“We Thought The War Would End”: Why Sudan’s Conflict Rages On

A shaky video call on a grey November afternoon rings five times before connecting me to Duaa. She is almost 5,000 kilometres away, sitting on the floor of her family’s temporary accommodation, and calling me on a laptop that, like most university students, has what feels like her entire life on it. She apologises for any unstable connection, and then again for any incorrect English (the sign of a true polyglot, it seems to me). I insist that I’m sure that’s not the case, and anyhow, anything is better than my woeful Arabic. We share a laugh; joking seems hardly appropriate, but it’s what comes naturally.

Duaa is one of 12 million Sudanese citizens displaced by a civil war that is consuming her country. She grew up in Omdurman, a large city in Khartoum State perched on the banks of the Nile; the skyline, once a warm mix of mosques and palm trees interspersed with skyscrapers and luxury hotels, now transformed into a battleground as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) push back against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

An hour’s-old BBC report of a random shelling killing 120, with numbers expected to rise, signifies the magnitude of the crisis.

“We tried to stay as long as we could,” says Duaa, recalling the first five months after war broke out. “We thought it would end soon. But during these five months, there were people being killed, and a lot of checkpoints where citizens are imprisoned… it was difficult to live there.”

Looking back, this bittersweet optimism of Duaa and her family was the writing on the wall for the violence that now engulfs Sudan. Like millions of others, the fighting between once-allied factions, which erupted on the 15th of April 15, 2023, was expected to last three, maybe four months at most. A perceived lack of soldiers, weapons, and funding meant many expected the power struggle between General Abdel Fattah al-Burha and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (or Hemedti) to peter out, with the possibility of each side maintaining some level of control in rival spheres within Sudan.

These predictions did not play out. Describing Sudan’s situation as a “war of agency”, with the Dagalo militia conducting a “genocide war without any clear goals or demands”, Duaa pauses as she remembers the abrupt escalation of violence as the RSF grew in strength and numbers.

“Suddenly the soldiers were everywhere, with powerful weapons. They were waging war against the citizens - and many of them weren’t even Sudanese. We didn’t know where they came from. I’m not an expert, but I’m sure there is something going on. It has become a survival war for the state and the citizen.” Her voice cracks.

Yet with the conflict now entering its 21st month, Duaa’s testimony reveals far more than a struggle for power between two megalomanic generals; it nods to the inner workings of a war that is being waged not just within Sudan, but from afar.

A web of geopolitical interests constricts Sudan, choking its people and casting a shadow on its future. Egypt has supplied arms to the SAF, while the UAE has funnelled weapons to the RSF, reportedly via Chad. Libya and South Sudan, though not officially aligned, have seen fuel flows reach the RSF. Eritrea is hosting training camps for SAF-affiliated armed groups, and even Ukrainian special forces are allegedly engaging RSF fighters alongside Russian mercenaries.

To obscure matters further, Sudan’s conflict isn’t merely a case of proxy warmongering between antagonistic nations. Egypt and the UAE, the two main external backers of the SAF and RSF respectively, demonstrate this clearly as they maintain close diplomatic ties, despite supporting opposing factions. Their involvement in Sudan is not indicative of a direct rivalry, but of strategic calculations that are rooted in personal regional interests.

As the violence showed no signs of abating, Duaa and her family fled to the North of the country in August 2023, when the local neighbourhood defence could hold off the marauding RSF no longer.

Insisting that she is “lucky to be displaced”, the occasional internet connection and unwavering support from her supervisor and colleagues has been just enough for Duaa to slowly continue her architecture studies with Khartoum University. She has even managed to present a paper on the use of AI in the revitalisation of cultural heritage in Kigali aged just 22 - a huge achievement for anyone, let alone a young woman caught in the crossfires of a bloody civil war.

When I ask Duaa what she misses most about her life back in Omdurman, she thinks for a moment. There are a lot of things to miss. Spending time with friends, revising for exams, walking around the university campus, eating meals cooked with love and patience. Once-ordinary moments, now on hold indefinitely.

She stays positive about her future, relieved that she has been able to continue her studies; still, she cannot hide from the fact that, across the global media scene, scant reporting and laissez-faire attention means Sudan is not attracting the attention it deserves, and desperately needs.

“I want the world to hear our story, because Sudan right now is forgotten. Every day, my people suffer; every day, someone is killed.”

At the time of our conversation, I felt I had little to offer in response. The global appetite for tragedy is insatiable - a macabre voyeurism fed by dark headlines and distant suffering. Sudan, with so many lives lost and communities displaced, cruelly fits the bill. Why is it that the world is turning away from Sudan?

Following my chat with Duaa, I had the chance to speak to the protest group London for Sudan about this very issue. Having assembled a small but powerful demonstration outside the Emirates stadium, a gutsy move given the Liverpool-induced temperament of Arsenal fans, principle organiser Lulu voiced a hard truth: that Sudan’s invisibility is rooted in anti-Blackness.

“Just Africans fighting again,” she said, distilling the dismissiveness that permeates Western media and UK foreign policy. A stark reflection of how the violence in Sudan is trivialised, her words stuck like a slap; but decades of British and Egyptian colonial rule marked by ethnic, regional, religious, and political fault lines reveal how Western indifference to Sudan is bound up in the deep scars of exploitation and division.

Rather than an oversight, this complicity in Sudan’s fractures, combined with an unwillingness to confront the lasting impacts of colonialism, presents a damning reflection of global systems that have long dehumanised African lives. Sudan’s plight is not inevitable, another chapter in a tired story of African conflict; it is the outcome of a deliberate unwillingness to reckon with the enduring legacies of colonialism and racial hierarchies.

The active role of countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, who continue to bloody their hands by arming and financing the warring factions while engaging in strategic distractions such as sportswashing, further underscores the complicity of a world that allows these contradictions to persist. The coupling of historical forgetting and willing exploitation is silencing Sudan, its suffering overshadowed by a cocktail of greed and global indifference.

The eerie media silence that surrounds Sudan, instilled by the coupling of historical forgetting and willing exploitation, threatens to render civilians like Duaa and protesters like Lulu invisible, their voices drowned out by waves of indifference.

Laid bare by Duaa’s testimony of being caught in the crossfires between proxies and power struggles, the war clearly doesn’t lack horror - far from it. What it does lack, however, is an audience.