Photographs by Lynsey Addario
In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia’s commanders would turn their artillery on residential neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from the Sudanese capital.
From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side. Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother killed, a house destroyed.
Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate, bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later, probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away. This wasn’t merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities closed, futures curtailed.
In the mornings, we drove down streets on the outskirts of Khartoum that had recently been battlegrounds, swerving to avoid remnants of furniture, chunks of concrete, potholes, bits of metal. As they retreated from Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces—the paramilitary organization whose power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces has, since 2023, blossomed into a full-fledged civil war—had systematically looted apartments, offices, and shops. Sometimes we came across clusters of washing machines and furniture that the thieves had not had time to take with them. One day we followed a car carrying men from the Sudanese Red Crescent, dressed in white hazmat suits. We got out to watch, handkerchiefs covering our faces to block the smell, as the team pulled corpses from a well. Neighbors clustered alongside us, murmuring that they had suspected bodies might be down there. They had heard screams at night, during the two years of occupation by the RSF, and guessed what was happening.
Another day we went to a crossing point, where people escaping RSF-occupied areas were arriving in Sudanese-army-controlled areas. Riding on donkey carts piled high with furniture, clothes, and kitchen pans, they described a journey through a lawless inferno. Many had been deprived of food along the way, or robbed, or worse. In a house near the front line, one woman told me that she and her teenage daughter had both been stopped by an RSF convoy and raped. We were sitting in an empty room, devoid of decoration. The girl covered her face while her mother was talking, and did not speak at all.
At al-Nau Hospital, the largest still operating in the Khartoum region, we met some of the victims of the shelling, among them a small boy and a baby girl, Bashir and Mihad, a brother and sister dressed in blue and pink. The terror and screaming of the night before had subsided, and they were simply lying together, wrapped in bandages, on a cot in a crowded room. I spoke with their father, Ahmed Ali. The recording of our conversation is hard to understand because several people were gathered around us, because others were talking loudly nearby, and because Mihad had begun to cry. Ali told me that he and his family had been trying to escape an area controlled by the RSF but had been caught in shelling at 2 a.m., the same explosions we had heard from our apartment in Omdurman. The children had been wounded by shrapnel. He had nowhere else to take them except this noisy ward, and no plans except to remain at the hospital and wait to see what would happen next.
Like a tsunami, the war has created wide swaths of physical wreckage. Farther out of town, at the Al-Jaili oil refinery, formerly the largest and most modern in the country—the focus of major Chinese investment—fires had burned so fiercely and for so long that giant pipelines and towering storage tanks, blackened by the inferno, lay mangled and twisted on the ground. At the studios of the Sudanese national broadcaster, the burned skeleton of what had been a television van, its satellite dish still on top, stood in a garage near an accounting office that had been used as a prison. Graffiti was scrawled on the wall of the office, the lyrics to a song; clothes, office supplies, and rubble lay strewn across the floor. We walked through radio studios, dusty and abandoned, the presenters’ chairs covered in debris. In the television studios, recently refurbished with American assistance, old tapes belonging to the Sudanese national video archive had been used to build barricades.
Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.
But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction. I felt this most strongly in the al-Ahamdda displaced-persons camp just outside Khartoum—although the word camp is misleading, giving a false impression of something organized, with a field kitchen and proper tents. None of those things was available at what was in fact a former school. Some 2,000 people were sleeping on the ground beneath makeshift shelters, or inside plain concrete rooms, using whatever blankets they had brought from wherever they used to call home. A young woman in a black headscarf told me she had just sat for her university exams when the civil war began but had already “forgot about education.” An older woman with a baby told me her husband had disappeared three or four months earlier, but she didn’t know where or why. No international charities or agencies were anywhere in evidence. Only a few local volunteers from the Emergency Response Rooms, Sudan’s mutual-aid movement, were there to organize a daily meal for people who seemed to have washed up by accident and found they couldn’t leave.
As we were speaking with the volunteers, several boys ostentatiously carrying rifles stood guard a short distance away. One younger boy, dressed in a camouflage T-shirt and sandals—he told me he was 14 but seemed closer to 10—hung around watching the older boys. When one of them gave him a rifle to carry, just for a few minutes, he stood up straighter and solemnly posed for a photograph. He had surely seen people with guns, understood that those people had power, and wanted to be one of them.
What was the alternative? There was no school at the camp, and no work. There was nothing to do in the 100-degree heat except wait. The artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital—all of that had led to nothing, built nothing, only this vacuum. No international laws, no international organizations, no diplomats, and certainly no Americans are coming to fill it.
The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.
To understand Sudan, as the British Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub once wrote, you need a kind of atlas, one containing transparent cellophane maps that can be placed on top of one another, like the diagrams once used in encyclopedias to show the systems inside the human body. One layer might show languages; the next, ethnic groups; the third, ancient kingdoms and cities: Kush, Napata, Meroe, Funj. When the maps are viewed simultaneously, “it becomes clear,” Mahjoub explained, that “the country is not really a country at all, but many.” Deborah Scroggins, a foreign correspondent who once covered Africa for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—a job that’s hard now to imagine ever existed—wrote in 2002 that a version of Mahjoub’s cellophane atlas could also help explain how Sudan’s wars and rebellions are provoked not just by ethnic and tribal divisions but by economic, colonial, and racial divisions, each one layered onto the next so as to create a “violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.”
