Five months after the United Nations reported acts of genocide in Sudan, another human rights catastrophe may be imminent.
The Rapid Support Forces, a rebel group that controls parts of the country and has a history of committing atrocities, has gathered outside El Obeid, a strategically important city, and nearly encircled it. About 600,000 people are facing severe shortages of food, water and medicine, and the R.S.F. has already killed some civilians through drone attacks. “The signs from El Obeid are clear and unmistakable: Another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan,” the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said.
There are many reasons that Sudan’s war is often overlooked, despite being bloodier than conflicts that receive far more attention. Sudan does not fit into larger global political debates in the ways that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East do. Africa too often is ignored by those on other continents, a reflection of both racial and economic double standards. Sudan has been so long ravaged by war that efforts to bring peace can seem pointless.
None of these explanations are acceptable, and they feed the terrible costs of the continuing conflict. The war in Sudan is one of the world’s most lethal, with a death toll estimated by independent monitors to be between 150,000 and 400,000. Millions of Sudanese have been driven from their homes, some of them flooding into neighboring countries. Beyond the innocent death and suffering in Sudan itself, the longer the fighting drags on, the greater the chance that regional instability will spread.
The world needs to make a bigger effort to halt the killing and mass displacement in Sudan, and the threat to El Obeid should inspire urgent action. The United States is uniquely positioned to push regional powers to intervene to halt the current threat and to bring an end to the war. American influence over Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, nations that have aided the warring sides, can restart peace talks and initiate a cease-fire. The Trump administration should urgently recommit to peace in Sudan and protect the many innocent civilians who face the threat of sexual assault, torture and death.
Bringing peace to Sudan will not be easy. Since it won independence in 1956 from Britain and Egypt, Sudan has endured decades of instability, including coups, long civil wars and the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s. The key divide is ethnic rather than religious. More than 90 percent of Sudan’s residents are Muslim, but they are split between an Arab majority and several non-Arab Black ethnic groups. In the Darfur genocide, Arab militias backed by Sudan’s government killed hundreds of thousands of Black civilians.
