There is a particular danger in a humanitarian crisis that lasts too long. At first, the numbers shock us. Images of people fleeing, bombed neighborhoods, starving children, and overwhelmed hospitals produce outrage and urgent appeals. Governments issue statements, international organizations launch emergency plans, journalists travel to the region, and the world briefly learns the names of unfamiliar cities.

Then something happens. The violence continues, but attention moves elsewhere.

Sudan has reached that dangerous stage. More than three years after war erupted in April 2023, it remains what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest humanitarian and internal displacement crisis. In 2026, an estimated 33.7 million people—roughly two out of every three Sudanese—require humanitarian assistance. At the end of 2025, 9.1 million people remained displaced within Sudan, while millions more had crossed into neighboring countries. Nearly 19.5 million people currently face acute food insecurity, and famine has been confirmed in some of the places most devastated by fighting.

Yet Sudan rarely commands the sustained international attention that numbers of this magnitude would seem to demand.

That is not simply an observation about journalism. It is a moral problem.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s 2026 assessment placed Sudan at the top of its list of the world’s most neglected displacement crises for 2025. The ranking does not measure suffering alone. It compares the scale of displacement with humanitarian funding, media coverage, and international political engagement.

Sudan did not top the list because nobody had heard of the war. It topped it because visibility had failed to produce a response proportionate to the suffering.

For the Vincentian Family, that raises an uncomfortable question. If our attention to human suffering is determined by the news cycle, do we eventually begin to create a hierarchy of victims—some whose suffering remains visible and others whom the world quietly learns to forget?

How Sudan Reached This Point

For readers outside Africa, the conflict can be difficult to understand, partly because it is often reduced to the names of two military leaders.

Sudan should not be confused with South Sudan, which became an independent country in 2011. Sudan lies in northeastern Africa, connecting the Arab world, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the Red Sea. Its political history has been marked by military governments, regional inequality, civil wars, ethnic violence, struggles over land and resources, and a long concentration of political and economic power in Khartoum.

For three decades, Sudan was ruled by Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 coup. His government fought multiple internal wars and became internationally notorious for atrocities committed in Darfur beginning in the early 2000s.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that now control much of Darfur have their roots in the government-backed Janjaweed militias used during that earlier conflict. Under Bashir, those militias were reorganized and institutionalized into the RSF, eventually becoming an extraordinarily powerful military and economic force under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti.

In 2019, a remarkable civilian protest movement helped bring down Bashir after months of demonstrations. For a moment, Sudan appeared to have a path toward democratic government. Civilians and military leaders entered an uneasy power-sharing arrangement intended to lead eventually to elections.

The two principal military figures were General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Hemedti, commander of the RSF. In 2021, the two men cooperated in a military coup that derailed the civilian transition they had supposedly been helping to manage.

Their alliance did not last.

Disagreements intensified over control of the state, the future of the political transition, and particularly the timetable and conditions under which the RSF would be integrated into Sudan’s regular armed forces. On April 15, 2023, fighting erupted in Khartoum. What began as a struggle between two armed power centers rapidly became a nationwide war.

The tragedy is important to understand correctly. Sudan’s present war was not an inevitable explosion of ancient ethnic hatred. It emerged from political choices, militarized institutions, the failure of a democratic transition, competition for power and resources, and decades during which armed forces were allowed to develop largely outside meaningful civilian control.

Those structural causes matter because the Sudanese people had already demonstrated—in enormous numbers—that they wanted another future.

A Country Being Pulled Apart

The map of the war has changed repeatedly.

The RSF initially occupied large parts of Khartoum and expanded its control across western Sudan. The army gradually regained territory and recaptured the capital in 2025. By 2026, the military-led government had returned to Khartoum and controlled much of central and eastern Sudan.

But the recapture of the capital did not mean the war was ending.

The RSF consolidated control across most of Darfur and established a parallel administration there. Sudan now faces the increasingly real danger of de facto partition: an army-dominated east and center, an RSF-dominated west, and continuing battles for the territories connecting them.

The strategic center of the war has increasingly shifted toward Kordofan, a vast region between Darfur and central Sudan. In August, fighting again intensified around al-Obeid, an important city whose population includes large numbers of people already displaced by earlier phases of the conflict. Drone attacks and siege conditions have disrupted electricity, fuel, food, and water supplies.

Only weeks before this article was prepared, Pope Leo XIV singled out al-Obeid when speaking about Sudan. He called for humanitarian corridors for civilians and appealed to the international community to support efforts toward an immediate ceasefire.

