Burhan and Hemedti Are Starving Darfur and Kordofan to Death

Hunger is being used as a weapon in Sudan, and the people who hold the trigger are not the sky.

The UN-backed global hunger monitor has warned that famine risk is rising across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan. A severe El Niño drought is making a catastrophe worse. But drought does not burn granaries, shell market queues, or bar aid convoys from crossing front lines. Men with guns do that. Sudan's families are not starving because the rains failed. They are starving because two armies have decided that feeding civilians is a lower priority than winning.

Think about what that means. A mother in Kordofan counting the days between meals. A child in a Darfur camp whose body has stopped growing because there is no food to grow on. A farmer who planted, who did everything right, and watched his harvest become a battlefield. We are not talking about abstractions. We are talking about children, and the people responsible have names.

The Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have been at war since April 2023. The fighting has left the country with the largest displacement crisis on the planet. The IPC has repeatedly confirmed famine conditions in parts of Darfur, including the Zamzam displacement camp near El Fasher, and has warned that famine is at risk in many more areas, including Kordofan. Tens of millions of Sudanese now face acute hunger. These are not statistics for a conference slide. They are people who used to feed themselves, and now wait for someone else to decide whether they eat.

The pattern is documented. The RSF has been accused by UN investigators, human rights monitors, and Sudanese emergency response networks of looting markets, destroying farmland, and blocking supply routes. Civilians in El Fasher endured a siege that ended in mass killings and mass displacement in late 2025, with reports of executions and sexual violence that the UN and rights groups described in language reserved for atrocities. The SAF, for its part, has been accused of blocking humanitarian access and bombing civilian areas, including markets and residential neighbourhoods, from the air. Both sides have obstructed aid. Both sides have turned a food crisis into a bargaining chip.

Then there are the foreign hands. UN Panel of Experts findings and investigative reporting have pointed to outside suppliers and financiers feeding this war, with the United Arab Emirates named in multiple reports as a channel of support for the RSF. The UAE denies these claims. Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Russia have also been linked to the SAF side, through weapons, drones, or diplomatic cover. Russia has spent years chasing a naval foothold on Sudan's Red Sea coast. Gold from Darfur and other regions has moved through networks that enrich commanders and mercenaries while the people who dig it out remain poor. Every one of these outside actors claims to care about stability. Not one of them has been willing to make feeding Sudan's children a condition of its involvement.

We have heard this script before. Foreign powers arrive with contracts, arms, minerals, and strategic ambitions, then lecture Africans about sovereignty while the sovereign people starve. The new scramble for Africa does not look like the 19th century. It wears defence contracts and port concessions and mining licences. The extraction is the same.

Let us be clear about what this is not. It is not a natural disaster that happened to strike a country at war. A drought is a hazard. Famine is a policy outcome. When armed groups control the roads, when fuel and seed are priced out of reach, when aid trucks wait at checkpoints for permission that never comes, the drought simply reveals who has been governing, and who has been failing to govern at all.

So what must happen? First, the African Union must stop issuing communiqués and start enforcing its own principles. Its Peace and Security Council should demand unhindered humanitarian access across Darfur and Kordofan, with named accountability for any party that blocks it. Second, the UN Security Council must impose targeted sanctions on commanders, financiers, and suppliers who fuel this war, and it must stop letting the veto shield those who starve civilians. Third, the states that sell arms to either side should be required to answer a simple question: are these weapons being used to kill people who are already hungry? If the answer is yes, the sales must stop.

Africa also has the proof that peace and prosperity are possible. Botswana built one of the continent's most durable democracies on diamonds, strong institutions, and an independent judiciary, and it has used its revenues to invest in the public good. Ghana has shown that power can change hands peacefully through the ballot. Mauritius shows what open markets, property rights, and transparent public finance can do for a country of modest size. Sudan's own civil society, including the community emergency response networks that have kept soup kitchens and clinics running under bombardment, has shown more courage and competence than either general. These networks should receive direct, protected funding, not sit at the mercy of parties who want to control the aid.

Citizens also have a part to play. Demand that your government publish what it knows about arms and financial flows into Sudan. Demand that your parliament ask hard questions of any company that profits from Sudanese gold. Demand that your media stop treating Sudan as a footnote. Support the organisations on the ground that are feeding people now, and hold your own leaders to account for what they do, and do not do, at the African Union and the United Nations.

Here is the question that should keep every African leader awake: how many children must go hungry before the word "famine" stops being a warning and becomes a verdict? In Darfur and Kordofan, that verdict is already being written. The only open question is whether we will sign it with our silence or rewrite it with our action.

Burhan and Hemedti have chosen their war over their people. The regional and global powers feeding them have chosen their profits over African lives. We do not have to accept that arrangement. Call your representatives. Pressure the African Union. Refuse the narrative that Sudan's hunger is inevitable. Sudan's children did not choose this war, and they cannot wait for the rains to stop.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS