Sudan today stands as one of the gravest indictments of our global conscience. A nation of rich civilisations and deep religious heritage is bleeding in silence, abandoned to warlords, famine, and foreign profiteers while the world averts its gaze. What began in April 2023 as a power struggle between two generals has spiralled into a colossal human tragedy – Africa’s largest displacement crisis, a man-made famine, and a war that has turned homes, hospitals, mosques, and markets into theatres of terror.
This is not a sudden collapse; it’s a slow immolation driven by internal betrayal and external indifference. Entire provinces burn, millions wander without food or medicine, and children starve as international actors weigh strategic interests over human lives. Sudan’s agony lays bare the moral failure of our times, and tests whether humanity still retains the will to act.
A Country Built on Faultlines and Foreign Designs
Sudan’s wounds run deep. Colonial engineering under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium entrenched hierarchies between an Arab-Muslim north and marginalised non-Arab, Christian and animist populations in the south and west. Post-independence instability – 20 coup attempts and two catastrophic civil wars – produced a brittle, militarised state.
The conflict in Darfur from 2003 onwards exposed another truth: revealing how brutality can be systematised as a tool of governance. The Janjaweed militias, later transformed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), evolved into a predatory paramilitary economy, profiting from gold, smuggling routes and foreign patronage. The 2018-19 uprising promised civilian rule, but the 2021 coup shattered hope. The generals did not relinquish power; they recalibrated their instruments.
April 2023: From Turf War to National Catastrophe
What began as a technically framed dispute over integrating RSF fighters into the army revealed deeper stakes. For Hemedti, integration threatened the RSF’s autonomy and economic lifelines; for al-Burhan and his Islamist-aligned backers, it threatened an entrenched military order rooted in decades of patronage. The result was urban warfare: the RSF seizing palaces, airbases and media; the SAF retaliating with air-strikes that turned Khartoum’s neighbourhoods into battle zones. Violence spilled nationwide while the international community offered little more than delayed, ineffectual statements.
A War with No Frontline and No End
More than two and a half years on, Sudan remains a land of shattered institutions and fractured humanity. The state’s administrative, economic, and social structures have collapsed under the weight of relentless violence, leaving citizens to navigate life without security, services, or hope. What endures is a profound human rupture, where displacement, hunger, and trauma have become the defining features of everyday existence.
Territorial Reality
- The SAF controls much of the Nile Valley, Khartoum State, and the Gezira agricultural belt; the RSF dominates Darfur and large parts of Kordofan.
- On 8-9 December 2025, the RSF seized the Heglig oilfield, Sudan’s largest and most strategic oil facility, dealing a crippling blow to the central government’s economic lifeline. Production has halted, oil workers evacuated, and more than 200 SAF troops reportedly fled into South Sudan and surrendered near Bentiu.
- The seizure strengthens RSF’s resource-based leverage, raising fears of a protracted war funded by oil revenues and reminiscent of proxy conflicts elsewhere.
- Siege tactics, mass expulsions and attacks on displacement camps – most recently the assault on Zamzam – have destroyed hospitals, mosques and clinics, leaving civilians with nowhere safe to turn. A retaliatory SAF drone strike on RSF celebrants in Katila reportedly killed dozens, including women, children and tribal elders, intensifying ethnic reprisals.
The Human Toll: Nearly 12 million displaced, including 8.8 million internally.Direct deaths number in the tens of thousands, while aggregate estimates, including deaths from hunger and disease, run significantly higher.Four million children are malnourished; 770,000 at imminent risk of death.Eighty per cent of hospitals in conflict zones are non-functional; 19 million children are out of school.
This is not an abstract crisis. It’s the collapse of family life, faith life, social life, a moral rupture demanding clarity from the Muslim world and accountability from the international community.
The West’s Double Standard
International coverage and diplomatic urgency have lagged far behind the scale of Sudan’s suffering, reinforcing a narrative that treats the war as just another distant African conflict rather than one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian emergencies. This global indifference has provided fertile ground for policy inconsistency and selective engagement.
It is within this climate that Western policy, especially American diplomacy, must be scrutinised. The US and other Western capitals have issued statements of alarm, yet their actions have too often contradicted their rhetoric. Selective aid freezes, geopolitical manoeuvring, and continued tolerance of proxy-backed warfare have deepened, rather than alleviated, Sudan’s agony.
