Repercussions

By 2024, Sudan's war had displaced over 10 million people internally and created more than 2 million refugees in neighboring countries (Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia, CAR). It surpassed Ukraine to become the world's largest displacement crisis — a fact barely registered by international media or political systems.

The International Criminal Court, which had previously indicted Sudan's former president Omar al-Bashir for genocide in Darfur, opened new investigations into RSF commanders for acts committed in 2023–24. The Masalit people of West Darfur were targeted in what UN investigators described as acts of genocide — the same communities, the same perpetrators, the same patterns as 2003–08.

The UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions in the Zamzam camp near El Fasher and parts of Darfur by mid-2024. Approximately 25 million Sudanese — more than half the pre-war population — faced acute food insecurity. The destruction of agricultural capacity, looting of food stocks by RSF forces, and collapse of supply chains produced famine at a scale not seen in Sudan since the 1980s.

Khartoum — a capital city of 6 million and the center of Sudanese intellectual, commercial, and civic life — was transformed into a ruins by the fighting. Hospitals, universities, banks, and government buildings were destroyed or occupied. The SAF government relocated to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. The physical and institutional destruction of Khartoum set Sudan's development back by a generation.

The UAE backed the RSF with weapons, drones, and financial support — viewing Hemedti as a secular, pro-business counterweight to Islamist political forces. Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. Libya's Haftar faction supplied RSF with arms through Darfur. Sudan became a proxy battleground for Gulf and regional power competition, prolonging a war that might otherwise have burned out from logistical exhaustion.

Sudan's catastrophe consistently received a fraction of the media coverage and international political attention given to Ukraine, Gaza, or other simultaneous conflicts. The disparity — which humanitarian organizations documented extensively — sparked a global debate about whose suffering receives attention and why, raising uncomfortable questions about race, geography, and the selective operation of international solidarity.

Sudan's GDP contracted by more than 40% in 2023–24 as the conflict destroyed Khartoum's commercial and banking infrastructure. The Sudanese pound lost over 80% of its value. Oil production — the country's primary export revenue — halted as pipelines and facilities in conflict zones were damaged or abandoned. The banking system effectively ceased to function. Sudan went from a fragile developing economy to a failed-state economy in under two years.

The flood of refugees into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia strained already fragile states. Chad, which borders Darfur, received over 600,000 Sudanese refugees, exacerbating its own political instability. Armed RSF and SAF factions operated in border regions, drawing neighboring militaries into the conflict. The spillover threatened to destabilize the entire eastern Sahel — a region already under pressure from climate change, food insecurity, and political collapse.

The SAF's recapture of Khartoum in March 2025 and the RSF's capture of El Fasher in October 2025 divided Sudan into two armed halves — the army holding the capital, the center, the Nile corridor and the Red Sea coast, the RSF holding almost all of Darfur, with Kordofan contested between them. Neither force can eliminate the other, and the RSF has established parallel governing structures in the territory it controls. Sudan has not been formally divided, and no state recognizes a partition; but two administrations, two armies, two currencies of authority and two separate humanitarian access regimes now operate inside the country's borders. Africa's third-largest state is being split by attrition rather than by agreement.

The RSF are the institutional successors of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the Darfur genocide of 2003–2005, for which the International Criminal Court indicted a sitting Sudanese head of state and secured no meaningful accountability. Twenty years later the same force, in the same region, against the same communities, besieged El Fasher for eighteen months and then killed more than 6,000 people in three days according to UN documentation — with credible estimates running far higher. In February 2026 the UN Human Rights Office found the RSF's conduct amounted to war crimes. The precedent that mattered was set the first time: that this could be done in Darfur without consequence.