Fleeing Sudan’s War: Refugees Detail Three Years of Trauma

[John Ashworth]

Fleeing Sudan’s War: Refugees Detail Three Years of Trauma

Jehanne Henry
Just Security
April 16, 2026

“We left because there was no food and because the dam [the
paramilitary Rapid Support Forces] came to loot and beat us,” Aida, a
30-something mother of eight, told me earlier this month, days after
she arrived at a refugee camp in South Sudan from Kadugli, the capital
of Southern Kordofan state in Sudan.

Kadugli had been under siege by the RSF for two years, and when
supplies ran so low she could not feed the children, they set off on
foot and begged a free ride on a tractor to cross into South Sudan,
where they made their way to a U.N.-managed refugee transit center.
Not only did they lack food and supplies, Aida said, there was a
constant threat of drones — in February, a drone hit her neighbor’s
house and killed nine people instantly and RSF drone strikes in
Dilling, a nearby city that was also under RSF siege, increased this
year.

Aida told me her story in a brisk, matter-of-fact voice, but when I
asked for her children’s names, her tone changed. She fell silent and
tears began to roll down her cheeks. She used a corner of her faded
taub [traditional dress] to wipe them away. After a while, she
recounted how she lost track of three of her children — two boys and a
girl. She worried most about the youngest, an 8-year-old boy, and
hoped he was with one of the other two, a 17-year-old girl and a
21-year-old young man, or with her husband, but she wasn’t sure if her
husband was alive or dead either.

Aida’s anguish is not unique. This week marks the grim third
anniversary of the start of Sudan’s brutal war, when the Sudanese
Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)
started fighting in the capital Khartoum on April 15, 2023. In many
respects, little has changed since last year’s morbid anniversary. The
country is roughly divided, with SAF controlling the northern and
eastern parts along the Red Sea, and the RSF controlling the western
and southern zones from Chad to South Sudan.

Litany of Violations

Since war started, the belligerents and their allied militias have
ravaged the country. They have destroyed infrastructure, schools, and
hospitals, and severed telecommunications. They have subjected
communities to starvation — famine has been declared in several
locations — and subjected civilians to a litany of abuses that the
U.N. and rights groups have documented extensively: from extrajudicial
killings and torture to rape and displacement. Both sides are using
drones and weapons purchased on the open market — including from the
U.K. and the United Arab Emirates — to target civilians in blatant
disregard of the laws of war.

Neither side seems interested in a ceasefire or a political solution.
They are fighting each other in the southern regions of Kordofan and
Blue Nile, imposing humanitarian blockades in key towns, and
engineering drone strikes that kill dozens at a time at weddings and
hospitals. Given these conditions, it’s no wonder thousands flee each
week across borders, arriving in South Sudan and elsewhere. According
to the U.N.’s refugee agency, more than 4 million are refugees in
neighboring states.

As war enters its fourth year, it is tempting to take stock of the
destruction — to describe it with ever higher numbers in hopes of
spurring the world to action. But there is little reliable data to
help. Within months of the war starting, Sudan was already the world’s
largest displacement crisis. Since 2024, U.N. officials have been
calling it the largest humanitarian crisis. Others have described it
as the world’s most severe crisis for women and girls.

An Incalculable Toll

But beyond these superlatives, the world’s understanding of the
effects of this conflict is impressionistic. For example, we don’t
have an accurate death toll. By one estimate, 400,000 may have been
killed. Previously, a health study found 60,000 were killed in
Khartoum state in the first 14 months alone, and U.N. sanctions
monitors estimated as many as 15,000 were killed in the RSF’s attack
on El Geneina in West Darfur in 2023, in assaults that “may amount to
war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Between 6,000 and 60,000 were
killed in the RSF’s violent takeover of El Fasher in October 2025,with
more than 150,000 missing.

No one seems to know how many people are languishing in detention
sites run by either of the warring sides or their allies, while
authorities deny access to prison monitors. In January 2026, Sudan’s
army commander Abdel Fatah al-Burhan released 400 women accused of
being RSF collaborators from a prison in Omdurman, and in April Human
Rights Watch called on SAF to release scores of others arbitrarily
detained. The RSF released more than 200 from a prison in South Darfur
in March, but reportedly continues to tolerate, abet, or carry out
kidnappings for ransom.

And we don’t know how many men, women and children like Aida’s
8-year-old have gone missing. In careful interviews to document this
phenomenon for The Reckoning Project, I heard many stories similar to
Aida’s, often told tearfully by women and men whose loved ones went
missing, might (or might not) be dead, and whose fates were unknown.
The accounts I have heard since the start of the war suggest it is a
widespread problem. The International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) says it has recorded 11,000 people missing. It tries to help
families trace and call their lost family members, but many Sudanese
have lost their phones and don’t have access to networks.

Haja, a woman from South Darfur, told me a brother was killed in an
explosion and she doesn’t know if her two teen-age sons, who were with
him, are alive or dead. Kuku, an elderly man who fled his village in
Kordofan after a drone strike, said his family scattered and he
doesn’t know where they are or if they will ever reunite. “I leave it
to God,” he said.

Anwar, a doctor from West Darfur, told me RSF soldiers came looking
for him when he wasn’t home, beat up his wife and abducted twin baby
boys; he believes they were killed but never saw their bodies.

Too Little International Action

What is certain is that wherever the war goes, suffering follows. Yet
the international community has done far too little diplomatically or
through sanctions and other pressures to curb the violence. The El
Geneina massacres in Darfur in 2023 formed the basis for the U.S.
Secretary of State’s determination in January 2025 that the RSF and
associated militias had committed genocide, and the U.N. reported in
February 2026 that RSF’s attacks on civilians in El Fasher, also in
Darfur, bore the “hallmarks” of genocide.

Yet the world’s most powerful states have, quite simply, failed to
uphold their agreed obligations to prevent and punish genocide under
the widely ratified Genocide Convention. They have failed to stop
malign actors like the UAE from supporting the RSF, or to sanction
more rigorously the Sudanese who bankroll the violence.

In addition to working more assiduously to create incentives for the
warring parties to end their fighting and their atrocities,
governments must emphasize justice and accountability as integral to
any peace deal, support the International Criminal Court’s
investigations into crimes in Darfur and expand its jurisdiction to
cover all of Sudan. They should not only meet the dire humanitarian
needs, but also work document crimes, collect evidence, and preserve
testimonies. When all else fails, the least the world can do is help
Sudanese prepare for a time when cooler heads prevail.

https://www.justsecurity.org/136456/sudan-war-refugees-trauma/

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