On top of these older maps, new ones now must be overlaid. One might show the divisions created by a more recent war of ideas. On one side of that battle are the Sudanese professionals, lawyers, students, and grassroots activists who in December 2018 launched a broad, popular protest movement, one that called for the rule of law, basic rights, economic reform, and democratic institutions. Their slogan, chanted on streets and painted on walls, was “Freedom, peace, and justice.” In April 2019, following years of organizing, several months of street demonstrations, and violent clashes between civic activists and the military and police, the military removed Sudan’s long-standing dictator, Omar al-Bashir, along with his repressive Islamist regime, in an attempt to appease this mass civic movement. A civilian government then briefly ruled the country, backed by the military. The prime minister of that transitional government, Abdalla Hamdok, who now lives in Abu Dhabi, told me that the “hopes and aspirations of people that were coming together at that time were beyond imagination.”
But even as the civilians took charge, the Sudanese military never relinquished an older set of ideas: that officers should control the government, restrict the national conversation, dominate resources. In 2021, acting on those beliefs, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, together with his deputy, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, carried out a coup and removed Prime Minister Hamdok. Burhan leads the Sudanese Armed Forces, widely known as the SAF, the body that has ruled Sudan, under different leaders, for many decades. Hemedti controls the RSF, a mostly Darfurian militia created by Bashir to control ethnic minorities and repress rebel groups. The RSF, whose first members were Arabic-speaking nomads, was originally known as the Janjaweed, an Arabic word meaning “devils on horseback.”
As many predicted, Burhan and Hemedti fell out. Although it is unclear who fired the first shot, on April 15, 2023, the RSF attacked the SAF headquarters, the Khartoum airport, and the presidential palace. Burhan, genuinely surprised by at least the timing of the attack, remained trapped for many weeks. According to one version of events, he was freed with the help of Ukrainian commandos; another says that he finally shot his way out. After that, Sudan fractured into a multilayered conflict that now involves not just the RSF and the SAF, but a bewildering array of smaller armies and militias that fight alongside and against them. The democracy movement split too, with some former members of the civilian government finding themselves on the side of the RSF, others with the SAF.
The chaos enabled the spread of what might be described as a third ruling idea, neither democratic nor statist, but rather anarchic, nihilistic, transactional. This ideology, if that is what it can be called, was unleashed in Khartoum in the spring of 2023, during an evacuation so violent and chaotic that people I spoke with wept while talking about it two years later. Embassies, international agencies, and United Nations food-storage sites were looted. Private apartments were ransacked, stripped of furniture and possessions. Three World Food Programme employees were killed during the chaos. The Sudanese army fled to Port Sudan, a small coastal city on the Red Sea that had neither the infrastructure nor the mindset to be the capital of a large country.
As the violence continued, civilians became not just accidental casualties of the fighting but its target. The RSF’s coalition contains a wide collection of fighters from across Sudan whom it can’t always control, as well as mercenaries from central and eastern Africa. At a SAF-controlled prison on the Omdurman army base, I was introduced to one of the mercenaries, a 17-year-old Chadian who said he had been duped into joining the RSF by a recruiter who came to his football club and offered everyone there the equivalent of $2,000 just to sign up. He went right away, without telling his parents; got a week’s training; fought for a few days; and then was captured, in February 2024. He never saw the money, which is a common story. Many RSF fighters aren’t paid, which gives them extra incentive to rob civilians, loot property, and obey commanders who promise they will be rewarded for displacing villages or evicting people who occupy coveted land. The SAF, which is the only group with an air force, has carried out extensive bombing campaigns on civilian neighborhoods, taken lawless revenge on alleged collaborators in recaptured areas, and been accused of using chemical weapons, which it denies. Both the RSF and the SAF have used food as a weapon, depriving their enemies of access to outside aid and creating obstacles for aid organizations operating inside the country.
The intensity of this violence is partly explained by gold, mined in Sudan since antiquity. Any Sudan atlas should contain a cellophane layer showing the location of gold mines, as well as those of the many people inside and outside the country who want access to them. Tiny artisanal gold mines, a misleadingly charming term, can be found all around the country. We stopped at one on the road from Khartoum to Port Sudan that was no more than a deep hole in the ground and a shack made of plastic sheets, wooden sticks, and bits of straw, housing a single miner. But there are also much larger mines, some connected to the broad seam of gold deposits running under the Sahara, discovered in 2012, that has sparked violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, as well as in Chad and Sudan.
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These larger mines shape Sudanese politics in both open and covert ways. Hemedti’s control over a large gold deposit in Jebel Amir, in North Darfur, is part of what consolidated his command of the RSF. Burhan and Hemedti launched their coup in 2021 partly because they feared that civilian control of the military would restrict their access to gold and other resources. Both the SAF and the RSF fund their soldiers by exporting gold—mostly illegally, to get around sanctions, and often through the United Arab Emirates. Last year, The New York Times published a description of a plane at the airport in Juba, South Sudan, being loaded with $25 million worth of Darfuri gold, bound for the UAE. The Russian Wagner Group, now reorganized and renamed the Africa Corps—a name accidentally or intentionally evoking Afrika Korps, the Nazi expeditionary force—has gold interests too, as do Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Indeed, to fully explain not just the role of gold in the conflict, but also the role of these many outside forces, we need a final layer of cellophane: a map of foreign influence showing Sudan’s place in an anarchic, post-American world, an era that does not yet have a name. Colonialism is long past, the Cold War has ended, and now the disappearance of any form of international order has left Sudan as the focus of intense competition among countries that are not superpowers but rather middle powers. The middle powers send money and weapons into Sudan, hoping to shape the outcome of the conflict. Some take part in the war of ideas. Some want gold. Some are there because their rivals are there, and Sudan is a good place to fight.
The middle powers include Turkey, which has historic links to Sudan as well as an interest—as one Turkish diplomat told me—in making sure Sudan is governed by someone. Both the Saudis, who are just across the Red Sea—Jeddah is an hour’s flight from Port Sudan—and the Egyptians share this sympathy for hierarchy and control. Egypt has ties to the Sudanese military going back to the 19th century, and the Saudis have made major investments in Sudanese land and agriculture. All three countries either sell weapons to the SAF, or fund their purchase.
On the other side of the conflict, the Emiratis not only back the RSF; they do so with enough money and commitment to spark conspiracy theories. After an iftar meal in Port Sudan, a Sudanese military officer got out a map, swept his hand across the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, and told me that the Emiratis were transforming Arabic-speaking nomads into a force designed to dominate the whole region, to create a new empire. I also heard more convoluted theories about alleged Israeli interests, or even American interests, hiding behind the Emirati support of the RSF, for which no evidence exists.
Plenty of evidence does connect the UAE to the RSF’s gold-trading operations, as well as to the Sudanese army’s gold interests, but Abu Dhabi has other ties of business and sympathy to the RSF too. Emirati leaders have in the past hired the RSF to fight on their behalf in Libya and Yemen (the Saudis have also hired the RSF to fight in Yemen). They have donated billions in aid to Sudan and Sudanese refugees, using some of it to build hospitals in Chad and South Sudan that are known (or believed) to treat RSF fighters. Above all, the Emiratis are repeatedly accused—by the Sudanese military, the United States, and the UN—of supplying the RSF with the money and weapons to fight the war, using their humanitarian aid as a cover, a charge they repeatedly deny. When asked, the Emiratis say that their primary interest in Sudan is to help reestablish an independent civilian government, and to prevent the return of an Islamist regime that threatens maritime trade and regional security. “We’d like not to see Sudan become a global hub of terrorism again” is how Lana Nusseibeh, a senior UAE diplomat who has been involved in Sudan negotiations, put it to me.
The Iranians, by contrast, might be happy to see the return of an Islamist regime, or at least a government with some Islamist factions. The Iranians once enjoyed a close relationship with Bashir, the SAF reestablished direct relations with Iran in 2023, and Islamist militias are fighting alongside the SAF right now. Outside Khartoum, we saw one of them waving flags and rifles from a military truck heading to the front line. But Iran clearly sees Sudan as a market for weapons, too: Iranian military transit planes have been identified in Port Sudan, and Iranian drones have been seen on the battlefield. Its motives might be not only ideological or economic. It may also be attracted by the vacuum: If the Turks, Saudis, and Emiratis are there, perhaps the Iranians simply feel that they need to be there too.
That same vacuum has drawn in the Russians as well, not on one side but on both. The Russians’ attitude toward Sudan is entirely amoral, and completely transactional. They buy gold from both sides and sell weapons to both sides. Their mercenaries have worked with the RSF in the past; they have also wanted, for many years, to build a naval base on the Red Sea coast, and so now work with the SAF as well. Because they are there, the Ukrainians are there too. When I told a Ukrainian acquaintance that I would be traveling to Sudan, he turned pale and told me to stay well away from Russian mercenaries, because they might be targets for the Ukrainians. Their numbers are tiny and their interests are narrow, but their presence reveals a lot about the war. The Ukrainians hunting Russians in Sudan are drawn not by any interest in the conflict, but by the anarchy itself.
Turkish, Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Russian, Iranian, and Ukrainian interests intersect and overlap on this final layer of cellophane, helping make Sudan, like Yemen and Libya, a place where antagonists from around the planet fund violent proxy wars, at the expense of the people who live there. Sudan’s neighbors, including Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, also get drawn into the conflict, either by the middle powers or through links of their own. The Chinese hover in the background, looking for business deals. Sudan’s strategic location on the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, attracts everyone too. Meanwhile, the countries that might once have banded together to stop the fighting have lost interest or capacity. The institutions that might once have helped broker a cease-fire are too weak, and can’t or won’t help. “We live in a very interesting, many people call it, new world order,” Hamdok, the former Sudanese prime minister, told me. “The world we got to know—the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post–Second World War consensus—is just no more.”
I made two trips to Sudan this year, to both sides of the front line. Both times I was escorted by people who wanted to present their view of the war, explain why it had started, and show me the atrocities committed by the other side. In Khartoum and Port Sudan, I traveled with a SAF information officer, as well as two other American women. Because there are hardly any foreigners in Sudan right now, let alone any American women, we attracted attention, hope, and some annoyance.
Several people stopped us on the street to tell us, with pride, that they had previously worked for the UN, the U.S., or a foreign embassy before they all vanished. One woman approached us, told us she was a Christian, and then drifted away, disappointed, when she learned we were not Christian aid workers. “I have a message for Washington,” a man standing in the courtyard of al-Nau Hospital declared. I turned on my recorder, and he spoke into it: “Save Sudan; we are in need for the medicine.”
Others already knew that medicine, like other forms of aid, might no longer be coming. At a communal kitchen in a Khartoum suburb, a local volunteer told us that his team had been serving a very simple bean stew five days a week. Because of American funding cuts—probably a few pennies’ worth of funding cuts, piddling amounts of money that had once trickled down to this half-ruined side street—they were down to three days a week. He said they would be soliciting on social media for more funds, and he hoped to find enough for two more weekly meals soon. He was not alone: This spring, more than 1,700 of the communal kitchens run by volunteers in Sudan closed down entirely, affecting nearly 3 million people, thanks either directly to USAID cuts or to the chaos created by mass U.S.-government layoffs and canceled contracts.
Still others wanted to make clear how grateful they were for the tiny amounts of help they had received, so much so that I felt ashamed. At another Omdurman medical facility, the Al-Buluk pediatric hospital, a young physician, Ahmed Khojali, told me that he still had some packages of Plumpy’Nut, a special nutritional supplement. The American government in theory still sends supplies of Plumpy’Nut to severely malnourished children around the world, but distribution has been interrupted. Khojali took us to see the hospital’s malnutrition unit. About two dozen new patients were arriving every week this spring; we saw a ward full of them, emaciated children with closed faces, lying beside their exhausted mothers, most of whom did not want to be interviewed or photographed. When the children first arrive, Plumpy’Nut is one of the few things they can eat. Khojali knew that some Americans wanted to cut aid because it is wasteful. “We didn’t waste it; we just use it,” the doctor said.
But not all of the comments concerned American aid. In Khartoum, Darfur, and everywhere exiled Sudanese now gather—Abu Dhabi, London, N’Djamena, Washington—I spoke with ambassadors, experts, diplomats, and politicians who repeatedly asked not just about American humanitarians, but also about the Americans who would come from the White House to negotiate, knock heads together, and find a way to end the war. They wanted Americans who would galvanize the rest of the international community, rope in the UN, bring some peacekeepers, make something happen: the Jimmy Carter–at–Camp David or the Richard Holbrooke–at-Dayton model of big-league, American-led, problem-solving diplomacy, which once played a role in Sudan too, during both Democratic and Republican administrations.
After the Roman empire stopped functioning, many people went on deferring to the distant emperor, acting as if he still mattered; in Sudan, I found similar nostalgia for the interest and engagement that once came from Washington. When I first met Colonel Hassan Ibrahim, the Sudanese army’s media liaison in Khartoum, he introduced himself with an earnest speech, described his country’s conflict as a “forgotten war,” and spent several days helping us find ways around the army’s strict rules so that Americans could learn the truth about Sudan, and so that the truth would inspire American action. Volker Perthes, a former UN official, assured me that Americans “do have clout if they want to use it.” A Middle Eastern ambassador in Port Sudan thought I was joking when I suggested that the U.S. might no longer care that much about Africa. That was beyond his imagination, and beyond the imagination of many other people who still believe that someday, somehow, American diplomats are going to come back and make a difference.
Admittedly, the speed of the shift is bewildering. Not that long ago, Sudan did inspire American compassion. Starting in the 1980s, the conflict between the mostly Muslim northern Sudan and the mostly Christian south provoked the interest and engagement of American evangelicals. Franklin Graham’s charity, Samaritan’s Purse, along with World Vision and other Christian charities, had strong links to Sudanese churches and, at different times, southern rebels. They still do: Samaritan’s Purse maintains its own aircraft and its own aid-distribution network in Sudan.
In the 2000s, American churches, synagogues, and secular groups were also angered and engaged by the Bashir regime’s use of the Janjaweed, the precursors of the RSF, to ethnically cleanse the Darfur region of non-Arab tribes. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, projected dramatic photographs from Darfur onto its exterior walls in 2006. A photography exhibition also traveled to several universities. At different times, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle, and Keira Knightley visited Sudan, raising awareness and money.
These campaigns made an impact. George W. Bush had deep links to the faith-based charities that worked in Sudan, and arrived in office determined to help. The Obama administration believed in America’s “responsibility to protect,” to help vulnerable groups avoid slaughter and genocide. Both invested real diplomatic and political effort in Sudan, largely because Americans wanted them to. Melissa Zelikoff, who was part of Joe Biden’s National Security Council, told me that when she began working on Sudan for the State Department, in the 2010s, “we had a 25-person special-envoy office. We had teams working on every region, on every issue, thinking through negotiating tactics and approaches.” Alexander Laskaris, a former State Department diplomat who worked in Africa for decades, most recently as ambassador to Chad, calls this effort “a remarkable expression of the compassion of the American people acting through their civil-society organizations on government.” I asked him what that effort had produced, given that violence has continued. “We saved a lot of lives,” Laskaris told me. “A lot of lives.”
Americans also helped end the north-south civil war, one of the longest-running in Africa. In 2011, more than 99 percent of South Sudanese voted for independence in a referendum that had international backing. A wave of American support for South Sudan—diplomatic, political, humanitarian—followed. Now, only 14 years later, the scale and ambition of that aid are almost inconceivable. Kate Almquist Knopf, a former U.S. official who spent nearly two decades as an Africa expert at USAID and then the Department of Defense, sounded almost nostalgic when she told me that South Sudan, which is again experiencing political violence, “squandered a moment that will never come again.” Regardless of who is president, she said, “neither party is ever likely to be willing to do that again for a country in Africa.”
Attention dwindled from the 2011 peak, slowly at first and then very fast. Independent South Sudan descended into internal ethnic conflict and failed to thrive. Backers became disillusioned. Few newspapers could pay for continued coverage—meaning hardly any reporters from places like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—and the story slipped out of the headlines. Maybe photographs from foreign wars became too familiar. Maybe Americans became indifferent. Social media brought a deluge of misinformation, about Sudan and everywhere else, producing a culture of cynicism and sneering. Compassion became unfashionable.
American politics changed too. The first Trump administration dropped the “responsibility to protect” idea immediately—and when it did, so did everyone else. Nor was Donald Trump’s State Department especially interested in the Sudanese democratic revolution of 2019. Instead of promoting a government that offered the first real possibility for peace and reconciliation in decades, Trump’s team was mostly interested in persuading Sudan to sign the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel, which the civilian government agreed to do, in January 2021, in exchange for the removal of Sudan from a list of countries that promote terrorism. As part of that deal, the administration did belatedly allocate funds to aid the transitional government, but the money was suspended again 10 months later, after the coup, mostly unspent.
Even after Biden took office, American popular and political attention focused first on Afghanistan and then on Ukraine and Gaza; it never returned to Sudan. After the 2021 coup, U.S. diplomats—working with the British, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the UN—did try to bring back the 2019 power-sharing arrangement, a negotiation that certainly never got any high-level, Camp David–style attention and mostly excluded the civilians who had led the revolt against Bashir. The group left discussions of security-sector reform to the very end, and ignored reports of military movement around Khartoum. “No need to panic,” one senior U.S. official told colleagues, only hours before the widely anticipated war broke out.
No American diplomats have returned since then, with one exception. In February 2024, the Biden administration finally appointed an envoy to Sudan, former Representative Tom Perriello, who, without much internal support or presidential attention, did spend one day in Port Sudan (the most that post-Benghazi security rules would allow) and launched a new format for weekly negotiations. Eight months after Trump’s reelection, the Trump administration had not appointed a replacement envoy, nor indeed any senior officials with deep experience in Africa at all.
Until this year, the U.S. nevertheless remained the largest donor to Sudan, not only providing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid but also supporting the logistics for UN and other aid operations inside and outside the country, and for Sudanese refugees around the world. In Sudan, the U.S. still had the clout to insist on some aid getting to both sides of the conflict, even if that meant dealing with the RSF over the objections of the SAF. “The one thing that still remained of U.S. soft power was USAID,” Perriello told me. “I do think we were mitigating the worst famine on Earth.”
But that scale of support was made possible by the dedication of a previous generation, especially of older congressional members and staffers who still remembered the former U.S. role in Sudan, even if they rarely spoke to constituents about it. Now Washington is run by people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to aid policies that had bipartisan acceptance only a few years ago. In February of this year, I spoke with one USAID official who had been directly responsible for humanitarian aid to Sudanese refugees outside Sudan. She told me that although she had known that the Trump administration would make cuts, she had not anticipated the catastrophic impact of Elon Musk’s assault on USAID and other aid programs, or the new administration’s utter lack of interest in how these unplanned cuts would reverberate across Africa. At the time we talked, she had been cut off from her email and from the systems she needed to process payments, unable to communicate with people on the ground. Theoretically, emergency food supplies of the sort she managed were supposed to be preserved, but all of the support around the delivery of food and money—the contracts with trucking and security companies; the institutions that gather health statistics, anticipate famine, help farmers—had been cut, along with their personnel. This affected everybody: the UN, other charities, even grassroots groups like the Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms.
I asked her how much the American contribution mattered. She started to answer, and then she started to cry. “We do so much, and it’s all being taken away, without a moment’s notice,” she said after she had recovered. “There is no transition planning. There is no handover of this assistance. The U.S. has been the largest donor to Sudan since forever, and to Sudanese refugees for so long. And it’s just a disaster.”
The Generals and the Politicians
In the past decade, refugees have slowly disappeared from American public debate, except when they figure as unwelcome immigrants, or as fodder for far-right memes. But they have not disappeared from the world. On the contrary, their numbers are growing. The wars of the 1990s produced a steady population of about 40 million refugees and displaced people. But in 2011, the numbers began to rise. In 2024, the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, at the UN, counted 123 million people around the world who were refugees, displaced, or seeking asylum.
The larger numbers reflect a deeper problem. If there are more refugees because there are more conflicts, it is also the case that there are more conflicts because international consensus has weakened. In the 1990s and early 2000s, an era of multiple peacekeeping missions, the Chinese were inclined to neutrality and the Russians were interested in cooperation. Americans, together with their European allies, enjoyed a degree of power and influence over international relations that they utterly failed to appreciate at the time.
That era is now over. The United States used UN resolutions to justify the invasion of Iraq, which helped delegitimize the UN and its procedures in the eyes of the rest of the world. Russia and China grew richer and more assertive. Now both of those countries and their network of allies—from Cuba to Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe—mock or undermine the language of human rights altogether. So does the MAGA wing of the American Republican Party. Meanwhile the humanitarian agencies of the UN, never models of functionality, became so “bureaucratized,” in the words of Alex Rondos, a former European Union special representative for the Horn of Africa, that officials “refused to take risks, even to prevent deaths.”
The UN Security Council became contentious, then dysfunctional. Independent UN negotiators lost their backing and clout. Finally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine pitted one security-council member directly against three others for the first time since the Cold War, ending, perhaps forever, any role for the UN Security Council as a serious place to debate matters of war and peace.
