Grave violations against 1,681 children in Sudan. CRSV in Darfur could be crimes against humanity

From What's In Blue 
Dated Thursday 25 June 2026 - excerpts:

Sudan: Briefing and Consultations

Tomorrow morning (26 June), the Security Council will hold an open briefing, followed by closed consultations, on Sudan. The meeting is being held pursuant to resolution 2715 of 1 December 2023, which requested the Secretary-General to provide a briefing every 120 days on the “UN’s efforts to support Sudan on its path towards peace and stability”. [...]

Colombia, in its capacity as Council president for June and in the absence of a Chair of the 1591 Sudan Sanctions Committee, is expected to deliver a statement on the work of the Committee. Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for Sudan Pekka Haavisto will brief in the closed consultations. [...]

Over the past several weeks, regional and international interlocutors have expressed alarm over the escalating situation in El Obeid, drawing comparisons with the RSF’s October 2025 offensive and subsequent takeover of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. That offensive was accompanied by widespread violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL), including reports of mass killings, summary executions, abductions, arbitrary detention, and other abuses against civilians. 

In an 18 June statement, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that an imminent offensive on El Obeid “risked fresh commission of serious international crimes and deepening the catastrophic impact on an already beleaguered civilian population”. [...]

In recent weeks, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported that repeated drone strikes have targeted critical civilian infrastructure in and around El Obeid, including power, fuel, and water facilities, as well as displacement sites.

Some members may also highlight broader protection concerns, including widespread conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). In this regard, there may be reference to the 23 June report published by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which documents patterns and trends of CRSV in Sudan since the outbreak of the conflict on 15 April 2023 to mid-April this year, including links to conflict dynamics. The report noted that CRSV has been perpetrated in conjunction with systematic and coordinated attacks against civilians as a tactic of war, including as retaliation against individuals perceived to be affiliated with opposing parties and as part of ethnically motivated attacks. It found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that some acts of sexual violence committed in Darfur, in the context of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, may amount to crimes against humanity. [...]

Tomorrow, Sulieman and several Council members are likely to highlight the devastating impact of the conflict on children, particularly in light of the escalating hostilities in and around El Obeid. They are expected to express deep concern about the continued perpetration of grave violations against children in Sudan. (The six grave violations, as determined by the Security Council, are child recruitment and use; killing and maiming; rape and other forms of sexual violence; attacks on schools and hospitals; abductions; and the denial of humanitarian access.) The Secretary-General’s latest annual report on children and armed conflict, dated 16 June and covering developments in 2025, verified 1,889 grave violations against 1,681 children in Sudan.

During the closed consultations, Haavisto is expected to provide an update on ongoing initiatives to address the crisis in Sudan, including his engagement with the Sudanese parties, consultations with key regional and international interlocutors, and efforts to coordinate various peace initiatives. Between 3 and 5 June, the Quintet—comprising the African Union (AU), the European Union (EU), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the League of Arab States (LAS), and the UN—held consultations in Addis Ababa with a broad spectrum of Sudanese political and civilian stakeholders. 

A press release issued after the meetings noted that discussions focused on possible pathways towards the establishment of a preparatory committee for an inclusive inter-Sudanese political dialogue. The latest discussions built on the Quintet’s initial engagement with a group of Sudanese civilian actors on the sidelines of the international Sudan conference held in Berlin on 15 April. 

On 7 June, Haavisto visited Sudan, where he met with SAF leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and several other senior Sudanese officials. He also held discussions with political figures, women civil society leaders, members of the diplomatic corps, and the UN Country Team. This was his second visit to Sudan following his appointment on 24 February. According to a UN readout, Haavisto’s discussions focused on UN-led efforts to promote de-escalation and confidence-building measures among the parties. During his meeting with Burhan, he also discussed the Quintet’s recent consultations in Addis Ababa and efforts to advance an inclusive political process.

On 19 June, Haavisto held a telephone conversation with RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, during which he underscored the urgent need to de-escalate the situation in and around El Obeid and avoid any actions that could further exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation. In a briefing earlier today (25 June), Haavisto said that he plans to visit Kenya, Chad, South Sudan, and Uganda in the coming weeks as part of his ongoing regional outreach. He expressed hope that the Quad group—comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the US—could help secure a humanitarian truce. In his assessment of the conflict dynamics, he noted that both sides still appear to believe that military gains remain achievable. At the same time, he underscored that regional actors, including Gulf countries, are increasingly rejecting the notion of a military solution.

