Sudan Genocide: Join HornAfrica Insights for a deep dive into Sudan’s unfolding tragedy. They uncover how Sudan’s history of betrayal led to today’s crisis. Particularly the dire situation in Darfur, where civilians face extreme violence. Famine has been declared in parts of the country. A UN fact-finding mission in September 2024 concluded that both sides have committed human-rights violations and international crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, arbitrary arrests, rape, torture, and extrajudicial executions.
KHARTOUM JULY 18: Join HornAfrica Insights for a deep dive into Sudan’s unfolding tragedy. From a 70-year cycle of military coups to the ongoing genocide in El Fasher, they uncover how Sudan’s history of betrayal led to today’s crisis. The focus is on the ongoing conflict in Sudan, particularly the dire situation in Darfur, where civilians face extreme violence. Learn about the sudan civil war and humanitarian crisis.
Violence began spreading across the country in April 2023 and had claimed an estimated 150,000 lives by June 2024. An estimated 12 million people had been forced to leave their homes as of July 2025, including 7.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)—more than half of them children.
Sudan’s ongoing civil war has created the world’s largest and fastest-growing displacement, yet this crisis has been largely overshadowed by conflicts and political tensions elsewhere around the globe.
Famine has been declared in parts of the country, including in an IDP camp. Displaced people have been pushed into at times hostile environments where access to basic services and protection is severely limited.
The war escalated from a power struggle between two rival factions within the country’s military establishment: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by the former camel herder from Chad Muhamed Hamdan Dagalo.
A UN fact-finding mission in September 2024 concluded that both sides have committed human-rights violations and international crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, arbitrary arrests, rape, torture, and extrajudicial executions.
The U.S. government has accused the RSF of committing genocide against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur and the SAF of deploying chemical weapons against civilian and military targets alike.
Both sides have mobilized, armed, and extensively relied on various militias —many of which were formed along regional, ethical, and tribal lines—to an unprecedented extent, adding dangerous ideological and ethnic dimensions to the fighting.
The Masalit massacres, sometimes referred to as the Masalit genocide, are an ongoing series of massacres of the Masalit ethnic group in Sudan perpetrated by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies. The massacres began in 2023 during the Sudanese civil war when the RSF began committing organized mass killings of Masalit civilians in West Darfur.
The ongoing massacres include the Ardamata massacre, Misterei massacre and the Battle of Geneina, all of which targeted Masalit civilians within the area of Geneina.
