There are images that lodge in the mind not because they are beautiful, but because they refuse to be ignored. Satellite photos of El-Fasher — the dusty, ochre city at the heart of North Darfur — show smudges on the earth that are unmistakably human: dark, irregular stains in places where people once walked, bought bread, prayed and worked.

“Bloodstains on the ground in El-Fasher have been photographed from space,” the UN human rights chief Volker Türk said recently, in an address that sounded less like diplomacy and more like an accusation. “The stain on the record of the international community is less visible, but no less damaging.” His words were raw, and they landed in Geneva at a special session of the UN Human Rights Council convened to respond to the horrors unfolding there.

To walk through a city after such violence is to encounter a thousand small ruptures: a child’s sandal abandoned in a market, a mosque door blocked with rubble, a clinic where staff count syringes the way other people count change. In El-Fasher, many who survived speak in the quiet, compressed tones of those who have seen too much.

What the UN session is asking for

Diplomats in Geneva are considering a draft resolution that would send a UN fact-finding mission to al-Fasher to investigate alleged violations, identify perpetrators, and collect evidence that could be used in legal proceedings. The International Criminal Court, the UN has said, is “following the situation closely.” It is an attempt to turn outrage into action, and action into accountability.

“There has been too much pretence and performance, and too little action,” Türk told delegates. “It must stand up against these atrocities — a display of naked cruelty used to subjugate and control an entire population.” Those are heavy charges. They also carry the promise that the world will be watching.

Voices from the ground

“We fled at night with nothing but the clothes on our backs,” said Fatima, a teacher who left her home in the Sabra neighborhood. Her voice, steady but thin, caught on the memory of the first gunshots. “We could hear the soldiers shouting. I still have the ash of our house on my hands.”

A young nurse at the temporary clinic near the market — who asked not to be named for safety reasons — described a steady stream of wounded arriving with wounds the staff had never seen before. “Not just bullets. Burns. Stabbings. People showing up with their hands bound. We stopped counting at a hundred. We don’t have the medicines, the lights, sometimes not even the bandages.”

From the international aid community, a regional coordinator for a major NGO put the situation into a blunt frame: “What we are seeing in Darfur now is a consolidation of control by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after they took al-Fasher on 26 October. That takeover has accelerated abuses and pushed communities into the road and into exile.” The coordinator asked not to be named because operational security is a constant concern.

Context that matters

Darfur is not a stranger to violence. Decades of marginalization, ecological pressures and a long history of conflict have made the region fragile in ways that are both structural and immediate. The RSF — an armed group that evolved from the infamous Janjaweed militias — has been locked in a bitter, more-than-two-and-a-half-year struggle with the Sudanese army. When al-Fasher fell, many analysts said it effectively cemented RSF control over much of Darfur.

Precise casualty figures remain contested and hard to verify. UN agencies, human rights groups and journalists offer varying tallies. What is not in doubt is scale: widespread killings, mass displacements, and the systematic destruction of neighborhoods and livelihoods that has left tens of thousands — possibly more — unable to return.

What the draft fact-finding mission could do

If approved, a UN fact-finding team would collect testimony, document patterns of abuse, and endeavor to identify chains of command. It could lay the groundwork for prosecutions, sanctions or other measures. “My staff are gathering evidence of violations that could be used in legal proceedings,” Türk said, an explicit signal that the work on the ground may move from the moral realm into the legal.

For survivors, the mention of justice is both balm and echo. “We want to see the faces that did this,” said an elder who returned to El-Fasher for the first time after months in a displacement camp. “We want them to know we are not a number.”

Local color and human detail

El-Fasher used to be known for markets alive with the smell of roasted peanuts and the calls of traders selling orange cloths and bright spices. Now, even when people tentatively trickle back, the rhythm is off. Shops open later; men gather in small knots in the shade rather than at full tables. Women whisper about routes that are safe and those that are not. Children, who used to play football in the wide central squares, now do so with an intensity that looks like defiance.

“We speak about the future like it is a distant country,” said a young man who rebuilds torn roofs for pay. “We talk about planting, about weddings, but first we talk about the bodies. First the bodies.”

Why this matters beyond Sudan

El-Fasher is not isolated. What happens in Darfur reverberates across the Sahel and into global debates about the international community’s capacity to stop atrocity crimes. The scenario raises urgent questions: When should the world intervene? What forms of response are both feasible and legitimate? Can investigative work pave the way to real accountability when political will is fragmented?

Those are not theoretical questions. They shape funding, humanitarian corridors, refugee policies and the lives of millions who watch the world decide whether to act.

At the crossroads of law, politics and memory

Justice in cases like this is slow and contested. The International Criminal Court has the reach to open probes, but it operates in a world of politics and constraints. Sanctions can punish leaders; humanitarian aid can save lives. Fact-finding missions can document atrocities. None of these measures is a panacea. Still, documentation matters. Naming matters. For survivors, to be recorded is to be acknowledged.

“We are watching you, and justice will prevail,” Türk said — a line meant as a warning, meant as comfort, meant as an insistence that the faces in the satellite photographs are not anonymous.

A final note to readers

What do you do when a city appears on a satellite photo as a patch of blood? Do you scroll past, half-believing images on your screen, or do you pause and ask who is left behind? We live in a global era in which distance has been partially eroded by images and data — and yet the distance between sight and action feels wider than ever.

This is a story about a city and a continent. It is also about the choices the international community makes when confronted with evidence of mass suffering. It is about whether institutions like the UN and ICC can translate words into meaningful protection. And it is about people — mothers, nurses, shopkeepers — trying to rebuild lives amid the din of geopolitics.

If you take one thing away, let it be this: stained earth is not just a satellite image. It is a map of loss and of a stubborn, human insistence that lives matter. What will we do with that knowledge?

When I arrived in Khartoum — the city where the Blue and White Nile meet and where the dust always seems to taste faintly of iron — the skyline was broken by more than just unfinished apartments and telephone wires. Thin columns of smoke rose from neighbourhoods that had once been full of children’s cries and the smells of fresh bread. Street vendors who used to sell steamy cups of black tea spoke in whispers. A doctor at a makeshift clinic told me, “You get used to the sound of distant booming. You don’t get used to the silence after the ambulances stop coming.”

This is Sudan in the third year of a conflict that began between two men who once stood shoulder to shoulder.

The Two Generals, One Country Torn

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo — known to many as Hemedti — were once partners in a military transition that followed the 2019 ouster of Omar al-Bashir. In October 2021 they formalized power in a coup, and by April 2023 their partnership had cracked into open warfare. The fighting has killed tens of thousands, forced nearly 12 million people from their homes, and pushed Sudan into a humanitarian abyss that reverberates across the Sahel and Red Sea coasts.

Today, the army nominally governs from Port Sudan on the Red Sea, with a new prime minister, Kamil Idris, installed in May 2025. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose lineage traces back to the Janjaweed militias — horse and camel-mounted fighters accused of atrocities in Darfur two decades ago — have carved out their own administration in Nyala and now control much of western Sudan.

Lines on the Map, Threads from Afar

What started as a power struggle between two military leaders has become a patchwork of battle lines fed by accusations of foreign meddling. Each side accuses the other of importing weapons, mercenaries, and the technical means to strike from afar. The United Nations has repeatedly urged nations to “refrain from external interference,” but the calls have had the brittle ring of a plea thrown into a storm.

Who is accused of what?

• Egypt: Cairo treats General Burhan as Sudan’s legitimate authority and has hosted him. Khartoum’s RSF has accused Egypt of providing direct military support — a claim Egypt denies.
• United Arab Emirates: The army accuses Abu Dhabi of supplying the RSF with drones and even mercenaries. The UAE has denied interference despite UN and open-source reports suggesting otherwise.
• Libya and Khalifa Haftar: Forces aligned with eastern Libyan strongman Haftar are accused of backing RSF offensives; Haftar denies these charges.
• Chad: The army claims that Chad has been a conduit for supplies to the RSF — a charge that has splintered local politics in N’Djamena, which denies the allegations.
• Turkey: Ankara has shown support for the army and, according to several outlets, supplied drones used against the RSF.
• Iran: Diplomatic ties with Khartoum were restored in October 2023; the RSF has accused Iran of arming Burhan’s forces.
• Russia: Long-standing military ties under the Bashir era and recent cooperation agreements keep Moscow in the background, with past talk of a Red Sea base that reverberates across regional security calculations.
• Kenya: Weapons reportedly labelled “Made in Kenya” were found in RSF caches — an accusation Nairobi says is misleading. Kenya also hosted the RSF’s political wing at a founding meeting.

Voices from the Ground

“They fire at night,” said Mariam, a mother of four from Omdurman who now sleeps in a neighbour’s garage. “Not because our streets are military, but because they want the sky.” Her voice is weary, but precise. The fear she describes is not only for bullets but for the fragile infrastructure that pushes water into taps and keeps hospital lights on.

A humanitarian worker who has worked in Darfur and Khartoum for years told me, “The war used to be about farms and oil; now it’s about the drones and the supply chains. Whoever gets the advanced technology decides the tempo.” This worker asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

From Cairo, an analyst close to Egyptian policy said bluntly, “Egypt sees stability in Sudan as a matter of national security — Burhan is their guarantor.” In contrast, a diplomat in Abu Dhabi told me, “The UAE has strategic interests in the Red Sea, but we do not operate mercenaries in Sudan.” Both statements were made with the careful cadence of those who balance public posture with private posture.

Humanitarian Numbers and the Slow Burn

The scale of the crisis is not abstract. UN agencies and independent monitors estimate nearly 12 million people displaced within and outside the country. Hospitals are broken, wheat imports are threatened, and the Red Sea — a choke point for global shipping — hums with a new volatility as external powers maneuver for influence.

“This isn’t just a civil war,” said Professor Fatima El-Sayed, a political scientist who studies the Horn of Africa. “It’s a geopolitical contest remade by drones, deep pockets, and proxy logistics. When external actors arm, fund, and diplomatically prostrate themselves to local militias, they make the violence last longer, and they make it deadlier.”

What’s at Stake Beyond Sudan’s Borders?

The war in Sudan ripples beyond Khartoum’s burnt markets. It touches migration routes to Europe, destabilises neighbouring Chad and Libya, and threatens shipping lanes that feed the world. In the context of a resurgent great-power jockeying in Africa, Sudan is a mirror for wider competition: access to ports on the Red Sea, influence in the Horn of Africa, and the shadow economy of commodity trafficking.

Are we watching the future of interstate conflict — fought with outsourced fighters, remotely piloted aircraft, and deniable supply chains? Or is Sudan a tragic outlier, where local ambition meets reckless international appetite? The answer matters not only to policymakers but to the millions whose daily reality is fear, hunger, and the impossible task of rebuilding lives between intermittent truces.

Where to from Here?

There are no easy answers. The UN’s calls for restraint ring hollow without enforceable mechanisms. Local ceasefires can hold for days, sometimes weeks, but the underlying rivalry — a collision of two military machines and their patrons — endures. If anything, the international community’s failure to coordinate a clear, consistent response has been an accelerant.

“We need a regional compact,” said an African Union negotiator. “Not speeches. Not press releases. A real plan that ties reconstruction funding to disarmament and reconciles security needs with civilian governance.” Whether such a compact will emerge, or be powerful enough to tie the hands of external actors, is uncertain.

For now, the streets of Sudan wait. Markets will reopen. People will plant their small plots again. But the scars of this war — the bodies, the uprooted communities, the fractured trust — will take a long time to stitch together. And every time a foreign weapon arrives, every convoy that crosses a dusty border, the possibility of peace slips a little further away.

How willing is the world to defend the idea that borders should not be battlefields for others’ ambitions? And how long can ordinary people — those who knead bread, tend camels, teach children their letters — keep living under the shadow of foreign strings pulled far away?

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.