Haavisto also met with US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos on 23 June. According to a post by Boulos on X, the two discussed the Quintet’s ongoing efforts to advance an inclusive, Sudanese-led civilian political dialogue, as well as ways to ensure unhindered humanitarian access for the UN and its humanitarian partners. Boulos further noted that he will participate in tomorrow’s Council meeting, during which he intends to emphasise the need for international support for a humanitarian truce, a pathway towards a permanent ceasefire, and an inclusive Sudanese-led political dialogue and civilian-led transition.

View original: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2026/06/sudan-briefing-and-consultations-13.php

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UK and allies Joint Statement on situation in El Obeid Sudan: Credible signs of an imminent attack by RSF

"We, the Foreign Ministers of like-minded partners (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, UK), are deeply concerned by reports of a continued assault on El Obeid, despite calls for a halt to the attack and protection of civilians.  

We call on the RSF to halt its attack immediately. Civilians must be able to leave safely, and all parties must ensure rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access. The RSF and the SAF, and their allies, must de-escalate, uphold international humanitarian law, and honour their commitments under the Jeddah Declaration." More.

UK Government response

From: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and The Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP

Dated Tuesday 23 June 2026 - full copy:

UK and allies Joint Statement on the situation in El Obeid

The United Kingdom and E4+deliver a joint statement on the situation in El Obeid, Sudan.

We, the Foreign Ministers of like-minded partners (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, UK), are deeply concerned by reports of a continued assault on El Obeid, despite calls for a halt to the attack and protection of civilians.  

Last year, the world witnessed with horror the atrocities in El Fasher - crimes that are assessed to bear the “hallmarks of genocide”. We must not allow such failures to be repeated.   

In recent weeks, repeated drone strikes on El Obeid have killed civilians and driven acute shortages of fuel, food and water. With the rainy season fast approaching, humanitarian workers continue to provide life-saving assistance but are being deliberately targeted. 

There are now credible signs of an imminent offensive. This is a critical moment, and the international community must act.  

We call on the RSF to halt its attack immediately. Civilians must be able to leave safely, and all parties must ensure rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access. The RSF and the SAF, and their allies, must de-escalate, uphold international humanitarian law, and honour their commitments under the Jeddah Declaration. 

External support continues to sustain this conflict. We call on those fuelling the conflict to cease, and those with influence must exercise it now to avoid further bloodshed.  

We will continue to work closely at the UN Security Council and with regional and international partners to secure a clear and unified response: the violence must end, civilians must be protected, and those responsible must be held to account. We remain committed to supporting a credible path to peace through the Quintet-led process and call on all parties to engage in good faith.

View original: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-allies-joint-statement-on-the-situation-in-el-obeid

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Sudan: Three Years of Conflict and Displacement. More than 11.58 million people were uprooted

Report from International Organization for Migration (IOM)
Dated 15 April 2026 - full copy:

Sudan: Three Years of Conflict and Displacement

Following the start of the conflict on 15 April 2023, Sudan became the largest displacement crisis in the world. Nearly one in three people in Sudan— over 15 million people— were displaced from their homes, either within the country or across borders. Sudan alone accounted for 15 per cent of all internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world. By January 2025, the crisis reached its peak in terms of displacement: More than 11.58 million people were uprooted inside Sudan—8.85 million driven out by the current conflict, and 2.73 million displaced from earlier conflicts.

This factsheet presents key statistics on displacement and return, based on three years of nationwide data collection from IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix. 

Key Figures: 15 April 2023 - 15 April 2026

• The number of IDPs more than tripled due to the conflict, increasing by over 200 per cent from 3.8 million IDPs in 2023 to a peak of 11.58 million IDPs in 2025.

• DTM recorded 805 events triggering displacement: On average, there was an event triggering displacement every 1.5 days for over 1,000 days. Some months witnessed as many as 88 incidents.

• An average of approximately 231,779 additional IDPs were displaced each month between April 2023 and the peak of displacement in January 2025.

• In addition to conflict-related displacement, over a quarter million individuals were displaced due to natural hazards (285,135 individuals).

• Displacement spans the entire country: individuals were displaced from every single state and fled to nearly 13,000 locations in 185 localities across all 18 states.

