Sudan’s 1,000 days of devastating war: A retired UN official on the deep roots of the conflict

For years, Sudan has existed in the global imagination as a peripheral crisis – periodically erupting into violence, then fading back into obscurity. The civil war that started in April 2023 has now lasted more than 1,000 days. Sudan is now the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, one of its most severe hunger emergencies and a conflict marked by brutality so extreme that seasoned humanitarian observers struggle for language to describe it.

I had a view of the violence in 2007, when I opted for an international posting as a United Nations Head of Field Office in the remote Sudanese town of Mukjar in West Darfur, bordering Chad and the Central African Republic.

My office sat amidst four sites where genocides are alleged to have been committed on Darfuri communities by Janjaweed, the militia controlled by Omar al-Bashir, the country’s longtime president.

Large swathes of land and villages had been burnt. When the wind blew, cinders would fly up from the shells of charred hut shells. We would routinely find skulls and bones.

Genocide to a fragile peace

The roots of Sudan’s catastrophe stretch back decades. Shortly after it became independent from the British in 1956, a war broke out between the Muslim-dominated north and the Christian- and animist-dominated south. South Sudan eventually became a separate country in 2011.

When my adolescent daughters joined me for their vacations in Khartoum in 2007, Sudan’s capital was described as one of the safest cities in Africa. Not once did we feel fear while on the streets. That calm, however, rested on repression by the two-decade-long military dictatorship led by Omar-al-Bashir.

During Bashir’s dictatorship, over half a million Sudanese had been killed by his Janjaweed militia.

Under Bashir, the state perfected the system of outsourcing violence to militias. It offered them impunity and denied responsibility for their actions. Among these military-affiliated militias were the Janjaweed – groups that later formalised into the Rapid Support Forces.

Many of their victims were from Darfur, a remote semi-desert plateau in western Sudan that was home to the Fur tribes. Bashir was eventually indicted by the International Criminal Court.

The current conflict started in April 2023, a reverberation of Bashir being overthrown in 2019 by a people’s revolution. The revolution briefly rekindled hope. Civilians demanded democracy, accountability and an end to military rule. But this transition was derailed by the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.

Since then, though, these forces have fallen out. The violence engulfing Sudan today is the result of a battle for control between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces.

Janjaweed to ‘literal vampires’

The Rapid Support Forces has carried out massacres, racialised killings, systematic rape and ransom detentions across Darfur, Kordofan and beyond, audaciously filming themselves hurling racial slurs before executions.

In the early 2000s, the same Janjaweed had ridden on horses and pick-ups into the settlements in Darfur of communities that they considered racially inferior and “slaves”, raping, looting and destroying homes.

Some of the current disturbing reports emerging from Darfur’s capital of El-Fasher describe fighters of the Rapid Support Forces forcibly drawing blood from civilians and captured soldiers, leading to them being described as “literal vampires”.

Medical workers have not been spared. Doctors and nurses have disappeared, detained by Rapid Support Forces fighters, leaving entire communities without care. Sexual violence has been deployed as a weapon of war. The scale is immense, with women and girls, particularly from non-Arab communities bearing the brunt.

El Fasher: A Crime Scene

Through much of the early 2000s, El Fasher was a base for humanitarian and protection forces. In the latest civil war, it had been the last stronghold of the Sudanese Armed Forces. It fell to the Rapid Support Forces in October 2025, after an 18-month siege. They unleashed a massacre.

When United Nations teams finally accessed El Fasher again at the end of December, they described the city as having turned into a crime scene. Satellite imagery and forensic reporting documented burned bodies and mass killings.

Of the roughly 260,000 civilians believed to have been alive there before the takeover, many are now dead, detained, trapped or cut off entirely from lifesaving aid. Children victims are the most visible, with acute malnourishment, abandoned and lost children arriving alone at displacement sites, separated from families whose fate remains unknown.

The fate of Western Darfur is reportedly worse than that of Northern Darfur, with little news emerging from refugees fleeing to Chad and Central African Republic. They are being received by the United Nations Refugee Agency in areas already bereft, impoverished and remote.

Collapsing humanitarian system

The suffering in Sudan has collided with a global retreat from humanitarian responsibility, with funding cuts forcing the United Nations to slash its appeals. The United Nations leadership has described 2025 as a year of “brutality, impunity and indifference”.

Forced displacement in Sudan is the current norm for civilians to survive the violence and impunity of both the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces.

Faced with 40 million people having acute needs, aid workers must make impossible choices. The Sudan crisis dwarfs most others, yet donor fatigue and geopolitical distractions have left response efforts dangerously under-resourced.

Thousands of Sudanese who escaped to Egypt have been detained and deported back into the war zone. Human rights groups are documenting arrests, abuse and killings by Egyptian security services. Many refugees are deported as they lack residency permits, requirements almost impossible to meet due to massive registration backlogs.

In some cases, identity documents issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have been confiscated deliberately, stripping refugees of legal protection and access to asylum. Community leaders and even children have been targeted. Egypt’s migration containment deals with the European Union, designed to block onward movement, have turned neighbouring countries into extensions of Sudan’s violence.

Sudan at the brink

Diplomatically, Sudan is trapped.

The Sudanese Armed Forces have rejected US-led truce proposals, claiming that they are biased toward the United Arab Emirates, which is widely accused of backing the Rapid Support Forces. The Army chief has framed the conflict as a sovereign army defending civilians from a genocidal militia, a narrative that ignores the state’s long history of cultivating the Rapid Support Forces and their joint role in crushing Sudan’s democratic movement.

Civilian leaders have attempted to reassert themselves, forming a “Third Pole” opposed to both generals. Yet, amid guns, drones and foreign interference, their influence remains limited.

As Sudan concludes 1,000 days of war, the consequences are unmistakable: mass death, starvation, sexual violence, and the systematic destruction of a society and a nation, the largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded.

Yet, amid the devastation, fragments of resistance persist. There are youth ambassadors working for peace, farmers planting seeds through United Nations programmes and communities struggling to survive under siege.

Whether these fragile efforts can outlast the violence remains uncertain.

It is clear that Sudan’s tragedy is not inevitable, but the result of deliberate choices by armed actors, by political elites, and by an international community that has too often looked away.

Sumbul Rizvi has recently retired from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. She served in Darfur for two years from 2007.