**Sudan: Three Years of War, 150,000 Dead, and the World Looked Away**

Three years into a war that has killed more than 150,000 people and forced 13 million from their homes, the United Nations is calling Sudan an "abandoned crisis." That is not a figure of speech. Since April 15, 2023, when the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces turned their guns on each other — and on the Sudanese people — the international community has done almost nothing to stop it. Denise Brown, the top U.N. official in Sudan, said it plainly this month: this war has not been forgotten. It has been abandoned.

The numbers tell a story of mass destruction against Black African people on a scale the world is choosing to ignore. Over 34 million people — more than half of Sudan's population — now need humanitarian aid. Twenty-one million have no access to health care. More than 11,000 people are missing. Hundreds of thousands face famine, not because of drought or crop failure, but because both warring factions are using food as a weapon. Hospitals are being bombed. In March, a strike on El Daein Teaching Hospital in East Darfur killed 64 people, including 13 children, two nurses, and a doctor. The World Health Organization has now documented 213 attacks on health facilities during this war, with over 2,000 people killed in those attacks alone.

The worst of it has fallen on Darfur — again. In October, the RSF rampaged through the city of el-Fasher and killed at least 6,000 people in three days. U.N.-backed investigators concluded that the massacre bore "the defining characteristics of genocide." That word carries weight. The RSF grew directly out of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the first Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, when Arab militias targeted Black African ethnic groups — the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa — with mass killings and sexual violence. Twenty years later, the same forces are running the same playbook against the same people.

This war did not come from nowhere. In 2019, the Sudanese people rose up and overthrew dictator Omar al-Bashir in a revolution that inspired Black people across the African continent and the diaspora. But instead of a transition to democracy, two military strongmen — General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF and General Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo of the RSF — cut a power-sharing deal and then turned on each other when neither would give up control. The people who bled for freedom got a civil war instead.

The roots go deeper than 2019. Under British colonial rule, Sudan's gold, cotton, gum arabic, and human labor were extracted for profit while the country's ethnic and regional divisions were sharpened as a tool of control. European nations later funded Sudan's military apparatus to crack down on migration heading toward Europe, and that funding directly strengthened the RSF. The weapons now being used on Sudanese civilians were produced in Europe. Yale University researchers recently reported strong evidence that Ethiopia has been colluding with the RSF, raising the threat of a wider regional war fueled by outside powers treating African land and African lives as expendable.

Both sides in this conflict have been accused of ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial killings, and systematic sexual violence against civilians. Khartoum, once a thriving capital, has been described as a "city of graves," with thousands of bodies buried in schoolyards and backyards because cemeteries are unreachable. The war has become increasingly mechanized — near-daily drone strikes, many of them carried out indiscriminately by the RSF, are killing dozens at a time across South Kordofan and Darfur. Both armies are committed to military victory, and neither has shown any interest in negotiating peace.

The silence around Sudan is part of a pattern that Black communities worldwide know well. When Black and African people are being slaughtered, the global response is slower, quieter, and smaller. The conflict in the Middle East has dominated international attention and driven up global fuel and fertilizer prices, making Sudan's food crisis even worse while pulling resources and political focus away from a war that the U.N. itself calls the world's largest humanitarian emergency. A conference was held in Berlin this month to raise aid funding, but aid is not what ends wars — political pressure and accountability do, and neither has been applied with any seriousness. Thirteen million displaced. One hundred fifty thousand dead. Three years. And the world still has not shown up.