Civilians to suffer even more in Sudan next year as civil war rages on

Sudan’s civil war has unleashed violence, death, hunger and disease on a scarcely imaginable scale: tens of thousands of people have been killed, 12 million have been displaced and, with the country on the brink of famine, more than half of its 48 million citizens are acutely food insecure.

But the toll of the war on civilians is likely to get much worse in the coming months, political analysts and aid workers told Euronews.

With no decisive military victory on the horizon, experts say that Sudan, whose war is often overlooked, is going to see more displacement, more hunger and more disease outbreaks in 2025, compounding what is already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“Things look set to get much worse for civilians in the new year,” said Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst who runs the Confluence Advisory think tank.

Heavy fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia, broke out on 15 April last year in the capital Khartoum.

The SAF leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is better known as Hemedti, were once allies.

In October 2021, they seized power in a joint coup, thwarting Sudanese hopes for a civilian-led government, several years after a peaceful revolution had toppled the dictator Omar al-Bashir. Based, as it was, on shaky foundations, the generals’ alliance soon fully unravelled due to clashing ambitions between the two men and their forces.

In the ensuing war, both sides have been accused of war crimes and of weaponising humanitarian aid.

“There is no straightforward good guy, bad guy binary that media attention and public attention usually craves to understand these types of situations,” said Michael Jones, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence and security think tank.

“The intent and in the scale of RSF atrocities are qualitatively different,” he noted, citing reports that the militia is targeting specific populations. “SAF has been accused of indiscriminately shelling RSF-held areas and putting civilians at risk. Both are crimes but they are different in nature, intent and scale and they have a different underlying logic.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said earlier this year that the RSF could be guilty of ethnic cleansing in its campaigns against non-Arab ethnic groups in parts of Darfur, just as the janjaweed militias — from which the RSF formed — did two decades ago. Hemedti’s forces and their allies have also raped young girls and women and kept them as sex slaves, according to first-hand testimony published by HRW this month.

Meanwhile, the SAF has put civilians’ lives at risk by carrying out indiscriminate bombing attacks on RSF-held territory. Earlier this month, an SAF airstrike hit a busy market in Kabkabiya, North Darfur, killing dozens of non-combatants in an attack that Amnesty International called a “flagrant war crime”.

No end in sight

An end to the fighting seems a distant prospect, analysts have warned,** especially after the arms race between the SAF and the RSF this summer.

“There is more sophisticated weaponry all round. The net result is that civilians are more at risk of being killed,” said Khair of Confluence Advisory.

“Sudan is awash with small arms. A friend of mine, who recently went into the north of the country to do some research, told me that an AK-47 costs less than a week’s groceries,” Khair added.

The political analyst thinks Sudan’s civil war should be viewed as “a war on civilians”, in which both the SAF and the RSF are guilty of harming the Sudanese population and of failing to properly open aid corridors.

Jones of RUSI said the prospect of peace is slim in the short term, especially because of the internationalised nature of the war.

“The involvement of external stakeholders and the quantity of foreign munitions, vehicles and fuel — supplies that are being poured into the conflict — do seem to be ramping up. And that’s a worry because that’s ultimately the dynamic that enables and sustains fighting,” he said.

Credible reports cited by the UN suggest that the UAE is the RSF’s chief international backer, although Abu Dhabi denies involvement. However, it benefits from both warring parties when it comes to Sudan’s lucrative gold industry, which is a key economic driver of the conflict, said Khair.

On the other side, Western officials have confirmed that Iran has provided the SAF with Mohajer-6 combat drones. Such technology has helped al-Burhan to win territory, even if it has not, as of yet, dramatically changed the nationwide outlook on the battlefield.

“Over the course of 2024, we saw a few shifts. You saw sporadic counter-offensives launched by the SAF that tended to run out of steam quite quickly,” Jones noted.

The RSF has, for months, been fiercely besieging El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the SAF’s only foothold in the state. Elsewhere, the militia still holds sway in Khartoum, but the SAF have taken back the Jebel Moya axis, south of the capital, which allows them to launch campaigns into Gezira state, Sudan’s agricultural heartland.

Despite the lack of military breakthrough, both sides think they can turn things to their advantage, Khair told Euronews. In any case, the enmity between the two precludes serious ceasefire negotiations.

The belligerents have one thing in common, which is that neither wants to see a democratic Sudan, Khair said. “Keeping the war going allows them to hedge that they may be able to turn things in their favour and diminish what is left of the revolution, what the revolution calls for. That is, an end to a militarised Sudan as much as possible.”

Jones agrees that it is neither in the SAF nor the RSF’s interest to stop fighting. “The domestic warring parties don’t have the incentive or need to come to the negotiating table in any real way,” he said. “I don’t really think there’s an immediately obvious pathway to peace.”

With no sign of the war abating, the country is poised to become ever more fragmented.

Sudan could split not only into SAF and RSF areas, but also along other lines, if local warlords and militias who currently support the main sides decide to carve out territory for themselves. “We will likely see the fragmentation, Balkanisation of Sudan,” said Khair.

With past Sudanese conflicts as her benchmark, Khair believes the war could last another 20 years. Unless political will changes, she said, and stricter weapons embargos and sanctions on the gold trade are introduced and enforced.

Worsening humanitarian crisis

As things stand, the scale of the humanitarian crisis is already staggering. In the first 20 months of the war, more than 9 million Sudanese have been internally displaced, while 3 million others have fled into neighbouring countries such as Chad.