Thanks to this shift, the UN has not launched a completely new peacekeeping mission since 2014—and even that one, to the Central African Republic, was possible, as Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International put it to me, only because it concerned a country “no major power really cared that much about, strategically.” The international negotiators and UN envoys who might have once persuaded all of the players to seek peace in Sudan have faded into the background. The UN was slow to react to the civilian revolution in 2019. Only after an unforgivably long time, in January 2021, did the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, appoint a diplomat, Volker Perthes, to head the grandly named UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan. But after the military coup overthrew that government, Perthes told me, “we didn’t have any transition to assist.” He stayed involved, and tried to negotiate the return of the prime minister and to mediate between the two armies. But the Sudanese military accused him of partiality because he insisted on speaking to both sides, and finally declared him persona non grata.
The UN’s relationship with Sudan never recovered. Guterres periodically issues declarations (“We must do more—and do more now—to help the people of Sudan out of this nightmare”), but he hasn’t been to Sudan himself. His envoy to Sudan, a former Algerian foreign minister, is widely criticized for perceived bias, because the UN, in practice, treats the SAF as the legitimate government. UN staff in Sudan repeatedly point to the bureaucratic obstacles all combatants create to hamper the distribution of aid. In a briefing to the UN Security Council, Christopher Lockyear, the head of Doctors Without Borders, said that the “delivery of humanitarian assistance in Sudan remains exceedingly and, in some cases, deliberately complex.” He also warned that both sides were using aid, and aid agencies, as a source of legitimacy. One former UN diplomat told me, more bluntly, that the Sudanese army was “using starvation as a weapon of war.”
That kind of criticism comes from real frustration. But it doesn’t build warm feelings. The Sudanese army’s finance minister, Gibril Ibrahim, told me that the “international community” is largely irrelevant, and that “mainly Gulf countries” are providing help for victims of the conflict. Though this was untrue—as of last year, hundreds of millions of American dollars were still flowing to Sudan—the comment was revealing. In practice, Sudan’s leaders, on all sides of the conflict, have already turned away from the U.S., the UN, and international aid and international law, because in their world, these things mean nothing.
We crossed over the border into Sudan near the Chadian city of Adré, a place literally built on shifting sand. Devoid of trees, grass, and water, Adré now hosts more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees. I visited its main camp—a real one, not a converted school—which looks from the outside like a fortified prison. The border itself is now a noisy no-man’s-land, crowded with transport trucks, tiny wagons, cars, pickup trucks, camels, and donkeys. If gold or weapons were wrapped in someone’s blanket or hidden beneath the seats of a van, no one would know. I encountered no customs officials or formal border posts as I crossed into Sudan from Chad, because there isn’t a proper government on the Sudanese side.
The RSF maintains order in West Darfur (or does for the moment). Men with machine guns patrol the markets. Pickup trucks carrying more soldiers park in front of the dilapidated local administration buildings. But the men who control the city can’t provide much else. One might call West Darfur a libertarian paradise: There is no income tax, no government, no regulations—but also not many roads, hospitals, or schools.
I traveled from Adré to El Geneina, a city in West Darfur, with an escort who had been assigned to us by the RSF. He was studying in Dubai and wore sneakers and neat khakis instead of a jalabiya and turban. But he got us through every one of the dozens of checkpoints we encountered by calling out greetings to the men with guns, offering an embrace, and sometimes stopping to chat, perhaps about relatives or mutual friends. On the last day of our trip, he told me that he hoped someday to go to California, to learn about California, and then to come home and make Darfur more like California.
Others also told us they aspired to the things that the liberal world used to stand for. Among them was Al Tigani Karshoum, the current governor of West Darfur, who had formerly served as the deputy to the previous governor, Khamis Abakar. The two men were appointed in the years following a government agreement to broker peace and share power. Abakar was a member of the Masalit tribe, which before the war was the largest ethnic group in El Geneina. Karshoum’s links are to the Masalit’s Arabic-speaking rivals, the tribes that comprised the bulk of the Janjaweed and now the RSF.
The competition between the Masalit and the Arabs is old, although it wasn’t always lethal. The Masalit, along with other tribes, were farmers; the Arabs were nomads, camel herders. Although they think of themselves as ethnically different, they coexisted and even intermarried in Darfur for decades, until climate change dried up the land and made the arable parts scarce. Following a major drought and famine in 1984–85, everyone began to buy weapons. “A herd of a thousand camels represents more than a million dollars on the hoof,” the historian Alex de Waal wrote in 2004. “Only the most naive herd-owner would not buy automatic rifles.” This conflict was then accelerated by the Bashir government in Khartoum, which gave the nomads more weapons and empowered them, as the Janjaweed, to repress their neighbors.
The current civil war has reignited and amplified this old rivalry, along with many other Sudanese rivalries, as it enabled both sides to acquire sophisticated weapons from around the world. Governor Abakar and the Masalit sided with the Sudanese Armed Forces, which had tanks and airplanes. The RSF and the nomadic Arabs brought in drones, howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers, and other weapons from abroad. They used their arsenal to unleash a wave of violence on the Masalit neighborhoods of El Geneina, according to a UN report, killing 10,000 to 15,000 people. Abakar himself was kidnapped and then murdered.
Under a tent outside the sprawling refugee camp in Adré, Darassalam, a teacher and headmistress of a school, told me that Arab soldiers had come to her neighborhood in El Geneina and ordered her to go to Chad. They told her they wanted to “clean the town of black skins.” The RSF, which she called the Janjaweed, killed people in front of her. “I saw raped women and men in front of me, beaten people in front of me.” In 2023, other Masalit exiles told Reuters they had seen Karshoum himself riding in pickup trucks, giving orders to sack houses. As a result of these and other accounts, which he denies, Karshoum is under EU sanctions.
