A civil war in Sudan that has killed 150,000 people and forced more than 11 million others from their homes, by some estimates, prompted the U.S. government on Tuesday to declare that a genocide had been perpetrated by one of the war’s main antagonists, the ethnic Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces.
The war, which has drawn in foreign countries and a host of armed groups, now threatens to spill over Sudan’s borders. After 21 months of fighting, thousands have been killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, countless women and girls have been subjected to sexual violence, and millions are hungry, in the world’s first officially declared famine since 2020.
So many people have been uprooted that the United Nations says Sudan is now home to the world’s largest displacement crisis — a “living nightmare,” in the words of Amy Pope, director general of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
Genocide Old and New
The Sudanese army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, were once allies. In 2021, they worked together to stage a military coup. But they later split after failing to merge their forces.
In April 2023, they went to war, with gun battles raging in the capital, Khartoum.
The R.S.F., as the Rapid Support Forces is known, is composed of the remnants of another militia, the Janjaweed, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people two decades ago in the western Darfur region of Sudan. Those killings led to genocide charges at the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019.
On Tuesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said that the R.S.F., and allied militias had committed new acts of genocide in Darfur in 2023. The target, officials said, was the Masalit people, a non-Arab ethnic minority in Sudan, where the population and the armed forces are predominantly Arabs.
In July 2023, a mass grave was uncovered, holding the bodies of 87 people, most of them Masalit who rights groups said had likely been killed by the R.S.F. There have also been reports of sexual violence, torture and killings of Masalit people.
Death toll estimates for the war vary widely. Last year — before the recent waves of fighting — the American envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, said the number could be as high as 150,000. In January, 2024, an independent panel of experts submitted a report to the U.N. that said that in December 2023 alone, some 10,000 to 15,000 people had been killed in R.S.F. massacres in El Geneina, a city in West Darfur.
As of last July, at least 33,000 people had been injured in the fighting, according to the World Health Organization. That figure has very likely increased.
Mass Displacement
More than 11.5 million Sudanese people — almost one-quarter of the country’s population — have been displaced from their homes, many of them repeatedly, including 8.7 million who fled during the current war, according to a U.N. report released in this week. Since the fighting began, over 3.3 million people have crossed Sudan’s borders into neighboring countries, among them Egypt, Chad and South Sudan.
More than half of all those displaced are children, the report said. Many are living in dire conditions, with little food or water. Some refugees living at a camp at Adré, across the border in Chad, sleep on the ground, even through the rain.
The catastrophe grew still worse last October, when over 135,000 people in one state, El Gezira in eastern Sudan, were displaced over the span of 10 days by a brutal surge of violence in the region, the United Nations reported.
“Words cannot describe this kind of thing,” said Mohamed Ahmed, deputy head of the Doctors Without Borders mission in Sudan. “It’s really a feeling of desperation.”
Many of the people fleeing Gezira ended up in another state, Gedaref, in the country’s southeast, where Mr. Ahmed has been working. The condition in which many children arrive at his clinic. he said, remains with him long after he lays eyes upon them.
“Emaciated, tired,” he said, “many of them displaced two or three times.”
Starvation and Sickness
Around 25.6 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — faced crisis-level hunger conditions in 2024, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative steered by the U.N. and major relief agencies that is considered the global authority on hunger.
Fourteen months after the conflict began, the I.P.C. reported that Sudan was experiencing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded in the country.
Last August, famine was officially declared at the camp for displaced people in the Darfur region known as Zamzam. Doctors Without Borders estimated in February 2024 that 13 children were dying per day at that camp alone. Zamzam is estimated to house hundreds of thousands of people.
There are not enough health care resources in Sudan to care for the millions of people who need treatment for rampant malnutrition, much less those struck by one or more of the four disease outbreaks — malaria, measles, dengue fever and cholera — that confront the country.
The World Health Organization reported last November that Sudan’s health care infrastructure, which was already strained before the war, was on the brink of collapse, with two-thirds of the main hospitals in conflict-riddled areas now closed. The organization has documented at least 119 attacks on health care workers and facilities since the war began, resulting in at least 189 deaths and 140 injuries.
Mr. Ahmed said that children were suffering through vicious cycles of preventable disease that predispose them to malnutrition, lamenting the plight of those he said “are supposed to be healthy, playing.”
