Sudan's forgotten war: Why we have to be scared

Al-Ahram Weekly

26-05-2025

The idea that Sudan's war is someone else's problem is not just passive; it is dangerous, and both international and regional media have failed spectacularly.
It was a student journalism forum in Cairo.
The students were engaged, thoughtful, and deeply invested in the world.
So, I asked them, 'What do you think is the worst humanitarian crisis today?'
Their answers came quickly. Gaza. Climate change. Forest fires. Artificial intelligence.
Their concern was real, their knowledge impressive.
But no one mentioned Sudan. Not one student. Not because they didn't care. But because no one had told them they should.
That silence is not accidental.
It is produced by a global media ecosystem shaped by power, proximity, and profit.
And Sudan, one of the worst crises of our time, is caught in its blind spot.
A war in silence
This is not a war with clear heroes. On one side stands the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF); on the other, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that evolved from the Janjaweed militias once responsible for genocide in Darfur.
Both claim to represent the state. Both are accused of committing atrocities. And both have waged another war in parallel—a war on truth.
Through state-controlled media, troll farms, and coordinated misinformation campaigns on social media, each side seeks to blame the other, sow division, and erase facts.
SAF deploys official narratives through national broadcasters. RSF counters with videos and testimonies from its aligned influencers and diaspora networks.
Fabricated footage and deepfakes circulate on Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp, weaponizing fear and fueling confusion.
International observers often struggle to distinguish reality from rumour.
Aid workers have reported being misled by falsified evacuation alerts.
Journalists are routinely threatened and harassed online by both SAF and RSF supporters.
Sudan's information ecosystem is not just broken—it's booby-trapped.
Caught in this crossfire are journalists—those who still try to report from the ground, often without pay, protection, or basic tools.
Over 90 percent of Sudan's media infrastructure has been destroyed or shut down, while 80 percent of the country has been cut off from the internet and communications networks.
Reporters are hunted, tortured, and disappeared. Hundreds of journalists have fled or gone silent.
And with them, the truth itself fades.
A fractured narrative
Meanwhile, much of the world clings to an outdated frame that Sudan's war is tribal, inevitable, and unfixable, that it's a remote civil war rooted in local grudges.
That there's nothing to be done!
But that's a lie—a dangerous one.
Sudan is not a land of ancient chaos. It is a country being torn apart by modern forces.
Proxy powers, arms trafficking, and resource exploitation by regional and global actors are the main culprits in this humanitarian disaster.
To dismiss this war as 'ethnic' or 'tribal' is not just racist. It is strategically blind.
The war in Sudan is not just a domestic tragedy. It's a regional and global chessboard where foreign powers play with bloody pieces.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has reportedly funnelled arms and logistical support to the RSF, its appetite whetted by Sudan's strategic ports, fertile farmland, and gold veins.
Russia's notorious Wagner Group has long lurked in the background, guarding gold routes and training militias, though its role now seems unclear.
Egypt, ever anxious about the Nile, backs the SAF, clinging to the belief that a strongman in Khartoum will protect its water security and keep Islamists at bay.
Saudi Arabia publicly postures as neutral, but behind closed doors, it's been quietly brokering side deals.
The United States and European Union—too distracted or too entangled in the interests of regional allies to confront the root causes of the conflict—have imposed sanctions, targeting figures from both factions for war crimes.
Sanctions that rarely touch those who wage the war but instead break those trying to survive it.
These powers are not mere observers. They are participants, each contributing to the conditions that allow this war to fester.
Deaf ears
The war in Sudan is brutal and devastating.
Since April 2023, it has claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced more than 13 million people. It is the fastest-growing displacement crisis in the world.
Entire cities have been razed. Khartoum, once a proud capital, has been bombarded beyond recognition. In Darfur—a place that already knows the taste of genocide—ethnic cleansing has returned.
The United Nations (UN) estimates that 30 million people, more than half the population, now need humanitarian aid.
It is 'the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,' as the International Rescue Committee describes it.
And yet, the silence is deafening.
International headlines barely flinch. News segments barely mention it.
Even social media—often a platform for resistance and awareness—largely looks the other way. Sudan is not just a forgotten war. It's a war deliberately ignored.
Why? Sudan, perhaps, is cursed by its very identity.
