On April 15, 2023, fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in Khartoum and simultaneously in Darfur. Three years later, the war has not ended. It has expanded. It has deepened. It has produced the largest internal displacement crisis on the planet, famine conditions across multiple regions, and a level of destruction that has left the capital of one of Africa's largest countries largely uninhabitable. The scale of suffering in Sudan in 2026 is not comparable to a difficult humanitarian situation. It is one of the most catastrophic collapses of a functioning state in the post-Cold War era.
Yet coverage in Western media remains thin. Diplomatic energy from major powers has been episodic at best. The peace processes that have been attempted, notably the Jeddah talks brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States, have produced ceasefires that were broken within hours and frameworks that neither party has treated as binding. Sudan enters its third year of war with no credible peace process in operation and no external power with sufficient leverage and sufficient interest to impose one.
This piece is not a summary of the war. It is an attempt to explain why a crisis of this magnitude has attracted so little sustained international attention, what has changed in year three, and what the Horn of Africa faces if Sudan continues to collapse on its current trajectory.
What year three looks like on the ground
The geography of the war has shifted significantly since its early months, when fighting was concentrated in Khartoum and in North Darfur. The RSF, which began the war with a superior ground presence in western Sudan and a network of logistical and financial relationships cultivated during years of operating as a semi-autonomous paramilitary force, has consolidated control over large parts of Darfur and Kordofan, and has pushed into Gezira state, the agricultural heartland of Sudan and historically one of its most stable regions. The fall of the Gezira to RSF control in late 2023 was a strategic inflection point that received far less international attention than it deserved.
Gezira matters for two reasons beyond military positioning. First, it is Sudan's bread basket. Its collapse into a conflict zone has directly contributed to the famine conditions now documented across the country. Second, it represents RSF expansion beyond its traditional western base, suggesting that the force's long-term ambition is territorial control of Sudan's most economically productive areas rather than merely a negotiated share of a reconstituted power structure.
The SAF, which controls Sudan's northeast, including Port Sudan where the internationally recognised government has relocated, has responded to RSF territorial gains by using air power against civilian areas, a tactic that has drawn repeated condemnation from UN agencies and human rights organisations without producing any change in behaviour. Both parties have been credibly accused of attacks on civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and in the case of RSF-affiliated forces in Darfur, atrocities against civilian populations in Masalit and other non-Arab communities that human rights lawyers have described as meeting the legal threshold for genocide.
Famine as a structural condition, not an emergency
The language of humanitarian response treats famine as an emergency, something that arrives, is addressed, and passes. In Sudan in 2026, famine is better understood as a structural condition produced by the deliberate choices of both parties to the conflict. Aid obstruction is not a side effect of the war. It is a tool of it.
The UN declared famine in the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur in mid-2024, the first famine declared anywhere in the world in several years. Since then, famine conditions have been documented or are imminent in additional areas including parts of Kordofan and the Upper Nile states. The mechanism is consistent: fighting displaces agricultural communities, looting and destruction of grain stores removes food stocks, and aid convoys are blocked by armed actors who use civilian starvation as leverage or simply as a byproduct of controlling territory.
The numbers involved are almost incomprehensible in their scale. The 25 million people assessed as facing acute food insecurity represent more than half of Sudan's pre-war population. The 11 million internally displaced represent a population larger than many European countries. These numbers have been repeated in UN briefings and humanitarian reports without producing proportionate action, which raises a question that goes beyond Sudan specifically: at what scale does a humanitarian crisis generate a response proportionate to its size, and who decides what that threshold is.
Why the world is not paying attention
The absence of sustained international attention to Sudan is not accidental. It reflects a set of structural factors that are worth naming explicitly rather than treating as a natural phenomenon.
Sudan does not fit neatly into the geopolitical frameworks that have organised international attention since 2022. The war in Ukraine consumed Western diplomatic and media bandwidth in ways that crowded out other crises. The conflict in Gaza has dominated Arab and Muslim-majority world attention since October 2023. Sudan sits in the space between these frames: too African for the Middle East desk, too Arab for the sub-Saharan Africa desk, too complex for the humanitarian crisis coverage that tends to focus on single-cause emergencies rather than multi-actor political wars.