Two glaring patterns stand out.First, selective humanitarianism: relief efforts are shaped by counter-terrorism priorities, regional influence and alliances with Gulf patrons. The early 2025 freeze on crucial aid programmes, which shut down soup kitchens and nutrition projects, transformed bureaucratic decisions into deadly constraints.Second, armaments and proxy indulgence: human-rights rhetoric coexists with permissive attitudes toward Gulf, regional and private security networks that sustain the war. Where Western leverage exists, through sanctions or financial channels, enforcement remains inconsistent, constrained by alliances deemed more strategic than Sudanese lives.The result is a strategic ambiguity that history will not judge kindly.
Foreign Hands in a Domestic Inferno
External patrons remain central to the conflict’s perpetuation. The UAE has long faced allegations of funnelling cash and arms to RSF-linked networks. On 9 December 2025, new US sanctions exposed a Colombian–UAE mercenary recruitment pipeline that supplied over 500 ex-soldiers, including minors, to RSF deployments through Somalia and Libya.Egypt continues a security-first posture, providing military support to SAF.Russia and private security actors embedded in gold-smuggling operations fund the war economy. Türkiye and Qatar supply drones and political backing to factions tied to Islamist networks.
This external web of patronage has recast the Sudanese war as a regionalised arena of competing security agendas, where financial gain, geopolitics and exploitation outlast humanitarian urgency.
Faith, Responsibility, and the Politics of Compassion
Sudan’s tragedy has laid bare the complex intersection of mercy, politics, and moral duty within the Muslim world. While the country’s overwhelming Muslim identity inspires genuine compassion, responses often oscillate between humanitarian obligation and geopolitical calculation. Muslim NGOs, notably Islamic Relief Worldwide, have stepped into the vacuum left by failing institutions, translating the Qur’anic imperatives of mercy, zakat, and dignity into lifesaving food, shelter, and medical care. Yet diplomatic bodies such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, despite issuing earnest calls for peace, remain hamstrung by interstate rivalries that reduce their influence to symbolism rather than coordinated action.
Complicating matters further, ideological actors including the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and their regional allies interpret the conflict through partisan frames, blurring the line between religious duty and political mobilisation. At a moment demanding protection and reconciliation, such polarisation threatens to erode the very moral authority required to guide Sudan toward peace.
What Must Be Done
Humanity first: relief must trump geopolitical calculations.
Unified diplomatic pressure: the OIC, Arab League, AU and IGAD must demand a verifiable ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors.
End the arms economy: Muslim governments should lead, backed by credible international sanctions, to block funding, weapons flow and mercenary recruitment.
Justice with mercy: support independent investigations such as ICC proceedings, while investing in reconciliation that protects minorities, women and children.
Protect the vulnerable: immediately fund programmes for displaced women, children and families.
The Moral Imperative Ahead
Sudan’s devastation is not fate; it’s the result of deliberate choicesby generals clinging to power, foreign patrons pursuing advantage and an international system that has watched a Muslim nation starve. The Qur’an rejects fatalism, calling believers to be qawwāmīnbil-qisṭ – steadfast in justice – even when confronting entrenched power.
Sudan’s war is a story of shattered families, lost childhoods, desecrated mosques and communities enduring hunger and displacement. Silence becomes complicity. “Do not incline toward those who do wrong” (11:113) is a warning ignored whenever arms, funds or political cover flow to the powerful while civilians suffer.
The Muslim world must respond with clarity and courage: halt arms flows, insist on humanitarian corridors, support credible ceasefires and invest in reconciliation rooted in dignity and justice. Statements are not enough; Sudan’s people need material solidarity and principled leadership.
Global powers share this responsibility. If human rights matter elsewhere, they must matter in Sudan. Justice in Qur’anic ethics is duty, not strategy.
Sudan still has a futureif justice guides international engagement, Muslim solidarity and local governance. “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (5:32).
Sudan stands on the brink of irrevocable collapse. The question now is whether the Muslim world and the global community will answer the Qur’anic call to stand firm for justicebefore an entire nation is lost in silence.