April 16, 2026 | The Free Press
How Sudan Became a Killing Field
On the third anniversary of Sudan’s war, the bloody fight is turning into the scene for proxy fights between the likes of Iran, Russia, and other global bad actors.
April 16, 2026 | The Free Press
How Sudan Became a Killing Field
On the third anniversary of Sudan’s war, the bloody fight is turning into the scene for proxy fights between the likes of Iran, Russia, and other global bad actors.
Excerpt
Three years in, Sudan’s brutal civil war shows no signs of relenting. An estimated 400,000 people have been killed since April 15, 2023. More than 12 million have been displaced internally. Another 4 million have fled to neighboring Egypt, Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, while more than 30 million need humanitarian assistance as a result of the “world’s largest hunger crisis.”
For a war of this scale, Sudan has drawn remarkably little sustained international attention. Compared to China’s Xinjiang (home to the Uyghurs) or Gaza, Sudan has remained largely peripheral to global discourse, despite the former area being massively harder to affect through outside intervention and the latter being much more contested. Here we have a confirmed genocide, a famine affecting a third of the population, and a death toll that dwarfs any other single conflict or atrocity on Earth, yet little interest in world capitals that can’t help but regularly decry what they perceive as the wrongs being perpetrated in certain foreign lands.
Mariam Wahba is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X and Instagram @themariamwahba.