Twelve million people displaced since 2023: more than half are children. Twenty-four million without food security, and at least eight million starving. Three million children aged under five suffering acute malnutrition. Nearly 97,000 people now suffer from cholera due to the collapse of sanitation and health infrastructure and lack of access to clean water. Eighty percent of hospitals non-functional. Nearly 7.5 million women of reproductive age and over 726,000 pregnant women needing urgent care. Four thousand cases of sexual violence across Darfur alone; 20 percent are girls under 18 years old.
This is Sudan, the country with the world’s largest population of internal refugees, the highest number facing famine and the most dying daily. Most of these statistics are from 2025; the current situation is even more dire.
Sudan’s current civil war (there have been many) started on 15 April 2023. At its centre are two military belligerents: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), commanded by Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by Mohammed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo. But the roots of this conflict are deeper.
The war has since spread from Darfur and Khartoum to SAF-controlled El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan. There, RSF drones are destroying civilian infrastructure — fuel depots, electricity networks and water facilities. People are fleeing in their thousands, half of them children and many previously displaced from elsewhere.
Seventy percent of Sudanese identify as “Arab” and 97% as Islamic. “Arab” is synonymous with nomadic pastoralists, and “African” with settled farmers. After centuries of cooperation, they now compete over access to land and water, a tension exacerbated by climate change. Arab tribal leaders across the Darfur region pledge their allegiance to the RSF, offering members of the these tribes as soldiers. RSF’s ethnic cleansing has forced rebel troops, such as the Sudan Liberation Army and Justice and Equality Movement, to align with the SAF.
Capitalism drives these wars. The televised genocide across Darfur from 2003 to 2005 gave a glimpse of the decades of conflict behind today’s catastrophe. Has Sudan done this to itself, as mainstream media would have us believe? No: the foundational causes are historical colonialism and modern capitalism.
Sudan’s ancient lands were invaded by Belgian and French capitalists in the imperialist race for incessant expansion. Belgium and France eventually handed their claims to Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. Sudan later became the independent Republic of Sudan in 1956. South Sudan split off in 2011.
Fuelling the civil war are external interests. Egypt and Turkey are SAF’s primary backers, supplying weapons, and training, and Saudi Arabia is also involved. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, backs the RSF with materiel and financial support. Russia wants to establish a naval base in Port Sudan. Its mercenary Wagner Group supplies missiles to the RSF while also providing military support to the SAF. China, Sudan’s largest trading partner for decades, claims neutrality. It has its eye on Port Sudan for its Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure project designed to expand its economic and political influence. The United States masquerades as a neutral peacemaker yet ignores UAE’s engagement, particularly since receiving $1.4 trillion from the UAE in investments.
Women-led revolution. Women were 70 percent of the mass protests that brought down the 30-year Bashir dictatorship in 2019, although his military successors have preserved much of the authoritarian infrastructure of his reign. “We tore our freedom from that regime. We can’t lose it again,” says Enas in the documentary film, Gidam (All the way) — named for the hip hop performed by herself and fellow women protesters shortly after a coup in October 2021. She says the revolution pushed her generation to learn about other revolutions and how to make their own. They saw how the pursuit of “western (ie capitalist) democracy” was paving the way for the counter-revolution.
“Sudanese women have always participated in revolutions in this country,” says Alaa Salah. Alaa is the student activist, whose address to the massive Khartoum sit-ins from the top of a car outside the military headquarters went viral and made her the symbol of the revolution. She was dressed in the traditional white toub and large gold earrings worn by the region’s ancient Kandake (queens). The Kandakes led the southern Nile valley matriarchal civilisation of Kush and defended it from Roman invaders. Today they symbolise Sudanese women’s leadership and resistance.
Contemporary Sudan is grounded in this ancient legacy. Sudanese women consider feminist peace as more than the absence of war: it’s the dismantling of gender inequality enforced by militarism, neoliberalism and all other structures of oppression. Unions have been a primary channel for their organising and action. The establishment of the Union of Sudanese Women Teachers in 1949 laid the foundation of a militant women’s movement — first confronting British rule, then winning equal pay and overturning the Obedience Laws that held them in servility.
Unionised tea sellers were prominent in the protests against Bashir and now against military and police violence. In 2019 they provided the protesters with food and hot drinks. For tea seller Hiliwah, “Being a tea-lady means being revolutionary.” These “tea-ladies” are part of the street vendors, who have been crucial to communities’ survival in war-torn Sudan since the 1980s. Many are themselves women displaced by war from the 1980s to now.
“Revolution, liberty! We’ll continue fighting.” In these lyrics from Gidam, young women rappers eloquently capture the failure of their 2019 revolution to go “all the way” and change the class in power. The people of Sudan are paying the price. May the long legacy of resistance, led by women, keep stoking the youthful revolutionary fire to bring that change. And may the rising global movements for liberation fortify and defend it.
