Article from The Rest Is Politics
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.
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