Sudan is living through the world’s largest humanitarian collapse. More than 25 million people now depend on emergency aid. Nearly nine million have been driven from their homes. Entire cities have been pulverized—reduced to ash and absence with chilling precision. And yet, from world capitals, the silence is deafening.
In Darfur, the crisis has crossed the threshold into genocide. What began in April 2023 as a struggle for power between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has mutated into a war of annihilation. The RSF—direct heirs of the Janjaweed militias—has turned its fire on non-Arab civilians in a ruthless bid to seize Darfur and its lucrative trade corridors.
The toll defies language.
Mass executions. Ethnic cleansing. Systematic sexual violence against Masalit and other non-Arab communities.
In El Fasher, the last major city not under RSF control, indiscriminate shelling has levelled neighbourhoods, hospitals and displacement camps. Satellite images show scorched villages and fresh mass graves. Human-rights observers describe nothing less than a coordinated, methodical genocide. Survivors speak of communities erased before sunrise.
In Sudan, every pledge of restraint is merely the prelude to the next atrocity.
And behind this slaughter stands a network of regional patrons who have turned a suffering nation into a profitable battleground.
The RSF’s war economy runs on gold smuggled through networks linked directly to the United Arab Emirates. Weapons and fuel flow with ease through Chad and Libya. Meanwhile, the SAF draws support from Egypt and remnants of Russia’s Wagner apparatus.
Sudan’s war is no longer internal. It is a marketplace of geopolitical ambition—a theatre where foreign states finance carnage to secure influence and extract mineral wealth.
Sanctions have targeted a few RSF commanders, but the financiers remain untouched. For years, RSF-controlled companies have dominated the Jebel Amer goldfields, moving tonnes of illicit gold through Chad and the Central African Republic to the UAE, where it is refined with minimal scrutiny. Investigations by The Sentry, Global Witness and Reuters have traced these networks to Dubai-based firms shielded by opaque corporate structures. Abu Dhabi denies complicity, yet remains the largest importer of Sudanese gold—and flight data reveals cargo shuttling between RSF airstrips and Gulf airports.
Western measures—piecemeal sanctions, calls for transparency, selective asset freezes—are toothless without enforcement. Every loophole is exploited. Every embargo breached. Civilians bleed while foreign patrons profit.
Meanwhile, the UN warns of famine. Aid groups say Sudan is collapsing faster than any country since Rwanda in 1994. Yet the world barely whispers. The images of mass graves in El Fasher should have provoked global protest, emergency sessions, and moral reckoning. Instead, Sudan has been pushed to the margins of conscience, treated as though African suffering were inevitable rather than engineered.
After two decades in human rights work, I know the fatigue that shadows global crises. Democracies are faltering. Authoritarianism is rising. Ideological battles consume attention. But Sudan will not be stabilised through indifference. Without sustained pressure, this conflict will spill across borders, destabilising an entire region and deepening a refugee crisis already among the world’s worst. When millions flee toward Europe and the Gulf, the very governments looking away today will confront the consequences tomorrow.
Most damning is the selectivity of global outrage.
Voices who thunder against Christian persecution in Nigeria fall silent as Sudanese Muslims are slaughtered.
Liberal groups who rally for Gaza under an anti-colonial banner avert their gaze as foreign powers fuel a genocide in Sudan for profit.
The moral inconsistency is breathtaking. Outrage, it seems, has become a curated performance.
And then there is the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—an institution created to safeguard Muslim lives and dignity. Today it stands silent, paralysed, astonishingly indifferent. As Muslim communities are massacred in Darfur, the OIC issues no emergency summit, no unified denunciation, no pressure on member states who finance the bloodshed. Its inaction is not merely disappointing—it is a betrayal of its founding purpose.
The UAE, for its part, cannot hide behind denials while Sudanese gold finances mass atrocities. Its role is not peripheral; it is central. And every day it refuses transparency, accountability, or sanctions compliance, it deepens its complicity in the unraveling of a nation.
History’s ledger is unforgiving. The world failed the victims of the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda. It vowed “never again,” only to abandon that vow repeatedly. Today, Sudan stands at the same precipice.
The question is no longer whether the world sees Sudan’s agony. It is whether it cares enough to act.
Javed Akbar is a freelance writer with published works in the Toronto Star and across diverse digital platforms.
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