The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which began in April 2023, is now in its fourth year. The May 2026 joint update from the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNICEF puts the number of Sudanese people in acute food insecurity at 19.5 million. Of those, 135,000 are classified as being in IPC Phase 5 — the catastrophic-famine classification — concentrated in Darfur and Kordofan. The number of children under five with severe acute malnutrition is 825,000, a 7% increase over the same period in 2025 and approximately 25% above the pre-conflict baseline.
Sudan continues to host the world's largest displacement crisis. Approximately 12 million people are displaced internally or as refugees in neighbouring countries — Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic. The Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan for 2026 is currently funded at approximately 20% of its requirement.
In November 2025, the city of El Fasher in North Darfur fell to the RSF after an eighteen-month siege. A subsequent United Nations human rights investigation found what it described as “the hallmarks of genocide” — systematic killings, mass rape, and ethnically targeted violence against the Masalit and other non-Arab Darfuri populations. The investigation's report has been formally received by the UN Human Rights Council. Whether it will result in any action that affects events on the ground is, as with most such reports concerning Sudan over the past three years, unlikely.
The war has not commanded sustained international attention. International journalism in Sudan is severely restricted by both warring parties. The humanitarian organisations operating there describe their work as conducted in something close to a media vacuum. The numbers are well-established. The political pressure that those numbers might be expected to generate has not materialised.
What ends the war, if anything does, will be a political settlement between the two sides — a settlement neither side currently has reason to seek. In the absence of that, the famine deepens.