Sudan's Two Generals Are Cutting Off Phones While Children Starve

Imagine your child is hungry, the nearest aid convoy is hours away, and you have no way to tell anyone where you are. For millions of Sudanese families, that is not a thought experiment. It is daily life.

Since 15 April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have turned Sudan into one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes on earth. More than 12 million people have been driven from their homes, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world. Famine has been confirmed in parts of Darfur and Kordofan. In Zamzam camp, outside El Fasher, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in 2024, and conditions have only worsened since. When El Fasher fell to the RSF in October 2025, reports of mass killings, sexual violence, and summary executions poured out of the city. Many of those reports came from people who had survived and who had to find a signal to tell the world what happened.

Here is the question nobody in Port Sudan or Nyala wants you to ask: who is keeping the phones dead?

The answer is both generals. Monitoring groups, including NetBlocks, have recorded repeated collapses of Sudan's telecommunications networks since the war began. Towers go dark. Fuel for generators runs out. Fibre lines are cut or seized. Each blackout does three things at once. It isolates civilians from relatives and from aid. It blinds humanitarian workers who must coordinate convoys through checkpoints controlled by armed men. And it hides atrocities, because the people who would have filmed them, posted them, or sent their location cannot do so. A war fought in darkness is a war designed to escape accountability.

The humanitarian machinery that keeps people alive depends on connectivity. Emergency telecommunications teams, logistics clusters, and the World Food Programme need reliable communication to know where food is needed, which roads are open, and whether a truck has been looted or a warehouse bombed. When that data disappears, so do the children it was meant to save. Every hour a relief operation loses to a dead radio is an hour a mother spends deciding which of her children eats today.

Let us be precise about who bears responsibility. The SAF and the RSF are both armed parties, and both have committed documented abuses. UN investigators have reported serious violations by each side, and the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission has pointed to possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet the RSF's campaign across Darfur, including the El Fasher siege, has carried the marks of ethnically targeted violence on a scale that demands the word genocide be examined seriously by international courts. The SAF, for its part, has bombed markets and residential areas and blocked aid routes it considers politically inconvenient. Neither general has earned the right to call himself a defender of Sudan.

And the outside powers keep feeding the fire. UN Panel of Experts reports have documented weapons and money flowing to the RSF through neighbouring states, with the United Arab Emirates named in investigations of supply routes that run through Chad and Libya. The UAE denies arming the RSF. But the pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched Africa's wars: foreign capitals with deep pockets and strategic appetites buy influence through the barrel of a gun, then wash their hands when the bodies pile up. Russia's Wagner Group has been linked to gold extraction and security arrangements in Sudan, the same gold that could feed Sudanese hospitals and pay Sudanese teachers. Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and others have backed one side or the other. This is the new scramble for Africa. The actors have changed. The extraction has not.

Why should we care beyond Sudan's borders? Because Sudan is a test. If a war of this scale can run for more than two years, with famine, mass displacement, and telecom blackouts, while the African Union issues statements and the UN Security Council argues over wording, then every government on this continent learns a lesson. The lesson is that power can be seized by force, defended by foreign money, and protected by silence. That lesson will be used again in Chad, in the Sahel, in Ethiopia, and in our own countries if we let it stand.

We have seen what it looks like when Africa refuses that lesson. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies by protecting property rights, funding institutions, and holding peaceful transfers of power. Mauritius turned a sugar island into an open, rules-based economy that attracts investment because contracts are respected. Senegal, after years of tension, completed a democratic transfer of power in 2024 through its courts and its electoral commission. These are not perfect nations. But they prove that strong institutions, independent judiciaries, transparent budgets, and free markets are not Western luxuries. They are African tools, and they work.

So what must happen in Sudan? First, the African Union Peace and Security Council must stop treating Sudan as a diplomatic embarrassment and start enforcing its own principles. Article 4 of the AU Constitutive Act rejects unconstitutional seizures of power and grave crimes against civilians. Use it. Second, the UN Security Council must back a binding, verified ceasefire that includes guaranteed humanitarian corridors and independent monitors for telecommunications and aid routes. Third, targeted sanctions must hit named commanders and the financiers and suppliers behind them, and the UN arms embargo on Darfur must be enforced at every border, including the ones run by friendly governments. Fourth, the international community must protect the Sudanese civil society groups, including the neighbourhood Emergency Response Rooms, which have kept communities fed, documented killings, and organized aid when the state collapsed. They deserve funding, security, and a seat at the negotiating table.

Sudan also needs a path back to civilian rule. That means an independent electoral commission, a transitional constitution written with civilian participation, and an economy freed from the military's control of gold, ports, and state companies. Sudan's own history of civilian protest, including the 2019 movement that toppled Omar al-Bashir, proves the will for democracy exists. It was crushed by men who wanted the spoils of power more than the survival of their people.

To the citizens of Sudan, and to all of us watching from across the continent: do not let the darkness become normal. Share verified information. Support the networks that deliver food and document crimes. Demand that your own governments disclose any military, financial, or mining ties to the warring parties. Hold your ministers accountable for every vote they cast at the UN and every arms licence they sign.

To the African Union and the UN Security Council: stop writing communiqués that die in the same drawers as the last ones. Enforce a ceasefire, open the roads, switch the lights back on, and name the commanders who are killing your people.

The children of Sudan are not asking for a grand strategy. They are asking whether anyone is coming. Answer them, before the next silence falls.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB