The world’s biggest humanitarian crisis is being ignored
In October, according to the BBC, several women in Sudan killed themselves after being raped by members of paramilitary groups. Six more women were reportedly considering killing themselves so that they were not raped. There are unconfirmed reports from the activist Hala al-Karib that over 130 women have died by suicide for the same reason.
The women currently weighing gang rape by militias versus taking their own lives represent a tiny proportion of the 6.7 million women at risk of gender-based violence in Sudan, the third largest country by area in Africa, where a civil war has claimed almost 25,000 lives since April 2023.
The conflict in Sudan is between the state military forces, the Sudanese Armed Forces or SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan — who is effectively Sudan’s president — and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces or RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The RSF is an outgrowth of the Janjaweed, which was largely responsible for the Darfur genocide of 2003–2005 (though both the RSF and the SAF are connected to the Janjaweed).
Mass rape and sexual violence committed against Sudanese people ranging in age from young children to the elderly is a tactic used by both belligerents to take regional power by force. Assaults on critical state infrastructure means that there is virtually no medical assistance for victims of sexual violence, or for victims of ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate military assaults on civilians, or the 26 million Sudanese people facing acute hunger.
According to Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale’s School of Public Health, “there is Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-level casualty potential” in Sudan. But why aren’t global powers paying attention?
Recent attempts to address the world’s largest humanitarian crisis by global powers have involved vague passes at categorizing the different crimes occurring in Sudan and holding military leaders accountable on paper alone. Some countries have allocated financial assistance, but to aid workers on the ground, it’s hardly sufficient to address the scale of the crisis.
During the early 2000s, significant American attention was directed towards the region. Under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan had sheltered Osama bin Laden. Focusing on Sudan allowed the U.S. to focus on counterterrorism, condemning al-Bashir’s genocide in the Darfur region in the process.
Unlike in the 2000s, however, today there is no significant counterterrorism benefit to the United States in significant involvement in Sudan. Putting aside the idealistic idea that the United States would provide aid simply to prevent human suffering, the complaint made by many working to help people in Sudan is that American attention is focused almost exclusively on wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. Ukraine’s sovereignty is of significant security benefit in the U.S.’s contentious relationship with Russia; Israel is a key regional ally to the U.S., and the issue there is pressed further by American citizens campaigning for aid to Gaza. Today, “very few people who don’t work on Sudan know that Darfur is on the brink of famine,” says Alan Boswell, a regional expert from the International Crisis Group. “Obviously, everyone knows about the risk of famine in Gaza.”
In the absence of humanitarian aid from the U.S. and other wealthy nations, our adversaries are stepping in to fill the void and stoke the flames. A report from the U.S. State Department revealed that munitions and drones are being supplied to both the SAF and the RSF by the United Arab Emirates and Iran, which will likely prolong the war, worsen the humanitarian crisis, and could result in the failure of the Sudanese state.
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