That appeal is particularly significant because al-Obeid illustrates one of Sudan’s cruelest realities: people who have already fled one battlefield can find the war following them into the place where they sought refuge.

Displacement in Sudan is often not one journey.

It is two, three, or four.

A doorway remains standing amid the ruins of a destroyed building in Sudan, April 2025. Photo: Shaaiixx / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

El Fasher: When a City Becomes a Warning

Perhaps nowhere reveals the character of this war more clearly than El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

For months, hundreds of thousands of civilians were effectively trapped as the RSF besieged the city and surrounding displacement camps. Food became scarce, humanitarian access was severely restricted, and famine took hold. El Fasher finally fell to the RSF in October 2025 after an offensive that produced some of the most disturbing evidence of atrocities seen during the war.

Survivors described executions, abductions, beatings, sexual violence, robbery, and killings during attempts to escape. International investigators later documented war crimes and crimes against humanity. A United Nations fact-finding mission reported evidence of acts bearing the hallmarks of a genocidal campaign against non-Arab communities.

This history carries an especially terrifying resonance in Darfur. The region had already become synonymous with mass atrocities two decades ago, when Sudanese government forces and Janjaweed militias were accused of ethnic cleansing and other international crimes.

The return of ethnically targeted violence therefore represents more than another episode in a new war. For many Darfuris, it is the repetition of a nightmare the world once promised it had learned from.

International investigators have also documented serious abuses by the Sudanese Armed Forces and forces aligned with them. Arbitrary detention, torture, indiscriminate attacks, reprisals, and violations against civilians have been attributed to multiple parties in the conflict.

Recognizing that reality does not require pretending that every actor has committed identical crimes in identical ways. It requires something simpler and more important: civilian life cannot become morally negotiable depending on which uniform threatens it.

Internally displaced women sell charcoal at a market in El Fasher, North Darfur, in 2015. The photograph predates the current war but illustrates the long history of displacement and precarious livelihoods in Darfur. Photo: Roman Deckert / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Hunger in Sudan Is Not Simply a Lack of Food

War kills directly through bullets, artillery, drones, and bombs. It also kills by destroying the systems that allow people to eat.

Sudan was once an important agricultural producer. Farming remains central to the lives of millions of people, but war has disrupted planting and harvesting, destroyed farms, killed or scattered livestock, closed markets, interrupted trade routes, displaced agricultural workers, and driven prices beyond the reach of poor households.

In several regions, hunger has also been intensified by siege warfare and restrictions on humanitarian access.

This distinction matters. Famine is sometimes imagined as a natural disaster—a terrible but impersonal absence of food caused by drought or crop failure. In Sudan, the reality is far more political.

People can starve while food exists elsewhere in the country. They can starve because roads are blocked, markets destroyed, farmland abandoned, humanitarian convoys prevented from moving, or communities deliberately cut off during military campaigns.

Millions of Sudanese are surviving at crisis levels of hunger. In some areas, families have reported reducing themselves to a single meal a day or eating leaves and animal feed. Famine has been confirmed in El Fasher and Kadugli, while other areas remain at severe risk.

Children carry an especially heavy burden. An estimated 4.2 million children are expected to suffer acute malnutrition in Sudan during 2026, including more than 825,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition, a condition that can become fatal without rapid treatment.

But even those statistics risk becoming abstractions.

A severely malnourished child is not an indicator.

It is a child whose body has begun consuming itself because the adults around that child cannot obtain enough food.

A Darfurian refugee cleans millet at Farchana refugee camp in eastern Chad, December 2011. The image predates the present war but reflects the long-standing connection between conflict, displacement, and food insecurity in Darfur. Photo: European Commission DG ECHO / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 (CC BY-SA 2.0).

A Health System Being Asked to Survive a War

Hunger is accompanied by the collapse of basic services.

Nearly 40 percent of Sudan’s health facilities are not functioning. Hospitals and clinics have been damaged, looted, occupied, deprived of electricity or supplies, or forced to operate with drastically reduced staff. Health workers themselves have been killed, displaced, or forced to work in extraordinarily dangerous conditions.

Disease thrives in precisely these circumstances. War destroys water infrastructure, forces large numbers of people into overcrowded shelters, interrupts vaccination programs, reduces sanitation, and makes ordinary medical treatment difficult to obtain.