Sudan is, in fact, experiencing the world’s largest ever recorded humanitarian crisis, with 30.4m people in need of assistance, according to the UN’s Global Humanitarian Overview 2025. To put the numbers into perspective globally, Sudan is home to less than 1% of the world’s population, but has 10% of the world’s people in need.

Hunger and disease stalk the country. More than 24 million Sudanese are deemed to be acutely food insecure, and famine, which was declared in August in Zamzam camp, Darfur, risks becoming widespread, according to the UN.

The country is in the midst of a large cholera outbreak, something made all the more difficult because more than 70% of Sudan’s hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttered by the war.

Despite such problems, Sudan is struggling to get sufficient humanitarian funding from the international community. This year, UNHCR, the United Nation’s refugee agency, sought to raise $1.031 billion (€1bn) for Sudan. But as of the end of October, it had only received [40% of this amount](https://reporting.unhcr.org/operational/situations/sudan-situation. US Sec).

However, on 19 September, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration was donating a further $200m (€192.4m) for food, shelter and health care in Sudan.

“At the moment, Sudan not only holds the title of the world’s worst displacement crisis, but it’s also the world’s worst hunger crisis,” said Anne-Marie Schryer-Roy, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) regional advocacy coordinator for East Africa. “There are people who are starving to death each day.”

Reflecting on a recent trip to SAF-held territory in Sudan, Schryer-Roy described seeing signs of displacement wherever she went.

People sleep by the roadside and outside mosques, while others live in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs). Winter has started, and the displaced lack the necessary warm clothes and blankets, Schryer-Roy said.

“I met this woman, Huda, who’s been displaced twice by the conflict and has had to move with just the clothes on her back and her three children,” the IRC representative said. Huda told Schryer-Roy of her despair, but also of her hopes for peace.

“That’s the biggest thing people are asking for now: an end to the fighting so that they can resume their lives and their livelihoods,” Schryer-Roy said.

Aid groups are urging both the SAF and the RSF to allow unfettered aid access, so the most vulnerable people can be helped. Although there have been small improvements in recent months, the situation remains challenging.

While international organisations struggle with access, local networks such as the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), which was nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, are working to feed millions of people through community kitchens and evacuate thousands from areas hit hard by the fighting.

Targeted by both sides, some ERR volunteers have been arrested and killed. As of early February, the ERR said more than 20 of its volunteers had been assassinated, while dozens more had been detained.

Counting the dead

There is no way of knowing for certain how many Sudanese have been killed so far by the civil war, either as a result of direct violence or a lack of medical treatment. Official estimates have put the deaths in the tens of thousands, but US Special Envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello has said it could be as high as 150,000.

A new study from the Sudan Research Group, a collaboration between humanitarians and public health academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), estimated that 61,000 people had died in Khartoum province alone in the first 14 months of the war.

This is a 50% increase from pre-war rates. Of this total, 26,000 were killed by direct violence, the study found.

The researchers used a technique called “capture-recapture analysis” to reach their estimate. This method compares data across multiple sources. In this case, researchers used three lists drawn up from social media, and private and public surveys.

“It was really hard work because one of the features of the war — and of many wars — is that the impact is meant to be silent,” said Maysoon Dahab, the study’s lead author.

“You see the trend in Sudan before most big attacks: the internet and the electricity will be cut off. There’s a real effort to try to make it difficult to communicate what is happening.”

On-the-ground visits were too dangerous, so everything had to be done remotely, both inside and outside Sudan.

Dahab, an epidemiologist at the LSHTM, said the results from Khartoum province showed just how devastating the war has been on civilians. And this is without estimates from worse affected regions, including Darfur and Kordofan.

“We think that Khartoum — bad as it is — is probably much better than other places,” Dahab said.

‘Every Sudanese life is important’

Aljaili Ahmed, one of Dahab’s colleagues on the LSTHM survey, said their work shows the world just how bad the situation in Sudan is.

“What we have tried to do is really to document what is happening. And then people have no way of saying, ‘We didn’t know it was that bad’. You knew. We’ve given you the information.”

Speaking as a Sudanese citizen, Ahmed, who now lives abroad, also reflected on his people’s hopes for civilian rule after the 2019 ousting of al-Bashir.

“We had lots of hope after the revolution. We thought things would change for the better,” he said. “We wanted to rebuild a Sudan that is fair, peaceful and diverse. And then suddenly, because both parties [the RSF and the SAF] wanted to grab power, the war started.”

Although he does not see peace coming soon, Ahmed said civilians have to be involved in negotiations further down the line. “It shouldn’t be armies negotiating with each other. Because the language they use and the solutions they have are just going to repeat this current situation over and over again.“

Omamah Abbas, who worked on the LSHTM study from Khartoum before fleeing Sudan earlier this year, saw death and destruction firsthand.

“From my room in Khartoum, I watched burials almost every day through my window. These were for people killed by shells or stray bullets,” she said.

“While hearing gunfire and shooting, I stayed on my laptop writing down the names of the dead. I also wondered if I would be on that list one day. Every time I recorded a death, I thought, ‘How will I die? Will it be from a shell, a stray bullet or something else?’”

It was difficult for Abbas to get enough signal. She had to go up to her building’s roof and wait for as long as it took to send in her results. Given the war raging outside, this entailed risk, but Abbas was spurred on by all the people who had died — by all those who, as she put it, once “had dreams, hopes and plans for the future”.

“Every Sudanese life is important. We wanted to show the world the effect of this terrible war for us. We want to remember every life lost.”