By Assam Francis

While the world has its attention on the ongoing missile parade between Iran, Israel and the United States, Sudan is still burning for nearly three years, and I keep asking myself the same question: why does the world only seem to grieve in certain time zones?

Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), two factions of the same rotten system, have been tearing the country apart in a war that is, by every measurable standard, the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.  Yet, it doesn’t draw the rallying cries we have seen for other conflicts.

To say the world is negligent about this crisis is overstating the obvious. Nearly 14 million people displaced, making it the largest displacement crisis on earth. The crisis has left twenty-one million people in acute hunger, fewer than 25 percent of hospitals still functioning and cholera spreading through all 18 states. These are not statistics. These are obituaries we have not written yet.

A War Built on Betrayal

The war in Sudan is preceded by a military coup in 2021 from two allies, turned hardcore foes.  General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan commands the national army, while General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” leads the RSF, a paramilitary born from the same Janjaweed militias that carried out the Darfur genocide. When negotiations collapsed in April 2023, they stopped pretending and started shooting. The people of Sudan had no vote in this. They were simply the collateral. The RSF besieged El Fasher for eighteen months, and when it fell, the UN described satellite imagery showing mass killings and executions sorted by ethnicity. Some estimates put the death toll at 150,000 people. We may be looking at the largest massacre of the 21st century, and it happened while the world was busy looking elsewhere.

The Bombs Nobody Talked About

And then came December 2025. A drone struck a preschool and hospital in Kalogi, South Kordofan, killing at least 116 people, 46 of them children. Days later, another drone hit a UN logistics base in Kadugli, killing six Bangladeshi peacekeepers. The UN Secretary-General called it a possible war crime. There was no global uproar. No emergency sessions broadcast live.

This is what impunity looks like when it is allowed to mature. Both the SAF and RSF have deployed drones against civilian infrastructure, hospitals, power plants, humanitarian hubs, with the calm efficiency of actors who have correctly calculated that nobody is coming to stop them.

Who Is Fueling This Fire?

Let us be honest about something that our diplomatic language likes to obscure. This war has sponsors.

Amnesty International found recently manufactured weapons flowing into Sudan from China, Russia, Turkey, Yemen, the UAE, and Serbia. The RSF funds its operations primarily through gold exports routed through the UAE, Kenya, and Ethiopia. In October 2025, the SAF recovered boxes of UAE-supplied arms directly from RSF-held territory. Sudan severed diplomatic ties with Abu Dhabi shortly after. The UAE denied everything. But the pattern is not subtle: Sudanese gold flows out, weapons flow in, and the war that makes all this possible is sustained by the profits it generates for people who will never spend a single night in a displacement camp.

On the other side, Iran has supplied the SAF with armed drones that contributed to military advances in Khartoum. Both sides have backers. Both sets of backers are profiting. And that, more than any military calculation, is why this war does not end. When the people funding the conflict are also benefiting from it, diplomacy is not just stalled. It is structurally unwanted.

The African Union’s Most Expensive Silence

By now, we should not be surprised by the African Union’s response. But that does not mean we should stop being angry about it.

The AU has issued statements. It has convened panels. It has urged ceasefires. It has done everything except apply genuine, sustained pressure on the parties and their backers. Analysts have described a persistent lack of real political will from AU leadership, a body that has at times hidden behind the principle of subsidiarity, deferring to regional mechanisms as a polite excuse for inaction.

On January 25, 2025, a drone struck one of El Fasher’s last functioning hospitals, killing 67 people including women and children. This happened nearly two years after the AU’s first calls for a ceasefire. Two years of statements. Sixty-seven more bodies. The math of this institution’s failure is not complicated.

We have seen the AU and ECOWAS move with urgency when soldiers seize power in West Africa. They sanction. They suspend. They threaten. But when a civilian-linked war produces the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe, the response is restraint, dialogue and process. The implicit message is clear: the method of destruction matters more to the AU than the scale of it. That is not a continental conscience. That is a protection racket for power, dressed in the language of African solidarity.

A Crisis We Are Choosing to Allow

The International Rescue Committee placed Sudan at the top of its 2026 Emergency Watchlist. Sudan’s humanitarian response plan required $4.2 billion. It received a fraction of that. The gap between what is needed and what is given is not a funding problem. It is a political choice.

Sudan is not forgotten because it is distant or difficult to understand. It is forgotten because forgetting it is convenient, for the Gulf states extracting its gold, for the arms suppliers filling the RSF’s arsenals, for the regional powers playing chess with Sudanese lives, and for a global community that has quietly decided some crises deserve more outrage than others.

We are pushing Sudan’s survivors into a corner they did not ask to occupy. And if the people with the power to act, the AU, the UN, the foreign governments arming both sides, do not make a different choice soon, there will come a point where there is nothing left to save but the memory of what Sudan once was.