Sudan: the largest hunger crisis on earth, and the least reported
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There is a reasonable argument that Sudan is the worst humanitarian catastrophe currently underway anywhere, and a near-certain one that it receives less coverage per person affected than any other conflict of comparable scale.
Around 24.6 million people — roughly half the population — face acute hunger. Famine has been confirmed in El Fasher in North Darfur and in Kadugli in South Kordofan. Four million children are acutely malnourished. Those figures come from United Nations assessments and Human Rights Watch’s 2026 country reporting, and they have been broadly stable for long enough that the lack of attention cannot be explained by their being new.
How it started
In 2019, a mass civil uprising ended Omar al-Bashir’s thirty-year rule. What replaced it was a fragile transition shared between civilians and two military factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a paramilitary force descended from the Janjaweed militias of the earlier Darfur conflict.
In October 2021 the two generals jointly removed the civilians. In April 2023 they turned on each other. The war since then has been a contest between two armed factions over a state neither has any popular mandate to hold.
El Fasher
El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur outside RSF control, fell in October 2025 after a siege lasting roughly eighteen months. The siege had already produced famine in the displacement camps around the city before the city itself was taken.
What followed has been documented by satellite. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab’s analysis estimated between 30,000 and 60,000 people killed in El Fasher alone. In July 2026 a United Nations fact-finding mission concluded that the RSF’s systematic campaign in Darfur — mass killings, sexual violence used at scale, and deliberate starvation — amounts to genocide. Amnesty International has described the atrocities there as a stain on the conscience of humanity.
The word genocide is used carefully on this site. In this instance it is the conclusion of a UN mission, not our characterisation.
Who is arming this
The RSF’s principal external backer is the United Arab Emirates. The evidence is not circumstantial: UN panel findings and a Sunday Times investigation have traced Emirati weapons routes into Darfur, including mortar rounds sold to the UAE in 2019 and re-exported to Sudan in breach of end-use restrictions.
The mechanism is gold. The RSF controls significant mining areas in Darfur and moves bullion out through Chad and the Central African Republic to Dubai. Sudan’s own central bank data shows the UAE took roughly 90% of the country’s official gold exports in the first half of 2025. Sudan has filed a case at the International Court of Justice alleging Emirati complicity in crimes against humanity. The UAE denies supplying arms to any party.
The Sudanese Armed Forces are not a clean alternative. They have conducted indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian areas throughout the war, and are credibly accused of war crimes of their own.
The part almost nobody covers
Sudan has one of the most remarkable traditions of civil resistance anywhere. Popular uprisings removed governments in 1964 and again in 1985. The 2018–19 revolution that ended Bashir’s rule was organised largely through neighbourhood Resistance Committees — horizontal, local, deliberately leaderless structures that coordinated protest across the country.
Those committees still exist. Through two and a half years of war they have run communal kitchens, clinics and evacuation networks in areas both armies have abandoned, frequently under fire, largely unfunded and almost entirely unreported outside Sudan.
That is the part worth carrying. Not the generals.