It is too African for the Arab world to care, too Arab for Africa to act, too Black and too poor for the Western world to care.
It doesn't fit neatly into the geopolitical chessboard that determines who deserves attention and who doesn't.
There are no NATO interests here. No shiny economic incentives. No oil or gas.
No European borders at risk of being overwhelmed—not yet, at least.
No viral footage of white children under rubble.
And so, the war is rendered invisible—not because it isn't catastrophic, but because it doesn't serve the right narratives.
The international media has blood on its hands.
Its choices help determine which lives are mourned and which are ignored.
Bosnia taught us this.
The horrors there became impossible to dismiss when news cameras poured in, giving voice to victims and shame to the West.
Global awareness shifted political will.
Contrast that with Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days while international media mostly yawned.
Or Congo, where a war that killed over five million people was buried under apathy.
The disparity is not just a matter of coverage. It is a matter of consequence.
Attention can bring aid, pressure, and political action.
Neglect emboldens killers.
Whose lives matter?
Look at the Israeli war on Gaza.
Global outrage has surged not simply because of the scale of suffering—though that is immense—but because Western governments are entangled in the bloodshed.
The war has significant political implications in Washington and the oil-rich Middle East, making it difficult for the media to look away.
Syria only became 'real' to the West when a dead toddler, Alan Kurdi, washed up on European shores, and refugee boats started to flood their coasts.
Yemen was remembered only when Houthi missiles threatened the Red Sea trade.
Sudan, by contrast, offers nothing to global powers but moral inconvenience. And so, it stays in the shadows.
Behind the geopolitics and the media silence are real people.
Mothers giving birth in bombed-out hospitals.
Children growing up with nothing but hunger and fear.
Journalists risking their lives to document horrors no one will publish.
Young activists streaming online from basements, begging the world to care.
They are not collateral. They are not peripheral. They are human beings screaming into the void.
'The war in Sudan is a war on people—a reality that grows more evident by the day,' Christopher Lockyear, MSF Secretary General, told the UN in March.
And for this, exactly, we should be scared.
We should be scared because of what our indifference says about us.
A world that only pays attention when it's convenient—when the victims look familiar or the violence threatens the West—is a world teetering on the edge of moral collapse, a world that will pay the price.
Make no mistake: this isn't just a moral failure. It's a strategic one.
Sudan is not isolated.
It lies in the heart of an already fractured region, bordered by South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, and Libya.
All states on the verge of instability—or already consumed by it.
Instability here spreads like wildfire.
And yet, the international community behaves as though it has learned nothing from Afghanistan.
Remember that 'forgotten war'?
Left to burn out of sight, Afghanistan was handed to warlords, fundamentalists, and foreign agendas.
In that vacuum, Al-Qaeda rose. Then ISIS.
Entire movements were born when global attention faded, in the silence that followed after the cameras packed up and the stories fell off the news cycle.
Sudan now stands on that same cliff's edge.
Like Yemen, the fire in Sudan is not contained.
It sits precariously close to global arteries of commerce.
Sudan's strategic position on the Red Sea places it just miles from the Suez Canal, one of the world's most vital maritime trade routes.
It shares a tense border with Saudi Arabia and lies directly in the path of critical supply chains connecting Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Should the conflict spill outward, it could disrupt international shipping, fuel spikes in energy and commodity prices, and trigger a new wave of instability in the Horn of Africa and beyond.
The idea that Sudan's war is someone else's problem is not just passive—it is dangerous.
And both international and regional media have failed spectacularly.
The Arab world's news outlets are too often entangled in the political interests of their governments to amplify Sudan's suffering.
African media, overwhelmed by crises on their own soil, have largely relegated Sudan's war to background noise.
Western media, meanwhile, remain transfixed by the conflicts that touch their own borders or challenge their strategic priorities.
But journalism is not meant to serve convenience. As Hani Shukrallah once wrote:
'The journalist's duty is not just to inform, but to advocate for justice, to expose oppression, and to stand with the marginalized. In societies where power is unchecked, journalism becomes a form of resistance.'
Sudan is not someone else's war.
It is a test.
And if we fail this test—if we continue to look away—the cost won't just be paid in Sudan.
It will come back to haunt us all.
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