Sudan's forgotten war: why Khartoum's collapse keeps slipping off the front page

On the morning of 15 April 2023, fighting broke out in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Within weeks, the capital's international airport had been gutted, the presidential palace was ringed by armored columns, and an estimated several million people had fled their homes. The pattern repeated across Darfur and, by 2024, into El Gezira state. By the third anniversary of the war, allAfrica's reporting observed what Sudanese families had been saying for months: the cameras had largely moved on, and the suffering had not.

The war in Sudan is now among the largest displacement crises on earth and one of the least covered. The reason is not that nothing is happening. It is that the constituencies who usually force a story onto Western front pages, host governments underwriting a foreign intervention, diasporas with political access, journalists on the ground, have thin purchase here. What results is a humanitarian emergency whose scale outpaces its visibility by an order of magnitude, and a slow-motion collapse of a state that the rest of the continent cannot insulate itself from.

A war of two men, then of their sponsors

The immediate trigger is well established: a power struggle between Burhan, de facto head of state since the 2021 coup, and Hemedti, his deputy on the ruling Sovereign Council, over the terms of a planned transition to a new military-controlled government and the integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces. What began as a contest inside Khartoum metastasised, in part because both commanders had spent the previous two years cultivating external backers. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have been reported by Western and African outlets as moving money, weapons and political cover toward the SAF, while the RSF's longstanding ties to the UAE in particular have drawn sustained scrutiny from U.S. senators and UN investigators. The UAE has consistently denied arming either side, calling such allegations baseless. Khartoum's geographic position, controlling the Nile confluence and bordering seven states, made the fight attractive to back anyway.

The pattern repeats one familiar from the past two decades of African conflict: a localised power struggle monetised by extra-regional patrons, then internationalised once both sides realise they cannot win alone.

What the numbers say, and what they don't

AllAfrica's framing of "the war the world stopped watching" rests on a measurable gap. International media monitoring groups have repeatedly placed Sudan near the bottom of conflict-related coverage relative to casualty and displacement counts; press-freedom organisations have documented the killing, detention and expulsion of Sudanese journalists, which thins the wire pool further. Inside Sudan, communications blackouts in Khartoum, Darfur and Kordofan have made verification a contest of satellite imagery and refugee accounts collected at the Chad and South Sudan borders. The International Organization for Migration has tracked the cumulative displacement at several million people, the largest internal displacement figure anywhere in the world; the World Food Programme has warned of famine conditions in multiple besieged areas, including Zamzam camp in North Darfur.

That does not mean nothing is being reported. It means the reporting is concentrated in a small number of regional outlets, Sudanese diaspora networks, and a handful of UN agencies whose press releases rarely make it past the policy pages.

The African Union's awkward position

The continental response has been the slow-motion story underneath the slow-motion war. The African Union has struggled to mediate, in part because its current chair, Mahamoud Ali Youssouf of Djibouti, inherited a body that had been largely sidelined from Sudanese mediation during the post-Bashir transition. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the eight-state Horn of Africa bloc, has run parallel talks from Addis Ababa; Egypt and Ethiopia, both downstream Nile states, have weighed in through their foreign ministries with sharply different priorities. Cairo has historically aligned with the SAF, in part through the joint defence agreement signed in the months before the war, and treats any successor government in Khartoum as a security asset on its southern border. Addis Ababa, by contrast, fears a vacuum that the RSF orients toward Eritrean and Gulf-linked supply lines. None of these players wants a UN Security Council resolution, where they would have to negotiate with Washington and Moscow rather than each other.

The result is a continental crisis that the continent cannot de-escalate alone and that extra-regional powers have little incentive to escalate. That is the political space Sudan is falling into: not frozen, but quietly ungoverned.

Stakes and what to watch

Three things are worth tracking in the months ahead. First, the trajectory of El Fasher, the last SAF-held capital in Darfur, which has come under sustained RSF pressure and whose fall would reorder the entire western front. Second, whether the AU's mediation track produces anything more durable than the Jeddah and Manama processes, both of which have delivered ceasefires that lasted weeks. Third, the political weight of the diaspora vote in Washington and London: Sudanese-American and Sudanese-British advocacy groups have been pushing their governments toward tougher enforcement of existing sanctions on RSF-linked networks and, in the U.S. case, toward a determination of genocide in Darfur that would carry legal consequences beyond the symbolic.

What the Western wire coverage routinely misses, and what the African outlets are more willing to name, is the structural reason for the silence. Sudan is not covered the way Ukraine or Gaza is covered because its constituencies are poorer, its journalists are fewer, and its patrons have less political skin in Western capitals. That is not a moral judgement. It is a description of how the international press system allocates attention, and it should be named plainly, because the people starving in Zamzam, in Tawila, in the Nuba Mountains do not have the luxury of waiting for the cameras to come back.

This piece sits inside Monexus's wider Africa-desk coverage of conflicts that the Western wire cycle under-weights relative to their scale. Where wire reporting tends to read Sudan through the lens of UAE-Iran-Saudi competition, the desk note here is that African-led mediation, displacement pressure on Chad, South Sudan and Egypt, and AU institutional capacity are the more proximate variables.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023)