Sudan suffered a major cholera epidemic during the war. Although authorities declared one major outbreak over in March 2026 after an enormous vaccination campaign, the continuing destruction of water and sanitation systems means the underlying conditions that allow such diseases to spread have not disappeared.

Around 17 million people lack reliable access to safe drinking water, while an estimated 24 million lack adequate sanitation.

Education has suffered similar devastation. More than one third of schools are closed, while others are being used as shelters or have been occupied by armed actors. At least eight million Sudanese children are out of school.

Education continues amid war in Ombada, west of Khartoum, Sudan, October 2025. Photo: Nani Salah / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A war can therefore destroy a society even among those it does not kill. A child who survives may lose years of education. A farmer who returns may find the irrigation system destroyed. A family may return to a neighborhood where the house still stands but the clinic, school, market, water network, and jobs have disappeared.

The end of shooting, whenever it comes, will not automatically restore what has been lost.

Women’s Bodies as Battlefields

Another dimension of Sudan’s suffering receives even less sustained attention: conflict-related sexual violence.

United Nations investigators have documented widespread rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, abduction, forced marriage, and other forms of sexual violence during the war. Women and girls have been particularly targeted, although sexual violence against men and boys has also been reported.

The damage reaches far beyond the assault itself. Survivors may face physical injuries, pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, psychological trauma, rejection by family or community, and enormous difficulty obtaining medical care in a country where much of the healthcare system no longer functions.

For displaced women, ordinary actions can become dangerous. Going to collect water, searching for food, traveling to a market, or leaving a camp to find firewood may expose them to harassment, assault, or rape.

This is another reason why displacement statistics tell only part of the story.

To say that a woman has “reached safety” because she crossed a front line or an international border may conceal a much more fragile reality. She may have lost her husband, children, livelihood, documents, home, community, and protection all at once.

Vincentian attention begins precisely where statistics stop.

The War Outside Sudan

Sudan’s conflict is formally a civil war, but it has increasingly become internationalized.

Foreign governments and networks have been accused of supplying money, weapons, logistical support, training, drones, or political backing to rival factions. The United Arab Emirates has repeatedly been accused by UN researchers, Sudanese authorities, U.S. lawmakers, and others of supporting the RSF; Abu Dhabi strongly denies those allegations. The Sudanese army, meanwhile, has relationships with regional powers including Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to varying degrees.

Mercenaries have also appeared in the conflict, adding another layer to an already complex battlefield.

This external dimension helps explain why peace efforts repeatedly fail. The conflict is not sustained only by the ambitions of two Sudanese commanders; it is connected to broader struggles over influence in the Red Sea region, security, trade routes, agriculture, gold, and geopolitical power.

Multiple diplomatic initiatives have attempted to secure ceasefires. The United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the African Union, and others have participated in different mediation efforts, but none has yet produced a durable political settlement.

Meanwhile, weapons continue to arrive more reliably than food in some parts of the country.

That is a sentence worth sitting with.

When a Crisis Becomes “Neglected”

Why does a catastrophe involving tens of millions of people receive so little sustained attention?

There is no single answer.

Sudan competes for international attention with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, political upheavals, natural disasters, economic crises, and an endless global stream of breaking news. Journalists face severe access and security problems inside Sudan, making sustained coverage difficult and dangerous.

The conflict is also complex. There is no simple storyline, no single front line, and no easily understood political binary. Both principal armed camps have deeply compromised records, while Sudan’s civilian democratic movement—the very people whose struggle helped remove Bashir—has been pushed largely out of the military contest now determining the country’s future.

Protracted suffering presents another problem. Human beings respond intensely to novelty, but a catastrophe that continues day after day begins to lose its power to surprise us.

This is where compassion fatigue becomes morally dangerous.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s finding that Sudan was the world’s most neglected displacement crisis is especially useful because it forces us to confront something beyond media coverage. Neglect has consequences. Less political attention can mean less diplomatic pressure; lower media visibility can make fundraising more difficult; inadequate funding forces humanitarian agencies to reduce programs; reduced programs leave people hungry, untreated, unprotected, or displaced for longer.

By mid-August, Sudan’s 2026 humanitarian response plan was only about 41 percent funded.

That gap is not simply an accounting problem.

Somewhere inside that missing percentage is a nutrition clinic that cannot treat every child.

A water system that cannot be repaired.

A food distribution that reaches fewer families.

A shelter program that runs out of materials.

A woman who cannot obtain protection.

A displaced family that receives nothing at all.