Karshoum told me a different story. He claimed, as did several others, that the Masalit and the SAF began the conflict. He expressed anguish about what had happened in El Geneina. After the murder of Abakar, he had been too distraught to continue his duties, he told me. Abakar, he said, was “my friend.” A council of elders, including several dozen tribal and religious leaders, came to his house and asked him to stay on. At first, he told me, he refused. Finally he agreed.
I don’t know whether what Karshoum told me was true. But he wanted me to understand that he had real civil-society support, that he himself was a civilian, and that he wanted to build a civilian government, one that represented all the ethnic groups in the region. He told me that there should be an independent investigation into the events that unfolded in the spring of 2023 (although the UN has already conducted one). He assured me that the Masalit were returning home to Sudan, and encouraged me to come and witness a local meeting of Masalit and other tribes, due to take place in another town a few hours’ drive away.
The event didn’t happen, or maybe I wasn’t wanted; the reason for the canceled invitation was never clear. But I did meet the reconciliation committee that supported Karshoum. About a dozen of the committee members gathered in a single bare room and introduced themselves, each one naming his tribe or clan, including a man who introduced himself as a Masalit. We also met Abdulbaqi Ali Hussein Ahmed, a lawyer and the chairman of the local constituent assembly. Solemnly, he showed me the old council chamber, with its worn tiles, watermarked walls, and shuttered windows, and promised it would someday be used again, by all of the ethnic groups in the region.
Outside Sudan, the RSF also wants to be seen as a force for democracy, not as a rapacious militia engaged in ethnic cleansing. This past spring, together with allied militias, a group of RSF leaders announced plans to form a Government of Peace and Unity, and to issue passports and currency. All of these efforts evoke a lot of scorn. In Adré, Asaad Bahr Al-Din, the brother of the sultan of the Masalit, told us that although some Masalit might return to El Geneina to trade or collect belongings, few were returning for good. “There is discrimination,” he told us. “No freedom.” Perceived enemies of the RSF were still intimidated, sometimes beaten, even just for looking insufficiently sad upon hearing the news of RSF battlefield defeats. In Port Sudan, I asked the finance minister, a Darfuri himself, what he thought of the RSF’s Government of Peace and Unity, and he dismissed it immediately. “They know nothing about democracy. Actually, they have been used by others to talk about democracy.”
I heard the use of the word democracy differently. Think back, again, to the decades that followed the sack of Rome. Long after the empire was too weak to exert real power, Latin remained the language of scholarship, of the Church, of universal communication. In much of the world, the terms democracy and civil society now function in the same way: They signify that the user aspires to something better—to legitimacy, to statehood. Warlords can rule by brute force for a time, but eventually they want recognition, acceptance, maybe statehood and UN membership.
The path to all of those things still runs through international law, even in a world where international law is scorned, dismissed, and ignored by the countries that invented it.
One day toward the end of our stay in El Geneina, we planned to leave early to travel to Zalingei, another town about 100 miles to the east, and to return the same day. The desert road between the two cities is one of the best in Darfur, which simply means that most of it is paved. Even so, the route requires a detour across a dried riverbed to avoid a bombed-out bridge, passes through more than a dozen RSF checkpoints, and runs through a region without cellphone connection and only loose RSF control. A daytime drive was said to be safe, but everyone advised us to get home before dark: Not only are there no taxes and no government regulations in Darfur, but there are also no highway police, no rescue services. No one will come help you if anything goes wrong.
The day went badly. We lost time in the morning, waiting for permission from the RSF to leave the city by car. We arrived very late for an appointment at a hospital, and the physicians we had planned to meet had left for lunch. We were even later for our next meeting, and squeezed the one after that into just a few minutes. Then, right after we finally got back into the car and prepared to head out of the city, our driver, who had come with us from Chad and wasn’t very communicative, abruptly announced that he was out of gas. There are no gas stations in Zalingei, so we went to a street market and filled the tank out of big plastic containers. By the time this tedious operation was concluded, it was late afternoon.
We headed out of town. Then, just as the sun was setting, the day devolved into a scene from a bad movie. The car started shaking, then slowed down. We had a flat tire. We got out of the car to change it. The spare tire was broken. Our guide, who had been relaxed and chatty throughout the previous difficulties, suddenly changed his tone. He barked orders at the driver, telling him to keep moving, despite the flat tire: We had to get to a checkpoint. It wasn’t safe to be stuck in the middle of the desert in the dark.
Just then, we saw a car approaching in the distance—unusual for this time of day. Our driver, our translator, and our guide stayed tense and silent, waiting to see who it would be. The car was a pickup truck; the passengers were men in flowing robes and turbans, carrying AK-47s, some riding in the cabin, some standing in the back.
The truck slowed down. Our guide smiled widely and held out his arms. He called out a name. One of the passengers, wearing a robin’s-egg-blue jalabiya and a camouflage turban, jumped off the truck and rushed to embrace him. It was his brother-in-law.
We were rescued. The brother-in-law and his comrades had a Starlink dish mounted on the hood of their pickup truck, so we had Wi-Fi. They gave us their functional spare tire, and escorted us back to El Geneina in the dark. In a lawless world—in a place run by militias, clans, and families—you are perfectly safe as long as your relatives are the ones in charge.