Displacement and Return in April 2026

After three years, the number of displaced people has decreased due to increased return movements. 

• Approximately 8,936,175 IDPs remain in Sudan, a 23 per cent decrease compared to the highest-ever recorded displaced population.

• Despite the recent decrease in IDP figures, displacement remains at historically high levels: the displaced population is still more than double compared to its pre-conflict figures.

• Approximately 350,000 individuals were newly displaced within the last six months, between October 2025 and March 2026. This surge in displacement was driven primarily by increased insecurity across Al Fasher, North Darfur, the Kordofan region, and Blue Nile state.

Nearly 4 million people have now returned home.

• An estimated 3,994,019 individuals have returned to areas of origin across nine states.

• Of these, 83 per cent moved back from internal displacement and 17 per cent returned from locations abroad.

• Sixty per cent of households have returned to damaged homes, including fully collapsed roofs and broken walls or windows.

• The majority of returning families moved back due to improved security (87%), and the majority intend to stay (92%).

View original, graphics, download full report

Period Covered Apr 15 2023 - Apr 15 2026:

https://dtm.iom.int/reports/sudan-three-years-conflict-and-displacement

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Sudan Displacement and Return Snapshot: 9 million internally displaced persons - over half are children

Report from International Organization for Migration (IOM)

Dated 15 April 2026 - full copy:

DTM Sudan Displacement and Return Snapshot (4)

The Sudan Displacement and Return Snapshot includes information on internally displaced persons and returnees, based on data from nearly 13,000 locations, 185 localities, and all 18 states in Sudan.

Main Findings:

• An estimated 8,936,175 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were recorded across 11,493 locations in 185 localities, in all 18 states.
• An estimated 3,994,019 returned individuals were recorded across 2,822 locations in 73 localities, in nine states.
• Eighty-three per cent of returnees moved back from internal displacement, while 17 per cent returned from locations abroad.
• Over half of IDPs (55%) and returnees (52%) were children under 18-years-old.

Key Trends:

• The number of IDPs decreased by 23 per cent compared to the highest-recorded displaced population, and by one per cent compared to the previous month.
• The number of returnees increased by four per cent compared to the previous month.

For further information, see DTM Methodological Note and the DTM Sudan Interactive Dashboard.

View original and get download 

for period covered Feb 27 2026 - Mar 31 2026: 

https://dtm.iom.int/reports/dtm-sudan-displacement-and-return-snapshot-4

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The War the World Forgot: Why Aren’t We Talking About Sudan? Why Some Wars don’t Make Headlines

Article from The Rest Is Politics

By Alastair Campbell
Dated 23 April 2026 - full copy: 

The War the World Forgot: Why Aren’t We Talking About Sudan?

“It’s the worst war in the world right now,” said Alastair in his discussion with Rory in the main episode about the ongoing conflict in Sudan.

The scale of the deaths and displacement is “almost uniquely horrific” and yet, he said, “there is so little attention paid to it.” 

The conflict, which entered its fourth year this month, so rarely appears at the top of the news agenda that it is often called “the forgotten war”. 

For this newsletter, we interviewed Ashan Abeywardena, who works as an emergency response manager for the charity War Child in Sudan. We also spoke to top foreign correspondent Christina Lamb, who has been reporting on conflicts for 38 years - including Sudan - to understand what is happening in the country, and why it receives so little international attention. 

And finally… We had a call with actress Carey Mulligan, who campaigns for War Child and who visited a Sudanese refugee camp in Chad with the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in February. Alastair met her at an event on Monday and set up this interview.

Carey Mulligan in Chad in February 

with the Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper

What’s happening in Sudan?

Fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces began in April 2023. Since then at least 150,000 people have died and 15 million have been forced to flee their homes in the northeast African country. 

“We often blithely refer to Sudan as the world’s ‘biggest humanitarian crisis’ without thinking what that actually means,” Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, who reported on the war from a refugee camp in Chad in February, explains. 

“It actually means women gang-raped when they head up a road, girls hiding terrified under branches, young people who once dreamt of going to university, forced to scrape a living gathering firewood,” she says.

There is no decisive victory or durable ceasefire in sight as both sides, and their international backers, “battle it out for control of the country and control of its resources such as gold and oil,” Lamb adds.

Abeywardena, from War Child, has just returned to the UK after spending four weeks in Darfur, in the west of Sudan. He had been visiting the charity’s partner organisations which are supporting children living through the war.

