On April 15, 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces turned their guns on each other — and on the country between them. Three years later, that war has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 12 million people, and earned the grim distinction of producing the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with at least 25 million Sudanese — more than half the country's population — now facing acute food insecurity.
The toll is not evenly distributed. In Darfur, where the RSF and allied Arab militias have conducted what the United States government formally designated as genocide, entire non-Arab communities have been systematically targeted. El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur not under RSF control, remains under siege. Hundreds of thousands of civilians — many of them women and children who survived the first Darfur genocide two decades ago — are trapped inside it, with food, medicine, and safe passage all but cut off.
Sudan's collapse has not stayed within Sudan's borders. An estimated 700,000 refugees have crossed into Chad, straining a country that was already among the world's poorest. South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Egypt have each absorbed significant waves of the displaced, compounding regional instability across a belt of nations already managing their own fragile political economies. For West Africa, the lessons are visible and urgent: armed conflicts do not respect borders, and Sudan's unravelling is a warning about what unchecked institutional breakdown looks like at scale.
How Sudan arrived here is a story about a transition that the world celebrated too soon. After the 2019 popular uprising toppled Omar al-Bashir, a fragile civilian-military partnership was supposed to shepherd the country toward democracy. Instead, the SAF and RSF — two armed factions that had co-existed in an uneasy, lucrative arrangement — fell out over who would control the future. The RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, had grown rich on gold and violence. The SAF, under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, had never truly surrendered its grip on state power. When the deal collapsed, it was ordinary Sudanese people — in Khartoum's shelled apartment blocks, in the villages of Jebel Marra, in the university corridors of Omdurman — who paid the price.
Yet amid the documentation of atrocity, a parallel record has emerged. The New Humanitarian's three-year accounting of the war captures not only the scale of destruction but the remarkable resistance networks that Sudanese civilians have built from within. Emergency Response Rooms — decentralised, community-led groups operating across conflict zones — have coordinated food distribution, medical referrals, and evacuation routes in areas where no international aid organisation could reach. These structures, largely run by young Sudanese volunteers, many of them women, represent what humanitarian observers are calling one of the most significant examples of civilian self-organisation in a modern conflict. They are also, as the RSF has demonstrated by targeting their coordinators, perceived as a genuine threat.
The third anniversary has prompted renewed calls from the United Nations and African Union for a ceasefire, but there is little reason for optimism in the immediate term. Neither the SAF nor the RSF has shown willingness to submit to a negotiated settlement, and external actors — including Gulf states and Wagner-linked networks — continue to supply both sides with weapons and political cover. What to watch in the months ahead: whether El Fasher holds against a widely anticipated full RSF assault; whether the African Union's mediators can produce a framework with any enforcement mechanism; and whether the Emergency Response Rooms can sustain their operations as their funding dries up and their leaders face targeted killings.
Three years in, Sudan is no longer a crisis on the edge of catastrophe — it is the catastrophe, and the question is simply how many more millions of lives will be consumed before the world decides to treat it that way.