Solidarity Cannot Be Governed by Competition

None of this requires us to pay less attention to Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or any other place of suffering.

Compassion is not a finite resource that must be transferred from one group of victims to another.

The problem begins when public concern functions as though it were.

We should resist the temptation to compare suffering in order to decide which tragedy “deserves” our attention. A Palestinian child does not become less important because a Sudanese child is starving. A Ukrainian family under bombardment does not lose dignity because a family in Darfur has been displaced.

Christian solidarity does not ask us to construct a ranking of grief.

It asks us to expand the circle of people we refuse to abandon.

There is nevertheless an uncomfortable imbalance in global attention. Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly observed that some African crises receive less media coverage, less diplomatic urgency, and less financial support in proportion to their scale.

Geographical distance plays a role. So does journalistic access. Political interests matter greatly. It is also legitimate to ask whether international audiences identify more readily with some victims than with others.

The answer may be complicated, but the question should not be avoided.

Whose suffering becomes visible enough to move us?

And whose suffering have we learned to regard as normal?

The People Who Refused to Wait for the World

There is another Sudanese story that deserves far more attention.

When the formal humanitarian system could not reach many communities, ordinary Sudanese began organizing their own response. Networks known as Emergency Response Rooms, rooted partly in the neighborhood resistance committees that helped sustain the 2019 democratic uprising, transformed themselves into an extraordinary grassroots humanitarian movement.

Volunteers opened community kitchens, distributed water and medicine, evacuated wounded people, restored basic services, supported hospitals, helped displaced families, and created local networks of survival.

Many have done so without salaries and at enormous personal risk.

Thousands of volunteers now work through these networks across much of Sudan. More than one hundred people associated with charity kitchens have reportedly been killed since the war began, while others have been detained, beaten, abducted, robbed, or accused by armed groups of assisting the enemy.

Yet they continue.

There is something profoundly Vincentian in this response, even though these networks are not Vincentian organizations.

Saint Vincent would have recognized the instinct immediately: people see an urgent need, organize those willing to help, gather whatever resources remain available, and refuse to allow neighbors to die because formal systems have failed.

There is also something more.

These volunteers are not outsiders rescuing anonymous victims. They are members of the communities themselves. They understand the streets, families, risks, and needs because they share them.

This is solidarity stripped to its essentials.

Volunteer teacher Omar Al-Muqaddam at Masawi School in northern Sudan, where teachers and local residents worked to restore education disrupted by war and displacement. Photo: Mogtaba Kanary / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Vincentian Family Is Not Entirely Outside This Story

Sudan is also directly connected to our own Vincentian network.

Shortly after the war began in 2023, the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in England and Wales reported that it was maintaining intermittent contact with SVP members in Sudan, including a team in Khartoum struggling with shortages of food, water, and electricity. Because normal channels of assistance had become extraordinarily difficult, SVP England and Wales provided emergency funding through an experienced humanitarian partner to support displaced people and vulnerable host families.

The connection has evolved as Sudanese people have fled the country. In 2024, SVP England and Wales created a Sudan Support Fund to help Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers. By 2026, the fund had received dozens of requests from local Conferences and community support projects for assistance ranging from food vouchers and clothing to bedding, transport to English classes, and basic household goods.

This may seem modest beside 33 million people needing humanitarian assistance.

But Vincentian service has never measured the worth of an action only by its scale.

A mattress matters when someone has been sleeping on the floor.

A winter coat matters when someone arrived with almost nothing.

A bus ticket to a language class matters when exile has left someone unable to communicate.

And accompaniment matters because displacement is not merely the loss of a geographical place. It is often the loss of belonging.

The Vincentian challenge, however, cannot end with helping Sudanese refugees after they arrive in our countries. Our charism also invites us to ask why they had to flee, what keeps the war alive, why humanitarian assistance is insufficient, and what political choices might help protect those still trapped inside Sudan.

Pope Leo’s Appeal: Do Not Leave Sudan Alone

The Catholic Church has repeatedly called attention to Sudan precisely as international attention has faded.

Pope Francis frequently appealed for an end to the fighting and described the suffering of Sudan’s children, women, and vulnerable people as crying out for action. Pope Leo XIV has continued those appeals.

On the third anniversary of the war in April 2026, Leo spoke of the Sudanese people as innocent victims of an inhuman tragedy and urged the parties to silence their weapons and begin sincere dialogue without preconditions.

In August, as fighting intensified around al-Obeid, he returned to Sudan again. He called for humanitarian corridors and asked the international community to support an immediate ceasefire.