The external actors with the most leverage over the parties have also had reasons to avoid pressure. The United Arab Emirates has been credibly linked to RSF support through arms transfers and financial networks, a linkage that the UAE has denied but that has been documented by UN experts and investigative journalists. Saudi Arabia brokered the Jeddah talks but has not been willing to use its economic relationship with the RSF's external backers as coercive leverage. Egypt has backed the SAF, partly out of concern about RSF consolidation near the Nile and partly out of alignment with the Sudanese military's historical connections to Cairo. Each external actor has preferred a Sudan that serves its interests over a Sudan that is stable, and those preferences have undermined every mediation attempt.
The African Union's peace panel has been structurally disadvantaged. It lacks the enforcement capacity and the financial leverage that would be needed to bring both parties to a genuinely binding agreement, and its attempts to coordinate with the Jeddah process and with IGAD have produced overlapping initiatives that have confused rather than concentrated diplomatic pressure.
The regional consequences that are already accumulating
Sudan's collapse is not contained within Sudan's borders, and the regional consequences are already visible even if they have not yet produced the kind of acute cross-border crisis that would force sustained international attention.
Chad has absorbed over a million Sudanese refugees, primarily into the east of the country, which was already hosting Darfuri refugees from the 2003 to 2004 conflict. Chad's own political stability is fragile following the death of Idriss Deby in 2021 and the transition government led by his son. The concentration of refugees and the RSF's cross-border networks create a genuine risk of destabilisation in a country that does not have the institutional capacity to absorb another large-scale crisis.
Ethiopia's western Amhara region shares a long border with Sudan, and the refugee flows have added to pressures on communities that are already dealing with the aftermath of the Tigray war and ongoing Amhara regional conflict. The Ethiopian government, which is managing multiple internal security challenges simultaneously, has limited capacity to respond to cross-border spillover from Sudan.
Egypt's calculus is the most complex. Cairo has backed the SAF on the assumption that an SAF-aligned Sudan is preferable to an RSF-dominated one, partly because RSF networks have been linked to Gulf actors who have sometimes been in tension with Egyptian interests. But Egyptian backing for the SAF has not translated into SAF military success, and the prospect of an indefinite conflict on Egypt's southern border, with implications for Nile water security and the flow of migrants through Sudan toward the Mediterranean, is one that Cairo is not equipped to address through military support alone.
What three years without resolution means
Wars that continue for three years without a credible peace process develop a logic of their own that becomes progressively harder to reverse. Economies that sustained livelihoods before the conflict cease to function. Armed actors develop revenue streams, from taxation of civilian populations, looting, control of agricultural land, and external financial flows, that give them a material interest in the continuation of the war rather than its resolution. Civilian populations adapt survival strategies around the conflict rather than expecting its end. State institutions that might anchor a transition atrophy or collapse entirely.
Sudan is exhibiting all of these dynamics in 2026. The banking system has largely stopped functioning. The education system has been suspended in conflict-affected areas for two to three years, meaning that an entire cohort of children has had their schooling interrupted at critical developmental stages. The professional class that would be needed to rebuild a functioning state has largely left, to Egypt, to the Gulf, to Europe and North America, following a well-established pattern in which conflict-driven brain drain removes precisely the people most needed for reconstruction.
The RSF and SAF have both developed enough of a war economy to sustain fighting indefinitely, absent significant external pressure. That pressure is not currently materialising. The most likely scenario for year four of Sudan's war is more of the same: continued territorial fragmentation, continued famine conditions in RSF-controlled areas where aid access is denied, continued SAF air strikes on civilian areas, and continued diplomatic activity that produces statements rather than outcomes.
The case for treating Sudan differently, as a crisis that warrants the kind of sustained high-level diplomatic engagement that was extended to Ukraine or Gaza, rests not on humanitarian grounds alone, though those grounds are more than sufficient. It rests on the strategic reality that a collapsed Sudan reshapes the entire Sahel-Horn corridor in ways that will generate instability and displacement for decades. The cost of prevention is always lower than the cost of managing consequences. Three years in, the window for prevention has largely closed. The question now is whether the international community is willing to invest in a genuine political process before the window for any managed outcome closes entirely.