Sudan is living through one of the darkest and most devastating chapters of its modern history—a tragedy the world is only beginning to acknowledge while the country bleeds between power struggles, betrayals, and systematic brutality. To understand the current chaos, we must go back to its origin: a regime that, since 1989, cultivated a culture of violence that persists to this day.
Experts on the region recall that millions of Sudanese took to the streets during the revolution that toppled Omar al-Bashir. That historic uprising left thousands dead, countless wounded, and entire communities shattered. Yet the fall of the dictator did not bring a democratic rebirth: the men who replaced him were, in essence, protégés created by al-Bashir himself. His two immediate successors, trained under his shadow, continued applying the same tactics of terror that defined the regime: extrajudicial executions, torture, mass disappearances, and a level of violence that knows no limits.
Recent testimonies describe horrors rarely reported clearly: thousands of bodies thrown into the river, the use of chemical weapons against civilians, and cholera outbreaks caused by contaminated water—water that people drink because it is mixed with decomposing corpses. Despite these atrocious abuses, the international community has maintained a calculated indifference for years.
The supposed democratic transition negotiated after al-Bashir’s fall ultimately proved to be an illusion. In 2021, when the shift to a civilian government was meant to occur, the military staged an internal coup. Abdalla Hamdok, the civilian prime minister, was arrested. Civilian members of the Sovereign Council were imprisoned. In a matter of hours, the promise of a new Sudan was buried under the military’s familiar declaration: “We are in charge.”
It was then that the fracture defining today’s conflict emerged. On one side, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a central figure of the Nile River’s northern Arab elite—a group historically shaped by colonial power and closely tied to the country’s old Islamist structure. On the other side, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo “Hemedti,” leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia born on the margins of the system, with its own social base and its own political ambitions.
They shared one thing: both had been allies in repression. But when the time came to decide who would control the country’s destiny, a clash became inevitable. The confrontation between these two factions ignited a civil war that has reduced entire cities to rubble and created a humanitarian catastrophe unparalleled in Africa today.
Those who closely follow the conflict explain that none of this is new. The brutality of the regime that began in 1989 never disappeared—first disguised as a transition, then as a democratic promise, and now as a “war on terrorism” or “defense of the nation,” depending on which side is speaking. The military elite that was supposed to safeguard the transition betrayed the people and opened the door to a direct confrontation between armed factions seeking to seize Sudan as if it were a prize.
Today, Sudan survives among ruins, with its capital destroyed, millions displaced, and a desperate population while regional powers and the international community weigh their own interests. And although global media is only now beginning to report on the crisis, the tragedy did not begin today: it is the inevitable result of decades of violence, betrayal, and accumulated ambition.
The question is not only what is happening in Sudan, but why the world allowed the country to reach this point without an effective intervention. Because Sudan’s story is not a recent accident—it is an open wound that has been bleeding for more than 30 years.