The repetition of these appeals is itself revealing.

There are conflicts in which saying something once is not enough because the world forgets faster than people stop suffering.

Christian solidarity therefore requires memory.

Not memory as passive recollection, but memory as a refusal to allow another person’s suffering to disappear simply because it is no longer new.

A Vincentian Question About Attention

Saint Vincent lived in an age without television, social media, humanitarian dashboards, or twenty-four-hour news. Yet he understood the politics of attention remarkably well.

When war and famine devastated Lorraine, Picardy, and Champagne, he did not merely organize assistance. He also worked to make suffering visible to people in Paris who were far removed from it. Reports from devastated regions were circulated, benefactors were informed, resources were mobilized, and people with influence were confronted with realities they might otherwise have ignored.

In modern language, Vincent understood that invisibility can kill.

If those with resources do not know—or choose not to know—what is happening, resources do not move. If rulers do not see the consequences of their decisions, policies remain abstract. If comfortable societies lose interest in suffering far away, the people enduring it become easier to abandon.

This gives communication itself a Vincentian dimension.

Those of us involved in Vincentian media, advocacy, formation, education, or leadership should ask not only, “What is everyone talking about?” but also, “Who has disappeared from the conversation?”

Sometimes the most Vincentian editorial decision is not to follow the loudest headline.

It is to look toward the place from which the headlines have moved on.

What Solidarity with Sudan Requires

Sudan needs humanitarian aid, but humanitarian aid alone will never solve Sudan’s crisis.

The first necessity is protection of civilians. All parties must comply with international humanitarian law, cease attacks on civilian populations and infrastructure, permit safe humanitarian access, and end the use of siege, starvation, sexual violence, abduction, and arbitrary detention as instruments of conflict.

The second is sustained diplomatic pressure for a negotiated end to the war. International actors cannot plausibly call for peace while allowing networks of weapons, financing, mercenaries, or logistical support to sustain the battlefield indefinitely.

The third is adequate humanitarian financing. Aid organizations cannot repeatedly be told to do more with less while needs rise into the tens of millions. Nor should local Sudanese organizations be celebrated for their courage while being expected to replace a retreating international humanitarian system with almost no resources.

The fourth is support for Sudanese civil society. The future of Sudan cannot belong only to the men carrying guns. The civilian movement that demanded democracy in 2019, women’s organizations, professional groups, community networks, religious communities, local humanitarian volunteers, and displaced Sudanese must eventually have a meaningful role in determining the country’s future.

For the Vincentian Family, solidarity can take many forms: supporting trustworthy humanitarian responses, accompanying Sudanese refugees, informing our communities, using our international advocacy networks, supporting branches already assisting displaced people, praying for peace, and refusing to let Sudan disappear from our communications simply because the story is no longer new.

None of these actions alone will end the war.

Together, however, they resist indifference.

Beyond the Headlines

There is something frightening about becoming accustomed to suffering.

The first report of a famine shocks us. The tenth becomes another statistic. The first photograph of a displaced family stops us. After hundreds of similar images, we may begin scrolling past.

But the suffering has not become smaller.

Only our attention has.

Sudan exposes one of the deepest challenges of living in an age of constant information. We can know about more suffering than any previous generation and yet become strangely skilled at not seeing it.

The Vincentian response cannot be to feel guilty about every tragedy on earth. No human being can carry the emotional weight of the whole world every hour of every day.

Our response can be something more sustainable and more demanding: faithful attention.

Faithful attention means refusing to equate visibility with importance. It means remembering people after the cameras leave. It means understanding that a humanitarian appeal does not become less urgent because we have heard it before. It means allowing the suffering of strangers to remain morally real even when political interests, geography, or media algorithms place them far from our daily concerns.

And it means noticing the extraordinary dignity of those inside Sudan who have not surrendered to despair.

The volunteers still preparing meals.

The health worker still opening a clinic.

The mother still searching for food.

The teacher trying to gather children despite the closed school.

The family welcoming relatives who have been displaced again.

The people who continue to insist that Sudan can have a future beyond military rule, militias, famine, and war.

Their lives are not background noise.

Their suffering is not old news.

And their dignity does not diminish when the world looks somewhere else.

The poor should never have to compete for our compassion.

Perhaps that is the most important Vincentian lesson Sudan places before us.

When the world begins to forget, we must learn to remember.

Javier F. Chento.

At a Glance: