Sudan’s Silent Catastrophe: The background on Sudan’s civil war and severe humanitarian emergency.
- The Colloquium
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
By Priya Caswell
The recent capture of El Fasher on October 27th, by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support forces (RSF) marks a devastating new chapter in Sudan’s ongoing civil war. After an 18 month siege, RSF fighters took the city, located in the western region of Darfur, ending control of one of the army’s largest strongholds. In the process, they committed brutal atrocities, including the massacre of over 450 patients and workers at the Saudi Maternity Hospital, which they proudly posted to social media.
The city’s capture signals a grim escalation of the conflict, which began in April 2023, when civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the militia RSF plunged the country into chaos. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces and Sudan’s de facto president, now faces his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, who leads the RSF. Once allies in the 2021 coup that toppled Sudan’s joint military-civilian government, the two men are now locked in a brutal struggle for power.
The RSF assumed control of Sudan’s border with Libya and Egypt in June 2025, and with its latest victory in El-Fasher, it now controls the majority of the Darfur region and neighbouring Kordofan, leaving the Sudanese Armed forces cornered in the northeast. Port Sudan, on the Red sea has become the army’s last major stronghold, though RSF drone strikes weakened the city in March.
The RSF emerged in 2013 out of the remnants of the Janjaweed, the Arab milita responsible for widespread atrocities in the Darfur region in the early 2000s, including ethnic cleansing campaigns that international investigations later characterised as genocide against the region’s non-Arab population. This legacy has raised concerns that similar patterns of violence and ethnic killings would recur wherever the RSF gained territorial control. The paramilitary’s advance on El Fasher has reinforced these fears - nearly 90,000 people have fled the city in recent weeks.
Sadly, these fears have come to fruition, evidenced by the documented killing of hundreds of patients and medical staff at the city’s Saudi Maternity hospital, testimonies emerging from survivors and corroborating satellite imagery and video footage. In January, the United States formally concluded that the RSF and its affiliated militias had engaged in systematic, ethnically targeted killings as well as widespread sexual violence, and despite sanctions, the recent events of El Fasher prove that these patterns of violence are continuing.
Across Sudan, the humanitarian consequences of the conflict are severe and worsening. The destruction of infrastructure, restrictions on humanitarian access, and the deliberate targeting of civilian supply lines have made the situation increasingly precarious. Famine has already been declared in parts of the country, and The United Nations estimates that more than 12 million people have been displaced.
Despite the scale of human suffering, the conflict has received comparatively limited international attention in comparison to crises in Gaza or Ukraine. This imbalance has affected the mobilisation of resources and diplomatic engagement needed to address the situation. The convergence of armed violence, environmental catastrophes and famine places Sudan among the most pressing humanitarian emergencies in the world today - and paradoxically, one of the most neglected.
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