“We left because there was no food and because the dam [the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces] came to loot and beat us,” Aida, a 30-something mother of eight, told me earlier this month, days after she arrived at a refugee camp in South Sudan from Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan state in Sudan.
Kadugli had been under siege by the RSF for two years, and when supplies ran so low she could not feed the children, they set off on foot and begged a free ride on a tractor to cross into South Sudan, where they made their way to a U.N.-managed refugee transit center. Not only did they lack food and supplies, Aida said, there was a constant threat of drones — in February, a drone hit her neighbor’s house and killed nine people instantly and RSF drone strikes in Dilling, a nearby city that was also under RSF siege, increased this year.
Aida told me her story in a brisk, matter-of-fact voice, but when I asked for her children’s names, her tone changed. She fell silent and tears began to roll down her cheeks. She used a corner of her faded taub [traditional dress] to wipe them away. After a while, she recounted how she lost track of three of her children — two boys and a girl. She worried most about the youngest, an 8-year-old boy, and hoped he was with one of the other two, a 17-year-old girl and a 21-year-old young man, or with her husband, but she wasn’t sure if her husband was alive or dead either.
Aida’s anguish is not unique. This week marks the grim third anniversary of the start of Sudan’s brutal war, when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) started fighting in the capital Khartoum on April 15, 2023. In many respects, little has changed since last year’s morbid anniversary. The country is roughly divided, with SAF controlling the northern and eastern parts along the Red Sea, and the RSF controlling the western and southern zones from Chad to South Sudan.
Litany of Violations
Since war started, the belligerents and their allied militias have ravaged the country. They have destroyed infrastructure, schools, and hospitals, and severed telecommunications. They have subjected communities to starvation — famine has been declared in several locations — and subjected civilians to a litany of abuses that the U.N. and rights groups have documented extensively: from extrajudicial killings and torture to rape and displacement. Both sides are using drones and weapons purchased on the open market — including from the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates — to target civilians in blatant disregard of the laws of war.
Neither side seems interested in a ceasefire or a political solution. They are fighting each other in the southern regions of Kordofan and Blue Nile, imposing humanitarian blockades in key towns, and engineering drone strikes that kill dozens at a time at weddings and hospitals. Given these conditions, it’s no wonder thousands flee each week across borders, arriving in South Sudan and elsewhere. According to the U.N.’s refugee agency, more than 4 million are refugees in neighboring states.
As war enters its fourth year, it is tempting to take stock of the destruction — to describe it with ever higher numbers in hopes of spurring the world to action. But there is little reliable data to help. Within months of the war starting, Sudan was already the world’s largest displacement crisis. Since 2024, U.N. officials have been calling it the largest humanitarian crisis. Others have described it as the world’s most severe crisis for women and girls.
An Incalculable Toll
But beyond these superlatives, the world’s understanding of the effects of this conflict is impressionistic. For example, we don’t have an accurate death toll. By one estimate, 400,000 may have been killed. Previously, a health study found 60,000 were killed in Khartoum state in the first 14 months alone, and U.N. sanctions monitors estimated as many as 15,000 were killed in the RSF’s attack on El Geneina in West Darfur in 2023, in assaults that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Between 6,000 and 60,000 were killed in the RSF’s violent takeover of El Fasher in October 2025,with more than 150,000 missing.
No one seems to know how many people are languishing in detention sites run by either of the warring sides or their allies, while authorities deny access to prison monitors. In January 2026, Sudan’s army commander Abdel Fatah al-Burhan released 400 women accused of being RSF collaborators from a prison in Omdurman, and in April Human Rights Watch called on SAF to release scores of others arbitrarily detained. The RSF released more than 200 from a prison in South Darfur in March, but reportedly continues to tolerate, abet, or carry out kidnappings for ransom.
And we don’t know how many men, women and children like Aida’s 8-year-old have gone missing. In careful interviews to document this phenomenon for The Reckoning Project, I heard many stories similar to Aida’s, often told tearfully by women and men whose loved ones went missing, might (or might not) be dead, and whose fates were unknown. The accounts I have heard since the start of the war suggest it is a widespread problem. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says it has recorded 11,000 people missing. It tries to help families trace and call their lost family members, but many Sudanese have lost their phones and don’t have access to networks.
Haja, a woman from South Darfur, told me a brother was killed in an explosion and she doesn’t know if her two teen-age sons, who were with him, are alive or dead. Kuku, an elderly man who fled his village in Kordofan after a drone strike, said his family scattered and he doesn’t know where they are or if they will ever reunite. “I leave it to God,” he said.
Anwar, a doctor from West Darfur, told me RSF soldiers came looking for him when he wasn’t home, beat up his wife and abducted twin baby boys; he believes they were killed but never saw their bodies.
Too Little International Action
What is certain is that wherever the war goes, suffering follows. Yet the international community has done far too little diplomatically or through sanctions and other pressures to curb the violence. The El Geneina massacres in Darfur in 2023 formed the basis for the U.S. Secretary of State’s determination in January 2025 that the RSF and associated militias had committed genocide, and the U.N. reported in February 2026 that RSF’s attacks on civilians in El Fasher, also in Darfur, bore the “hallmarks” of genocide.
Yet the world’s most powerful states have, quite simply, failed to uphold their agreed obligations to prevent and punish genocide under the widely ratified Genocide Convention. They have failed to stop malign actors like the UAE from supporting the RSF, or to sanction more rigorously the Sudanese who bankroll the violence.
In addition to working more assiduously to create incentives for the warring parties to end their fighting and their atrocities, governments must emphasize justice and accountability as integral to any peace deal, support the International Criminal Court’s investigations into crimes in Darfur and expand its jurisdiction to cover all of Sudan. They should not only meet the dire humanitarian needs, but also work document crimes, collect evidence, and preserve testimonies. When all else fails, the least the world can do is help Sudanese prepare for a time when cooler heads prevail.