A couple of days after we left Khartoum, the Sudanese army recaptured the presidential palace, the symbolic seat of power in the capital. Soldiers filmed themselves shouting triumphant slogans and waving rifles in front of broken windows. Sudanese military officials posted reams of praise on social media. In Port Sudan, several people predicted confidently that the war would soon end, perhaps as early as April, because the Sudanese army would now quickly reconquer the rest of the country.
That same day, Colonel Ibrahim, the earnest military-liaison officer who’d helped us because he didn’t want Sudan to become a “forgotten war,” was killed in a drone strike, together with a team of Sudanese television journalists. The RSF must have targeted them, to spoil what would have been newsworthy film and photographs. Over tea that evening in the garden of our hotel in Port Sudan, a senior Sudanese-military officer, the scion of a family with a long tradition in the government and army, told us in confidence that he disagreed with the official optimism. The war would not end soon. His own family, whose members found themselves on different sides of the conflict, bitterly divided, were still “electing by their legs” to leave the country, traveling to Egypt, or Abu Dhabi, or beyond.
Some weeks later, the RSF began using drones to hit Port Sudan, including the hotel with the garden where we’d had tea. The Sudanese-military leaders accused the Emiratis of coordinating the strike, and finally cut all ties with Abu Dhabi. The UN suspended flights into Port Sudan. Some of the diplomats who remained in Port Sudan also, I was told, began to contemplate leaving.
But not everyone will leave. Nor will everyone succumb to the nihilism and greed that drive the war, or to the despair that has followed so much destruction.
On one of my visits to al-Nau Hospital, in Omdurman, I met Momen wd Zaineb. We had arranged to meet in the hospital courtyard, but conversation proved almost impossible. Wd Zaineb was surrounded by a large crowd of mostly elderly people, all waving small bits of paper. These were prescriptions for medications that aren’t available at al-Nau, which has a dedicated staff of emergency doctors and a free pharmacy but limited supplies, especially of medications for chronic diseases. Wd Zaineb raises money on Facebook to pay for the medications, periodically asking his 125,000 followers to donate. Social media has also helped make his long, curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses into a kind of trademark. When he is at the hospital, he is deluged by people who recognize him, people who want to be cured.
Wd Zaineb’s local prominence also has deeper roots, in the revolutionary movement that led to the end of the Bashir regime, and in the community of Sudanese who use the language of transparency, democracy, and power-sharing not to appeal to some foreign ideal or to win outside recognition, but because they believe this is the only way to achieve peace in Sudan. “We have abundant resources,” he told me. “But we suffer from massive mismanagement and even greater corruption; that’s why our people live in these tragic conditions. Our country is a paradise, but there are those who want to live in that paradise alone, to rule it, and to own all its wealth.”
As a result of these beliefs, wd Zaineb has spent a lot of his life in hiding. He hid first from the Bashir regime. After the coup, he hid from the military dictatorship. On the first day of the war, he nevertheless went immediately to al-Nau, which was then in the middle of the conflict zone, to see what he could do to help injured civilians. Together with dozens and eventually hundreds of other activists across the country, on both sides of the conflict, wd Zaineb helped build the Emergency Response Rooms, raising money, at first from diaspora Sudanese, to provide people with the communal kitchens I saw all over the country, along with medical care and other help. The Emergency Response Rooms, known as the ERR movement—sooner or later, every Sudanese group becomes known by its acronym—eventually built shared fundraising platforms that are capable of raising money around the world and distributing aid around the country. “We did all of this on our own,” wd Zaineb told me, “as revolutionaries, without any support from the government.” That kind of independence generates hostility from both the RSF and the Sudanese military, who have repressed ERR volunteers. Alsanosi Adam, a member of the ERR communications team, based in Kenya, advised me to be careful meeting volunteers on the ground, because the interaction might attract unwanted attention from the authorities.
But wd Zaineb wanted to meet, and eventually we arranged to do so a second time, this time behind a water tank where petitioners couldn’t immediately find him. I asked him to explain the connection between this volunteer work and his political activism, and he told me that they are the same thing. The war, he said, is run by people who want to destroy, so he tries to do the opposite: to build. He pointed at the huddle of people who were already gathering a few feet away, waiting for him. “Him, he’s like my father. Her, she’s like my mother. All these people need help, so I came to help. I stay here sometimes for 10 hours a day.” There aren’t enough ambulances, so he and his network of volunteers also help people get to the hospital after a bombing raid, assist the families of the injured, even bury the dead.
The hospital authorities are wary of wd Zaineb—he’s not a physician; medications can interact badly with one another. Their doctors and nurses also do heroic work, providing emergency help to victims of the war. Maybe his politics make them nervous too. Still, they tolerate wd Zaineb standing in the courtyard. Without him, the small mob of sick people would not have access to any medication at all.
Many others share his views. During that rushed, truncated day in Zalingei, we did have one memorable meeting, with a group of students and professionals—among them a physician, a teacher, and an environmental engineer—who had, during the two years of war, collectively created 45 Emergency Response Rooms in Central Darfur, staffed by more than 800 volunteers. Many had lost their job when universities, hospitals, and government offices were shelled or shut down, but they still thought it important to “give something to the community,” as one of them told me. Like wd Zaineb, they wanted to build, they told me, not destroy.
Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to “communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when “people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it, if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at sundown.
It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.
On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.
But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.
This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “This Is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like.”