budgets have been slashed but who continue to feed the hungry and stitch up the wounded.
Second: ask your policymakers to keep Sudan on the agenda. Sanctions, arms embargos, pressure on external backers—these are levers. “Sometimes international pressure moves policies,” Dr Ahmed says. “We must not let this descend into a forgotten catastrophe.”
Finally, consider the human face behind the numbers. Think of Amal stirring a pot in a house that smells of smoke and boiled soup. Think of the teacher-turned-volunteer counting children’s names as if inventorying the living. Think of a surgeon in a living room, hands steady despite everything.
We live in an age where images travel fast and attention travels faster. But what if the stories we encounter are the ones we choose to keep alive? What if turning our gaze to Sudan today can help stop the next catastrophe tomorrow? The choice, in small acts or big policies, is ours.
