The world is watching two wars while a third is fought without an audience. Sudan’s war began in April 2023. It has taken at least 59,000 lives, driven around 13 million people from their homes, pushed large parts of the country into famine, and is now closing in on a city full of the displaced.
The latest front is El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state. The city sits at the country’s crossroads, and for three years it has been a refuge for people fleeing the fighting in Darfur and Kordofan. Now the Rapid Support Forces have effectively encircled it. The UN warned this week that civilians around El-Obeid face growing danger, and aid agencies are bracing for a full-scale assault on a city already swollen with people who fled earlier attacks.
Drones have been working the city over. Fuel supplies are hit, power lines are down, transport routes are cut. El-Obeid’s main hospital keeps losing its generator because the diesel is gone, and the generator is the difference between an incubator working and a premature baby dying. Doctors at El-Obeid Teaching Hospital describe an emergency room that stops when the fuel stops and maternity wards where a power cut is a mortal risk. A displaced woman who fled after her husband was killed described arriving with nothing: no bed, no pan, no bucket, no food. Those details are not embellishments; they are the standard equipment of this war.
The numbers measure the silence. More than 30 million people, more than half the country, need humanitarian aid. Around 13 million have been displaced, most of them inside Sudan. The UN’s appeal for Sudan this year is about $3 billion, and barely two-fifths of that, some $1.2 billion, has arrived. The sums raised for other conflicts in the same period run much larger, because those conflicts have television coverage and diplomatic pressure behind them.
The infrastructure of mercy is collapsing under the funding gap. In Central Darfur, three clinics have shut their doors for want of funds, leaving around 75,000 uprooted people without medical help. In the past week alone, fighting in West Darfur emptied more than twenty villages, sending about 18,000 people toward the border with Chad. People are fleeing into El-Obeid at the same moment the RSF tightens the ring around it. The city that was the refuge is becoming the trap.
The war itself is shifting. On Thursday, the RSF claimed a major victory in the Blue Nile region, a sign that the paramilitary force is advancing on multiple fronts even as it tightens the noose around El-Obeid. The army, which held the cities when the war began, is losing ground. The two sides have been fighting since the generals who once shared power fell out, and neither has shown the slightest interest in stopping. The peace talks, such as they are, have produced nothing. The UN’s envoy shuttles between the sides and reports back the same nothing.
Why does nobody talk about it? The reasons are not mysterious. There are no Western troops to bring home, no oil to price, no Western election hinging on it. The dead are counted by aid agencies and researchers, not by governments, and their names do not appear in headlines. The famine is declared in reports that few people read.
None of that makes the war quieter. The drones still fly over El-Obeid. The generator still stops. The bodies still pile. The only difference between this war and the two the world is watching is that this one is not being watched. That is a choice, made every day by everyone who has the time to look at a phone and looks away instead.
Sources: Africanews (AP), UN News/OCHA, Channel Africa