Since 15 April 2023 — the day the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces turned their guns on each other — more than fifteen million people have been forced from their homes. That is roughly one in every three Sudanese. Almost four million have crossed international borders.

It is the largest displacement crisis in the world. It has been for two and a half years. Very little of it makes the front pages of European or American newspapers on most days.

The numbers, as of mid-2026

The International Organization for Migration puts current internal displacement at around 8.9 million people — down from a peak of more than 11.5 million in January 2025 as some families begin returning. About four million have gone back to areas of origin, most from within Sudan, some from abroad. Sixty per cent of those who returned found homes with collapsed roofs, broken walls or missing windows.

The rest have not. Nearly four million Sudanese remain outside the country, spread across Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, Libya and Uganda. Chad alone hosts hundreds of thousands in camps along its eastern border.

Fresh displacement is still rising in specific regions. IOM recorded a 65 per cent jump in newly displaced people in Kordofan between February and June 2026, as fighting intensified there. Nearly a million internally displaced people were living in that region alone by mid-year — around eleven per cent of Sudan’s total.

What the war is about

The fighting began as a power struggle between two generals who had jointly overthrown a civilian transitional government in 2021: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti — of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the successor to the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur wars.

Both sides have been accused by human rights organisations of serious violations. The RSF in particular has been documented committing ethnically targeted killings in Darfur, sexual violence at scale, and the deliberate blockade of humanitarian aid. Neither side has shown much interest in the ceasefires proposed by various mediators.

Famine

Alongside displacement, Sudan is in the middle of what the UN describes as one of the largest hunger crises in decades. Reports from earlier this year described families in besieged areas eating tree leaves. Around 33.7 million people are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance — the highest figure of any country in the world.

The IOM appealed in March for $277 million to fund its 2026 response. Whether that money materialises is a different question. Donor fatigue, competing crises, and cuts to development budgets in several traditional funders mean humanitarian appeals for Sudan have consistently come in badly underfunded.

Why the coverage is so thin

Three reasons that are worth naming plainly rather than pretending otherwise.

Access is dangerous. Foreign correspondents cannot easily move around a country where two armies are shooting at each other and journalists have been killed. Most reporting comes through NGOs, satellite imagery and the accounts of the displaced themselves — slower and less vivid than embedded coverage.

The war has no clear side for Western audiences to identify with. It is a fight between two commanders both accused of atrocities, with foreign backers on several fronts, and no obvious moral shortcut for editors trying to explain it in a paragraph.

And competing stories crowd it out. Gaza, Ukraine, the Iranian war, the dispute over Hormuz — each is a live conflict with news value every day. Sudan does not disappear because it stops mattering. It disappears because the space it would occupy has been taken.

Sources

UN International Organization for Migration Displacement Tracking Matrix; UNHCR figures; Al Jazeera and Sudan Tribune reporting; IOM Sudan Crisis Response Plan 2026.