Atif Mehmood | Published August 16, 2025
The author is deeply interested in social and political issues, focusing on analyzing their impact on society and policy development. It is to be noted that the opinions articulated herein are exclusively the author’s own and do not reflect the views or stances of the author’s employer or those of Pakistan Chronicles Online. For correspondence, the author may be contacted at atif@live.ie.
Sudan is bleeding out before the eyes of a watching world, and yet the world does not move. The horizon above its deserts is not darkened by the coming of night but by the choking smoke of burned villages and the pall of unburied dead. The Nile still winds through the land, but it carries no promise; its waters slip past cities reduced to rubble and fields abandoned to weeds. Since the war erupted in April 2023, a nation that once fed itself and its neighbours has been hollowed into a graveyard of the living. More than 12 million have been uprooted from their homes, scattered like seeds across a hostile terrain, while famine, disease, and violence stalk them without pause, stripping away what little they have left.
Half of the country now lives in hunger so severe that it defies ordinary language. Some 24.6 million people rise each morning unsure if they will eat that day. Among them, over 600,000 teeter in the realm of hunger so extreme it has been designated “catastrophic”. These are not statistics; they are the skeletal outlines of children, their bellies distended not from fullness but from starvation, their eyes glazed in the stillness of exhaustion that precedes death.
In North Darfur’s camps, whole communities are caught in the tightening jaws of siege. Zamzam camp holds nearly half a million people, and in August last year it reached the most severe famine classification recognised anywhere on earth. Since then, the days have not brought relief, only deeper deprivation. Aid convoys are blocked, stripped of supplies, or obliterated before they arrive. An airstrike on a hospital in El Fasher killed seventy patients, among them children, and extinguished one of the last places where the sick could find shelter.
Disease walks easily here. Cholera, that ancient and merciless killer, has returned with a vengeance, spreading through camps where clean water is a luxury. Nearly 100,000 suspected cases, more than 2,400 deaths. In one week alone, forty people died in North Darfur. The country’s healthcare system has collapsed into ruin; more than 70% of facilities are destroyed or barely functioning. In the first six months of this year, hospital deaths rose sixty-fold over the previous year.
Even the supposed safety of refugee camps is an illusion. In August, the Rapid Support Forces stormed Abu Shouk camp, killing forty people in their homes and wounding dozens more. In April, the Zamzam massacre claimed some 1500 lives in a mere seventy-two hours, a slaughter so calculated and so vast that it should have shaken every capital city into action.
Women and children bear the deepest wounds. More than 14 million, mostly women and girls, are displaced. They live crammed into fragile shelters, their dignity stripped, their safety uncertain. Sexual violence, forced marriage, abduction, and trafficking are not accidents of war here; they are instruments of it. Maternal care has vanished, reproductive health services are absent, and trauma festers in silence. Such wounds are not measured in years; they endure for generations.
Yet, even here, fragments of resilience surface. Archaeologists at Jebel Barkal unearth relics of an older Sudan, offering both shelter for the displaced and a reminder that history has given this land more than ruin. These small acts matter, but they cannot take the place of food, medicine, clean water, and the means to survive.
This crisis does not require sympathy alone; it demands intervention. Humanitarian corridors must be secured to deliver aid where it is needed most. Over $645 million is needed through November 2025 to keep the World Food Programme’s lifeline alive, yet funding remains disastrously inadequate. Vaccination campaigns must be intensified, water sources purified, and sanitation restored before the next rains unleash fresh waves of disease.
Those responsible must be held to account. The deliberate starvation of civilians, the destruction of hospitals, the systematic use of sexual violence, these are not the unintended side effects of war; they are war crimes. The International Criminal Court and the United Nations must bring their weight to bear on perpetrators and deny them the cover of impunity.
Women must be central to recovery, not relegated to its margins. They must have a voice in the rebuilding of their communities, and aid must be structured to protect their dignity, safety, and agency. Long-term recovery will demand more than the silencing of guns. Sudan’s schools must reopen, its clinics rebuilt, its markets restored. Children must once again walk to class, farmers must return to their fields, and life must be measured not by survival alone but by the possibility of a future.
The temptation for the world to turn away is strong. There is always another crisis to capture the headlines, another war to dominate the broadcasts. But Sudan’s agony is not some distant misfortune; it is a living indictment of our capacity to ignore what does not touch us directly. Every day that passes without action is another day in which children starve, women are brutalised, and communities vanish.
History will not remember our distractions or our excuses. It will remember whether we stood by while a nation was dismantled piece by piece. If the world allows Sudan to disappear beneath famine and fire, it will not be because there was nothing to be done. It will be because, in the face of a preventable catastrophe, we chose silence over courage. And silence, in the face of such suffering, is nothing less than complicity.
Reprinted with courtesy of The Nation. All rights reserved.
https://www.nation.com.pk/16-Aug-2025/sudan-s-overlooked-agony
© 2024 Pakistan Chronicles Online. All Rights Reserved.
The content posted in pakistanchronicles.online community pages is created by members of the public. Hence, views expressed therein may not be those of pakistanchronicles.online. pakistanchronicles.online is not responsible for any content posted by members of the public on pakistanchronicles.online. Ensure to view Disclaimer section of this website for mor information.
