Sudan's Generals Are Starving Children and Their Foreign Backers Are Paying

Somewhere in Sudan tonight, a child is too weak to cry. Her ribs show through her skin. Her mother has walked for days, past burned villages and checkpoints manned by men with guns, hoping to reach a clinic that may no longer exist. This is not a natural disaster. No drought or flood made this happen. Two men made this happen, and the foreign powers that sell them weapons, gold, and drones are making sure they can keep going.

We have seen this before on our continent, and we know how it ends if we stay silent. The Sudanese army under General Abdel Fattah al-Ibrahim Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have turned a war for power into a war on the most vulnerable people in the country. Since fighting erupted in April 2023, the country has become one of the largest displacement and hunger crises on earth. UN agencies estimate that more than twelve million Sudanese have been forced from their homes. Tens of millions do not know where their next meal will come from.

The evidence is not hidden. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the international system that measures hunger, confirmed famine in Zamzam camp in North Darfur in August 2024, the first such declaration in the region in more than a decade. Famine was later identified in other parts of the country as fighting spread across Darfur and Kordofan. Those are not abstract categories. Famine means children dying from hunger and the diseases that prey on hungry bodies, measles, cholera, and diarrhoea, while aid trucks wait at blocked roads.

Consider what the nutrition sector documents year after year. Severe acute malnutrition is the most lethal form of childhood hunger, and it is treatable with ready-to-use therapeutic food that costs a few dollars per child. When that food runs out, the children do not wait politely. They die. Health facilities have been looted, bombed, and abandoned. Health workers have been killed. Stock shortages at state and facility level, documented repeatedly by aid partners, mean therapeutic food sits in warehouses while mothers are turned away from clinics. Every month that supply chains stay broken is a month of preventable funerals.

Then there is El Fasher. When the RSF overran the last major army stronghold in North Darfur in October 2025, the UN and human rights monitors documented mass killings, sexual violence, and the systematic targeting of civilians on the basis of ethnicity. Survivors described being hunted through the streets. Families who fled had nowhere safe to go, and the hunger that followed was not an accident of war. It was a predictable result of besieging a city and calling it a military operation.

Let us be clear about the army too. The Sudanese Armed Forces have bombed residential neighbourhoods in Khartoum and elsewhere, and they have used blockades and restrictions on humanitarian access as tools of war. A general who denies food to a town because its residents are presumed to support his enemy is not a patriot. He is a war criminal in uniform. Africans who have lived under military rule know this story well. The uniform changes. The contempt for civilian life does not.

What makes this catastrophe harder to bear is the money and weapons flowing in from outside. UN panels of experts have reported that the RSF's supply lines have run through neighbouring states and that gold extracted from Sudanese mines has been moved through foreign networks to finance the fighting. Investigations have linked the Russian private military network Wagner to gold extraction in Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates has been named in UN reporting on arms supplies to the RSF, a claim Abu Dhabi denies. Meanwhile, drones and military support have reached the SAF from Turkey, Iran, and other partners. Each of these governments speaks the language of partnership and development. Each one is profiting from a country that is being hollowed out.

So we must ask the question these governments would prefer we did not. If you are truly our partner, why are your gold refiners, your arms exporters, and your security contractors all in the same war that is starving our children? You build ports and sign minerals deals in our capitals, and then you look the other way when the guns you supplied are used against villages. You claim to respect sovereignty, but you have helped pour fuel onto a fire that is burning the sovereignty of Sudan to ash.

The West is not innocent either. Western governments lecture us constantly about democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. They have the right values. The question is whether they will enforce them when the perpetrators are useful to someone. An arms embargo that exists on paper but leaks like a sieve is not a policy. It is a press release. The UN Security Council has the authority to enforce sanctions, freeze the assets of commanders and their financiers, and inspect shipments. It should have done far more, far sooner.

Solutions exist, and Africa has shown them. Botswana built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by protecting property rights, funding institutions, and keeping the military subordinate to elected civilians. Mauritius rebuilt its economy on open markets and an independent judiciary. Senegal demonstrated in 2024 that peaceful transfers of power are possible when citizens and civil society refuse to accept a ruler's grab for permanence. None of these countries is perfect, but each proves that a better path is not a fantasy. It is a choice.

For Sudan, the path begins with a ceasefire that is monitored, enforced, and linked to unhindered humanitarian access across every front. It requires the African Union to take its Peace and Security Council seriously, to name the sponsors of this war, and to back a civilian-led transition with real institutions. It requires donors to fund nutrition programmes before the next famine declaration, not after. It requires the UN to make therapeutic food and clean water non-negotiable in any agreement. And it requires accountability: sanctions on every commander, every financier, and every foreign company that trades in Sudanese blood gold.

Sudanese civil society has been doing the work of survival for two and a half years, running kitchens, staffing clinics, and documenting atrocities while the generals fight over palaces. They deserve more than sympathy. They deserve protection and funding.

And we, the ordinary citizens of this continent, must refuse to accept this as background noise. Demand that your government raise Sudan at the African Union and the UN, not as a footnote but as an emergency. Demand that your country stop purchasing gold and weapons from supply chains that feed this war. Demand transparency from every company that does business with the RSF or the SAF. Share the evidence. Name the names.

Every child who dies of hunger in Sudan this year will have a name, a mother, and a village. Their deaths are not inevitable. They are the result of decisions made by men with guns and by governments that count the profits. Africa was told for centuries that our suffering was someone else's business. It is our business now. Stand up for Sudan before the next famine declaration arrives, because by then it will be too late for too many children.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB