According to a new study, Sudan’s death count in civil war is much higher than previously reported. More than 61,000 deaths in the state of Khartoum, where fighting broke out last year, are reported by the Sudan Research Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Conditions causing preventable diseases and starvation killed most people in Sudan, rather than being directly caused by violence in 26,000 deaths. Cases of atrocities and ethnic cleansing still appear, and the actual scale of deaths, particularly in places like Darfur, could be even higher.
Aid agencies had long sounded the alarm that a situation in Sudan was creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world: widespread famine and millions at risk. The UN and other organizations had previously reported 20,000 confirmed deaths, but systematic data collection is lacking amid the fighting.
In a separate development, Amnesty International argues that France is breaching the UN weapons ban on Sudan because the Rapid Support Forces militia is using its military technology. RSF, fighting against Sudan’s national army, reportedly is using armed vehicles supplied by the United Arab Emirates and fitted with French-made defense systems.
Amnesty called on France on Wednesday to end weapons supplies likely to be used to commit violations of human rights in Sudan, and for the existing United Nations weapons embargo to be extended to all of Sudan, not just Darfur.
The Sudan conflict, which began in April 2023 as a power struggle between General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s RSF and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s army, had been accused of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing, as the death toll and the number of displaced increase in the country.
Famine conditions had been declared in parts of Darfur by August 2024, and the World Health Organization declared the hunger crisis “almost everywhere” in Sudan.
The study of the Sudan Research Group noted that 90% of deaths in Khartoum went unrecorded and assumed this would be the case for other parts of Sudan. However, the researchers have admitted that they do not have sufficient data to precisely identify the total number of deaths throughout Sudan, or even clearly know how many deaths can actually be directly associated with the conflict.
The international community, too caught up with what is happening in one place or another-in Ukraine or in the Middle East-on paid not enough attention to Sudan, although its human cost is naturally catastrophic.
