Burhan and Hemedti Are Starving Sudan While the World Looks Away

Between 23 July and 17 August 2026, enumerators knocked on the doors of 23,736 Sudanese households. They were not asking about politics. They were asking whether families had enough food, clean water, schools that were open, shelter that would survive the rains, and whether anyone was protecting their children. The answers, collected across 185 localities in all 18 states, describe a country that has been broken on purpose.

We need to say this plainly, because too many people far from Khartoum have grown comfortable with the language of "humanitarian crisis," as if hunger simply happened, like weather. It did not. Armed men made it happen. Since the war erupted on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, Sudan has become a machine for producing displaced people, starving children, and graves. Both men have turned the lives of ordinary Sudanese into a bargaining chip. Both men should be ashamed. And both men should be held accountable.

Consider what a survey of this scale tells us. It was designed to produce comparable evidence on food security, health, water and sanitation, education, shelter, and protection across the entire country, including the internally displaced, returnees trying to rebuild, and those who never left. A needs assessment of this size exists because the need is too vast to ignore and too urgent to guess at. The humanitarian community is using this data to shape the 2027 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan. In plain language: this is the map of who will eat, who will drink, and who will die next year if nothing changes.

Look at what the numbers are measuring. Every locality surveyed is a community of people who once had jobs, harvests, classrooms, and clinics. Every household interview is a family that answered a stranger's questions about whether they had eaten that day. Three localities in South Kordofan, Al Buram, Heiban, and Um Durein, could not be reached at all because of insecurity and administrative obstruction. Think about that. Even the counting of Sudan's suffering is being blocked by the guns. Where the assessors cannot go, the people are being left in the dark, and darkness is where atrocities thrive.

Sudan's humanitarian collapse did not begin in a vacuum. The United Nations has repeatedly documented serious violations by both warring parties, including killings of civilians, sexual violence, attacks on hospitals, and the blocking of aid. The RSF has been implicated in mass atrocities in Darfur, including the wave of killings in El Geneina in 2023 that UN investigators and human rights organizations described in terms that should horrify any government with a conscience. The Sudanese army has bombed residential areas and obstructed relief routes. Famine has been confirmed in parts of the country, and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system has warned of catastrophic hunger spreading across Darfur and Kordofan. Behind the official phrasing sits a simple truth: mothers are watching their children waste away while the men with the weapons negotiate their next advance.

Then there are the outside hands. The UN Panel of Experts on Sudan has reported on the flow of weapons and money into the conflict, and the names that recur are the ones that should make us angry. The United Arab Emirates has been accused of supplying the RSF with weapons and financing, a charge Abu Dhabi denies but which keeps surfacing in independent investigations. Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Russia have all been linked to the supply of drones, munitions, or political cover to one side or the other. Russia has spent years chasing a naval base on the Red Sea coast, and Wagner-linked networks have been implicated in gold extraction, the very resource that finances this war. Every one of these powers speaks the language of stability and partnership. Every one of them profits from a fractured state. This is the new scramble for Africa, dressed in modern clothing, and the currency is still our blood.

Who benefits? The generals, their commanders, and the foreign financiers who buy gold and sell weapons. Who bleeds? A child in Kordofan who cannot find clean water. A nurse in Darfur who has no medicine. A schoolteacher in Khartoum whose classroom is now a shelter. A farmer in Gezira who planted a field and lost it to the fighting. Who in Sudan has any real say over this? Almost no one with a voice that reaches the men with guns.

Sudan is not the only African country that has been handed this lesson. Too many of our governments have learned that a coup can be rewarded if the right foreign partner stands behind it. Too many of our militias have learned that terror pays when the gold keeps flowing. The African Union suspended Sudan after the October 2021 military takeover, and it should have treated that suspension as the beginning of accountability, not a box to tick. Africa has the tools. It has the Peace and Security Council, the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, and a generation of jurists who know how to build cases. What it has lacked is the will to use them without fear or favor.

The way forward is not mysterious, and we have seen it work. Botswana has built one of Africa's most durable democracies on rule of law, transparent public finance, and an independent judiciary that does not bend to generals. Mauritius has shown that a small, diverse island nation can build prosperity on property rights, open markets, and accountable institutions. Senegal demonstrated in 2024 that peaceful ballot-box transitions are possible even under heavy pressure. Sudan's own civilian resistance, including the volunteer Emergency Response Rooms that have fed and evacuated people in the most dangerous cities, has shown the courage that a functioning civil society requires. These are the building blocks: a ceasefire with independent verification, humanitarian corridors that cannot be closed by checkpoint politics, sanctions that freeze the assets and block the arms shipments of the generals and their foreign enablers, and a return to a civilian transition with an independent judiciary and a free press.

What should Sudanese citizens demand? Unhindered access for aid agencies to every locality, including the three in South Kordofan that remain sealed off. Full humanitarian funding that matches the scale of the need, not the scale of the donor's attention span. An end to the external supply lines that keep both armies fighting. Public accountability for every commander accused of atrocities, whether they wear a military uniform or a militia badge. And a civilian government chosen by the people, not appointed by the barrel of a gun.

The African Union must stop treating Sudan as a diplomatic embarrassment and start treating it as a moral emergency. The UN Security Council must enforce existing arms embargoes and sanction every foreign government caught feeding this war. Regional bodies must refuse to recognize any government installed by force. And every African citizen, from Lagos to Nairobi to Johannesburg, must ask their own leaders a simple question: when Sudan's children are dying, what exactly are you doing about it?

We know the number now. Twenty-three thousand seven hundred thirty-six households answered the call. They told us what the generals will not admit: that their country is starving, displaced, and under siege. The question is no longer whether Sudan's catastrophe is real. The question is whether we will keep counting the dead while doing nothing to save the living.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB