Sudan's Warlords and Their Foreign Sponsors Are Starving 20 Million People

Forty-one people were killed on October 10 near the Ethiopian border. They were displaced. They had already lost their homes, their farms, and their neighbourhoods, and they had fled to a place they believed was safer. Then a drone found them. Think about who was in that group: mothers, children, old men who walked for days, families who had nothing left to carry but their children. Nobody in Khartoum, Port Sudan, Abu Dhabi, Ankara, or Moscow will ever have to explain those deaths in a courtroom. That is the obscenity at the heart of Sudan's war.

Twenty million people in Sudan are facing acute hunger. Two hundred thousand of them are at catastrophe levels, the final stage before famine, where people are dying of starvation in the open. This is not a statistic that belongs in a briefing note. It is a country of 50 million people where one in every two or so is now fighting to eat, and where the grain that should be on the market is being used as a weapon of war by men in uniform.

We have watched this before. We watched it in Darfur in the early 2000s, when the Janjaweed militias burned villages and the world held meetings. We watched it in the war that began on April 15, 2023, when the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, turned Khartoum into a battlefield. Two generals who once shared power in a transition meant to deliver civilian rule chose instead to share the spoils of a shattered country. The people paid for it.

Consider what the crisis looks like today. More than 700,000 displaced people have gathered in Tawila in North Darfur. Many of them fled the siege and massacres around El Fasher. They arrived with no food, too little water, and almost no healthcare. Mothers are walking hours to find clean water. Children are dying of diseases that are preventable with clean water and basic medicine. Aid workers say the supply lines are constantly disrupted. When a camp has no food and no clinic, the death toll does not arrive as a headline. It arrives quietly, one child at a time.

The drone strikes are the new face of this war. From El Obeid in Kordofan to Blue Nile in the south-east, drones are killing civilians in places that were supposed to be safe. Drones are cheap. They can be launched from far away. They allow the men who order the strikes to avoid looking into the eyes of the people they kill. Sudan's war has been fuelled by weapons from outside its borders: drones and armoured vehicles that arrive through shadowy supply chains, and money that flows through third countries. UN investigators and international monitors have documented weapons reaching both sides, and the United Arab Emirates has been named repeatedly in reporting on supplies to the Rapid Support Forces, a claim Abu Dhabi denies. Turkish-made and other foreign drones have been used by the army. Russian interests, including the Wagner network's gold and mining operations and long-running ambitions for a naval presence on the Red Sea, have made Sudan a prize for Moscow. Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have each been drawn into the contest in different ways. Every one of these outside powers talks about stability. Every one of them profits from the instability.

Here is the truth that the diplomats in New York will not say plainly enough. Sudan's generals are not fighting a war they inherited. They are fighting a war they chose, and they are doing it with the help of foreign governments that see Sudan's gold, farmland, ports, and strategic position as opportunities. This is the new scramble for Africa. The colonial powers of the nineteenth century carved up the continent with maps and rifles. Today's partners arrive with drones, development loans, and security deals. The method has changed. The extraction has not.

The arms embargo the Security Council imposed covers only Darfur. Think about what that means. The men flying drones over Kordofan and Blue Nile are not bound by the restriction. The embargo is a partial measure that treats a national catastrophe as a regional problem. Sanctions have been extended to December 11, which gives the council another two months of meetings and statements before it has to reconsider. We have seen this pattern for years: a resolution passes, the violence continues, the sanctions are renewed, and the dead are counted later. That is not diplomacy. It is a slow retreat from responsibility.

So what must happen? The Security Council must expand the arms embargo to cover all of Sudan, not just Darfur. Every drone, every shipment of ammunition, every armoured vehicle, and every financial channel feeding either side must be traced and cut. Sanctions should target not only the commanders but also the companies, brokers, and governments that enable them. The UN must guarantee humanitarian corridors that cannot be closed by checkpoints or artillery. The African Union, which suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, must stop issuing communiqués and start demanding a civilian-led transition with a date on the calendar and international observers on the ground.

We also have examples that prove a better path exists. Botswana built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by protecting its institutions, managing its resources transparently, and treating the rule of law as the foundation of growth. Mauritius shows what happens when property rights are respected and public institutions are accountable. Sudan's own revolutionaries in 2019 proved that ordinary people, from doctors to teachers to young women in the streets, can demand civilian rule and win. Their dream was stolen by men who wanted power without accountability. The answer is not another junta. The answer is an independent judiciary, a free press that can report drone strikes without being shot for it, markets that move food to where it is needed, and an army that answers to elected civilians.

To the Sudanese reading this from Omdurman, Port Sudan, Nyala, or a tent in Tawila: you did not cause this. You have not failed. Your suffering is the proof that the men who started this war have failed you.

To the rest of us, the question is simple. How many more must die before the world stops calling this a crisis and starts calling it what it is: a war of choice, fed by outside money and outside weapons, and paid for by the poorest people on earth. Demand that your government back a full arms embargo covering all of Sudan. Demand that the UAE, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Iran, and every other power stop feeding the guns. Demand that the African Union choose civilians over generals. Demand that the Security Council act before December instead of waiting to renew its own inaction. We are Africans. This is our continent, and the children of Darfur and Kordofan are our children. Do not scroll past them.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS