While the world has been focused on Gaza and Ukraine, another catastrophe has been quietly accelerating in the heart of Africa.
Sudan’s civil war — now entering its second brutal year — has reached a horrifying new low.
In the western region of Darfur, the city of El Fasher remains under relentless siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, triggering a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe. Starvation is now weaponized.
With supply routes severed, medical centers destroyed and aid convoys under attack, the United Nations reports that desperate families are surviving on animal feed, wild leaves and garbage.
The city’s graveyards are expanding daily, and local residents say they they can’t dig fresh graves fast enough to bury the dead.
The U.N. World Food Programme has confirmed it can no longer reach El Fasher, citing near-constant shelling, road blockades and drone strikes on infrastructure.
The rainy season has compounded the isolation, turning access roads into swamps and rendering humanitarian aid virtually impossible. UNICEF warns of irreversible harm to an entire generation of Sudanese children: Severe malnutrition, lack of access to vaccines and total health system collapse have pushed hundreds of thousands of children to the edge.
Only 23% of the U.N.’s $4.16 billion humanitarian appeal for Sudan has been funded. The shortfall is catastrophic.
In South Darfur alone, more than 1,100 suspected cholera cases and dozens of deaths have been reported since May, and disease outbreaks are sweeping through displaced persons camps.
What’s unfolding in El Fasher is just a microcosm of a much broader disaster.
Since April 2023, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 12 million — nearly a quarter of Sudan’s population.
Ethnic violence has become a hallmark of RSF operations in West Darfur, where Darfuri Arab militias aligned with the group have carried out systematic massacres of non-Arab communities, particularly the Masalit. These mass killings, which include the torching of refugee camps and sexual violence, have prompted international warnings of genocide.
The January 2025 RSF drone attack on a maternity hospital in El Fasher, which killed 70 women and children, epitomizes the deliberate targeting of civilians and medical facilities.
Despite international condemnation and prior Saudi and U.S.-led negotiations, peace talks remain suspended. Neither side believes it has already exhausted its military options.
In the absence of a ceasefire, the war is metastasizing. Chad has fortified its border with Darfur, fearing a flood of refugees and RSF incursions. Egypt has conducted large-scale military drills near the frontier and remains cautious of a regional spillover.
The RSF now controls most of Darfur and much of western Sudan, raising fears of a de facto partition of the country.
The international system is once again struggling to respond to a man-made famine and war of attrition that bears all the hallmarks of past genocides.
The siege of El Fasher is not just a humanitarian emergency — it appears to be a campaign of systemic annihilation, enabled by international paralysis and underfunded aid.
Without immediate intervention — through humanitarian corridors, funding for food and health services and international accountability for war crimes — the collapse of El Fasher could become a defining stain on the conscience of the global community for decades to come.
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