Sudan's War Just Produced Ethnic Cleansing at El Fasher. A War 3,000km Away Just Made the Hunger Worse.

The Rapid Support Forces besieged El Fasher, the last major Darfur city outside its control, for roughly 500 days before capturing it in October 2025; Amnesty International's report, published 1 July 2026 after investigating the period from early 2024 through the city's fall, documented murder, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, extermination and persecution, concluding these acts constitute both crimes against humanity and the ethnic cleansing of the Zaghawa community from the area — RSF fighters burned homes after residents fled specifically to prevent their return. Tawila, the nearest safe town, absorbed 800,000 displaced people, mostly from El Fasher. Nationally, UN News's January 2026 figures put 33.7 million people — about two-thirds of Sudan's population — in need of humanitarian assistance, 13.6 million displaced (9.3 million internally, 4.3 million as refugees), and more than a third of health facilities non-functional after 201 verified attacks on healthcare since the war began in April 2023. Since the Iran war closed most Hormuz shipping in early 2026, Al Jazeera's July reporting documents a second, geographically distant shock landing on the same crisis: Sudan depends heavily on Gulf-sourced fertilizer, and the wartime shipping disruption hit during planting season, driving WFP acting director Carl Skau to describe a food-security picture that is 'falling backwards' rather than stabilizing — the agency has cut the number of people it can assist from 5 million to 3.5 million against a $646 million funding shortfall from US, European and British donor cuts.

Brookings' own account is blunt about the origin: both Burhan and Hemedti 'scorned' the 2022-2023 tripartite mediation effort by the UN, African Union and IGAD, turning their forces on each other in April 2023 rather than accept a civilian-transition framework that would have curtailed their own power. That the war has run nearly three years since is sustained, per Brookings, by outside patronage on both sides — 'fingers pointing at the United Arab Emirates for arming the RSF,' and Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran backing the SAF — a structure in which neither side has to win outright because neither side is fighting alone. Layered on top of that standing dynamic is a second, more recent cause specific to why the hunger crisis sharpened in mid-2026: Al Jazeera's reporting ties Sudan's fertilizer shortage directly to Hormuz shipping disruption from the separate Iran war, arriving during the planting season when the loss does the most damage, while WFP's own funding — already cut by the US, European nations and Britain — fell further behind need at the same moment. Likely, not confirmed, because the war's persistence is well-documented but the precise weighting between 'foreign patronage lets both sides afford to keep fighting' and 'neither commander would compromise regardless of external support' cannot be settled from the reporting available — both readings are argued, and this file cannot adjudicate between them with confidence.

Hemedti's territorial position is the least contested gain: with El Fasher's capture, the RSF holds effectively all of Darfur, consolidating control of a region whose gold trade — mined from Dagalo-family-linked operations — continues to reach outside markets regardless of the arms-supply dispute below. Brookings frames both external patron blocs (UAE for the RSF; Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran for the SAF) as gaining a proxy force and regional leverage at a fraction of the cost of direct military involvement — a pattern consistent with how the war has run for nearly three years without either patron bloc having to answer for it directly, and without the African Union's own 2022-2023 mediation effort ever being revisited by either commander. The UAE's own position, however, is a direct dispute of this reading: Emirati official Salem Aljaberi called Amnesty's 2025 arms-supply allegations 'baseless,' saying the weaponry in question 'has been available on the international market for nearly a decade,' and the UAE dismissed Sudan's own genocide lawsuit against it at the International Court of Justice in May 2025. Amnesty's counter-evidence — verified footage of RSF fighters using Chinese-made howitzers of which the UAE was, per SIPRI data, the only confirmed buyer — is itself credible but not a confession. Uncertain, because the arms-supply question sits at the center of a live legal and diplomatic dispute this file cannot resolve, and 'who benefits' from a proxy war is inherently harder to pin down than 'who is fighting' it.

The human toll is the least contested part of this file because multiple independent bodies converge on the same order of magnitude: UN News's January 2026 figures count 33.7 million Sudanese in need of humanitarian assistance — about two-thirds of the population — 20 million requiring health assistance, and 21 million facing acute food insecurity, with nearly 85,000 children treated for severe acute malnutrition in North Darfur alone between January and November 2025, close to one child every six minutes. Amnesty's ground-level account from El Fasher specifically documents the ethnic cleansing of the Zaghawa community — burned homes, blocked returns, 26 documented survivors of sexual violence including girls under 18, and named RSF commanders it holds responsible, including Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris ('Abu Lulu') for verified video of executing captives. Over a third of Sudan's health facilities are non-functional after 201 verified attacks since April 2023, which killed 1,858 people at the facilities themselves. And the response apparatus is losing ground in parallel: WFP has had to cut the number of people it assists from 5 million to 3.5 million against a $646 million funding gap, driven by donor cuts from the US, European nations and Britain — acting director Carl Skau's own words, 'we are falling backwards,' describe an aid effort contracting exactly as the Hormuz-linked fertilizer shock adds a second driver of need. Confirmed, because these figures come from a UN agency, an independent human-rights investigation and an on-the-ground WFP account, none of which disputes the others' order of magnitude.