Sudan & Darfur

The War That the World Ignored

150,000+ killed. 12 million+ displaced. Famine declared. The world looked away.

Khartoum, once a city of four million, is a ruin. Its hospitals are bombed. Its streets are mass graves. Its people have fled — on foot, by donkey, across desert and river — into a world that has not come to meet them. What is happening in Sudan is not a distant tragedy. It is an active atrocity, unfolding in real time, largely invisible to the global conscience.

This is the story the world chose not to tell. NZETE tells it.

How It Began: The Road to April 2023

To understand the war, you must understand what came before it. In 2019, after thirty years of Omar al-Bashir's brutal dictatorship — a regime indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur — the Sudanese people rose up. Millions filled the streets in one of the most extraordinary popular uprisings in African history. Bashir fell. The world applauded.

What replaced him was not democracy. It was a fragile power-sharing arrangement between two military factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti. The RSF was the direct descendant of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the Darfur genocide between 2003 and 2008, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 300,000 people and the displacement of 2.5 million more.

These two men — both implicated in atrocities, both enriched by Sudan's gold trade — were supposed to govern together. The arrangement was always a countdown. On April 15, 2023, the clock ran out.

April 15, 2023: The Day Khartoum Burned

Fighting erupted simultaneously across Khartoum and in Darfur. RSF fighters seized the presidential palace, the national broadcaster, and strategic positions across the capital within hours. SAF warplanes bombed RSF positions in residential neighborhoods. The city of four million became a battlefield overnight.

Civilians had no warning. No evacuation. No shelter. They hid in bathrooms, under beds, in stairwells — listening to artillery and airstrikes shake the walls around them. Foreigners were evacuated within days by their governments. Sudanese civilians were left behind.

Within weeks, Khartoum was largely under RSF control. The looting was systematic — hospitals stripped of equipment, homes emptied, banks robbed. Doctors reported that RSF fighters occupied wards, used operating theaters as barracks, and executed patients. (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2023.)

Darfur: Genocide, Again

While the world focused on Khartoum, Darfur was being destroyed.

In El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, RSF forces and allied Arab militias carried out what Human Rights Watch described in November 2023 as “mass ethnic killings” of the Masalit people. Neighborhoods were surrounded. Men and boys were separated from women and children and shot. Bodies were thrown into the streets, into wells, into the Wadi Azum river.

Survivors described fighters going door to door, asking for ethnicity before deciding who lived and who died. The governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abbakar — himself Masalit — was killed by RSF fighters after publicly accusing them of genocide. His death was filmed. The footage circulated. The world did not respond.

The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United States government have all used the word genocide to describe what is happening in Darfur. It is not a metaphor. It is a legal designation. And it is happening now.

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War

Across Sudan — in Khartoum, in Darfur, in Kordofan — sexual violence has been deployed as a deliberate instrument of terror and ethnic destruction. The UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict documented mass rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery carried out by RSF fighters and allied militias.

Médecins Sans Frontières reported treating survivors as young as nine years old. Many victims cannot access medical care. The true scale of sexual violence remains vastly undercounted. (MSF, 2024; UN Special Representative, 2024.)

Famine: A Man-Made Catastrophe

In August 2024, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur. It was the first famine declaration anywhere in the world in years. It was not caused by drought. It was caused by war.

Over 25 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — face acute hunger. Aid convoys have been blocked, looted, and attacked. The RSF has used starvation as a military tactic, cutting off supply routes to besieged areas. Children are dying of malnutrition in displacement camps while food sits in warehouses that cannot be reached. (WFP, 2024; IPC, 2024.)

The Foreign Hands Behind the War

This war did not sustain itself. It was fueled.

The United Arab Emirates has been credibly accused — by UN experts, Reuters investigations, and multiple governments — of supplying weapons to the RSF through Chad and the Central African Republic, in violation of a UN arms embargo. Russia, through Wagner Group operatives, has provided support to the RSF in exchange for access to Sudan’s gold and a potential Red Sea naval base. Egypt has backed the SAF. Saudi Arabia has interests on both sides.

The result: a proxy war fought in the bodies of Sudanese civilians, sustained by foreign money and weapons, with no external power willing to pay the political cost of stopping it.

The Blackout

Sudan’s internet has been repeatedly shut down since the war began. Journalists have been blocked, expelled, and killed. The RSF has actively prevented documentation of its atrocities — confiscating phones, destroying evidence, targeting witnesses.

What we know, we know because of survivors who risked their lives to speak. The full truth of what has happened in Sudan since April 2023 may never be fully known. That is not an accident. It is a strategy.

The International Failure

The UN Security Council has been largely paralyzed — Russia and China blocking meaningful action. Peace talks in Jeddah and Geneva have produced ceasefires that lasted hours. No peacekeeping force has been deployed. No arms embargo meaningfully enforced.

The architecture of international protection — built after Rwanda, after Bosnia, after the first Darfur — has failed Sudan completely.

Why NZETE Speaks

NZETE means Tree in Lingala. Rooted. Enduring. African. We cannot build a brand on African identity and remain silent when Africa bleeds. The people of Sudan are not statistics. They are the same people whose strength, whose culture, whose survival against impossible odds is the foundation of everything NZETE stands for.

Know what is happening. Say their names. Do not look away.

What You Can Do

• Donate: MSF — msf.org  |  UNHCR — unhcr.org  |  Sudan Relief Fund
• Amplify: Follow @RadioDabanga and @HRW for ground-level updates. Share verified reporting.
• Demand accountability: Contact your elected representatives. Ask what your government is doing to enforce the arms embargo.

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Sources: UN OCHA Sudan Situation Reports (2023–2024) · Human Rights Watch, “Darfur: Mass Ethnic Killings” (November 2023) · Amnesty International Sudan Reports (2023–2024) · Médecins Sans Frontières Field Reports (2023–2024) · IPC Famine Declaration, Zamzam Camp (August 2024) · UNHCR Sudan Emergency Data (2024) · UN World Food Programme Sudan (2024) · Reuters Investigation: UAE Arms to RSF (2024) · UN Panel of Experts Report on Sudan Arms Embargo (2024) · UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (2024) · International Criminal Court, Sudan situation docket.