“We speak to kids who don’t really know any alternative and are just numb to the sound of conflict and war - and that’s a continuous state of being for them,” he says.

More than 30 million people in Sudan are currently in need of aid, including an estimated 15 million children. Yet desperately needed care provisions have been hard hit by international aid cuts.

Last year, according to a report by Humanitarian Action, only 39.5 percent of funding required for humanitarian responses in Sudan was actually made available. 

“It’s almost ignored by the international community,” Abeywardena says.

War Child does what it can with its local partners to create “places for children to come together, play, and really be children,” Abeywardena says, but it’s not enough.

The British actress Carey Mulligan, who has worked with War Child since 2014 and has visited the charity’s projects in Lebanon, Uganda, and the DRC among other countries, visited a Sudanese displacement camp in Chad in February.

She described witnessing a level of trauma unlike anything she had previously encountered. 

“There was one mother I met almost immediately who had managed to get across the border [into Chad from Sudan], but had lost her husband and her three children and didn't know if they had lived or not,” she said. 

Mulligan met other mothers who had been forced to flee with only some of their children. 

“They had seven children but crossed the border with two,” she said, or “had nine children but crossed with five” - and they often could not bear to explain what had happened to the others.

She described the way survivors spoke with euphemisms. Women would refer to having had a “difficult journey”, she said, which was often “unspoken code for sexual trauma”.

When there are so many severe and immediate threats to survival, just staying alive becomes a success story. 

As Mulligan put it: “Physical survival has become an acceptable outcome for children. If you walk out of a conflict with your limbs intact then that’s meeting some new level of acceptability. A child deserves to have a normal life.”

Both sides in the war, the RSF and the SAF, have been accused of committing war crimes, with widespread reports of rape, sexual assault and child abuse. 

One report released last month by Doctors Without Borders recorded more than 3,396 cases of sexual violence in 2024 and 2025. In South Darfur, 20 percent of victims were under 18, including 41 children under five.

Sexual violence, the report explains, is now “part of everyday life” in most parts of Sudan, both during fighting and in its aftermath, on the roads, in markets and in refugee camps. 

One woman quoted in the report described her attack: “They took us to an open area. The first man raped me twice, the second once, the third four times.”

Mulligan described how one mother she met told her that her seven-year-old daughter couldn’t sleep at night because she was so terrified of a man who had attacked her. 

“[There are] no practical steps there for a parent to take to help their child,” she said. “You're interrupting the building blocks of their brain, you're tying a hand behind their back if you don't offer mental health support to a child who's been through something like that.”

Recovery from the trauma of war is possible, both Abeywardena and Mulligan say, having witnessed it first hand in other conflicts War Child has worked in. 

“We've met countless children over the years who've had really catastrophic trauma and who have, through working with a partner and with mental health support, been able to recover to a degree where they can have agency and choose their life for themselves,” Mulligan says. 

“But it needs peace and sustainable peace for that to happen,” Abeywardena explains.

Why does the conflict receive so little international media attention? 

“In its fourth year, it’s almost an abandoned crisis overshadowed by other world events,” says Lamb. 

There are too many other crises, from Gaza and Ukraine to Iran, she explains, for Sudan to be able to hold international focus for long. 

“In 38 years of reporting I have never known a time like the last four years, or the last three months in particular,” she says. “I never imagined covering a major land war in Europe.”

Research suggests there are also economic and political variables which influence which conflicts get more coverage than others. 

A report from the Reuters Institute released this month titled “Why Some Wars don’t Make Headlines” pointed to factors including the accessibility and safety for reporters, the nature of the conflict, and its perceived impact on readers’ lives. 

A 2025 analysis by Vision of Humanity found more than 1,600 articles for each civilian death in high income countries, compared to 17 in low-income countries. 

“Conflicts in regions with less economic influence are more likely to be overlooked, regardless of their severity or humanitarian consequences,” the report notes.

Relatively complex civil wars, like Sudan, also receive less coverage than wars between different countries, the report notes. 

Abeywardena finds it frustrating hearing the Sudan war described as “forgotten” in the wider media. He says: “It’s not forgotten by the millions of Sudanese who are affected.”

You can read Lamb’s piece about her experience reporting on Sudan here and more of her reporting here. 

View original: 

https://alastaircampbell.org/category/podcasts/the-rest-is-politics/

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