It was a pleasure to welcome Khalid Sidahmed (Middle East and North Africa Solidarity Campaign), Dr Sarah Richard Hassan (General Secretary of the Sudan Doctors Union’s UK Branch) and Dr Yasser Abdelhafeez (Vice President of the Sudan Doctors Union’s UK Branch) to our Gloucestershire village in February to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
The speakers gave a passionate and moving presentation covering the Darfur genocide of 2003-2005, the 2018 revolution, the current violence, and its impact on health care. Their testimony, like others we have heard, shows how ineffective our political establishment and the international community have been in honouring the promise of ‘never again’, as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity continue to be perpetrated and largely go unpunished.
Background and historical context
Khalid and then Sarah began by giving their perspective on the post-colonial history of Sudan. After Sudan gained independence from Britain in 1956, British colonial rule continued to shape its class structure and institutions, laying the groundwork for today’s crisis with weak institutions, a bureaucracy stifling democracy, and dependence on the military. Successive regimes maintained and deepened this status quo to secure control over the country’s wealth of mineral resources and agricultural land.
There have been four major revolutions: in 1924, 1964, 1985, and 2018. Sudan has seen 17 attempted military coups, the largest number of any African nation. While not all of them succeeded, Sudan has spent 57 years under military rule.
Darfur and the genocide 2003-2005
From 1983 to 2005, Sudan was devastated by a second civil war between the north and the south. The government in Khartoum, under General Omar al-Bashir, pursued a centralised, Islamised political agenda that was resisted by southern communities who were ethnically, religiously, and politically marginalised.
In 2003, rebel groups in Darfur, in western Sudan, attacked government installations, demanding political and economic reforms. Instead of offering talks, the government responded with annihilation. President al-Bashir armed and mobilised Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, from which the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) later emerged. A brutal pattern emerged of aerial bombardment by Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), followed by scorched-earth campaigns on the ground. Villages were burnt down, wells poisoned, livestock stolen, men killed, and women raped, with the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities in Darfur deliberately targeted.
During Khalid’s emotional account of the violence, many images were shown of death and destruction, but the most shocking were the drawings by schoolchildren depicting the horrors they had witnessed. Abd al-Rahman, whose picture is included in the Human Rights Watch collection Smallest Witnesses: The Crisis in Darfur Through Children’s Eyes and appears as this article’s main image, describes his illustration:
“I am herding the sheep in Wadi. Suddenly I see the Janjaweed militia coming – they are approaching fast on horses and camels and have Kalashnikovs. They are shooting and shouting ‘Kill the slaves, kill the blacks.’ They killed many men. They chased the children and took some of them away. We never saw them again. Then the planes came and bombarded our village.”
A Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005, but by then over 300,000 people were dead and over two million displaced.
In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, but accountability stalled; the president remained in power, and the violence continued.
South Sudan became independent in 2011, but the militarised power structures in Sudan remained. The Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa continued to be marginalised, with 2.7 million still in camps. This was not recovery but prolonged vulnerability, leaving them prey to a repeated cycle of violence.
Revolution, resources, and renewed conflict
Following the mass protests and strikes that began in 2018 by workers, unions, students, and women, al-Bashir was deposed in 2019, and a power-sharing transitional government was formed between the two military factions – the SAF and RSF – and the civilian forces, under pressure from Western and regional powers.
Prior to division, Sudan was the largest country in Africa, but with limited infrastructure, communication across the nation was difficult, and civil society struggled to find a political direction. Workers turned inward to look after their own short-term interests.
Sudan is immensely rich in natural resources, yet that wealth is largely extracted rather than benefiting its people. It holds major deposits of chromite, iron ore, uranium, copper, and other minerals, and is Africa’s fifth-largest gold producer, though over 80% of its gold is smuggled out, and the ninth-largest oil producer.
It also ranks among the top 20 countries globally for agricultural land, producing around 80% of the world’s gum arabic and, in 2022, the world’s largest supply of sesame seeds. Much of this production, however, is geared towards external interests, particularly those of the Gulf states.
Khalid argued that the result is a stark contradiction: vast wealth alongside deep crisis, driven by exploitation and external control.
While the Sudanese masses forced the removal of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the core of the regime was never dismantled. The military apparatus – the SAF, the RSF, and the old regime’s shadow networks – remained intact and regrouped to carry out a counter-revolution, tightening their grip over Sudan’s wealth and state power.
Civil war and counter-revolution
By April 2023, former allies turned on each other. The SAF and RSF took up arms in a brutal struggle for control. The consequences have been catastrophic: over 15 million displaced, hundreds of thousands killed, and the destruction of vital infrastructure, production, education, and healthcare.
In Darfur, mass atrocities have returned – ethnic killings, siege warfare, starvation, and systematic attacks on civilians. The United Nations has described Sudan as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in modern history.
Food, medicine, communications, and even women’s bodies are weaponised to break resistance. Kidnapping, rape, and murder are routine instruments of terror. Children are forcibly recruited or orphaned, while an entire generation is denied education, healthcare, and basic safety. Revolutionary forces, trade unionists, and activists are among the main targets of both sides.
Much of the media presents this as a simple conflict between two sides. That narrative is false. Both factions are fighting to control Sudan’s wealth and resources, to preserve a system that excludes and subjugates the majority. No matter who wins, the Sudanese people lose.
Khalid described in detail some of the crimes committed by both the SAF and the RSF, as well as the vast wealth each has accumulated over years of control over Sudan’s economy. Outside the formal economy, over 86% is tied to SAF-linked networks, alongside the RSF’s sprawling financial empire, such as control over major gold extraction networks, including Jabal Amir – a “gold mountain”. Khalid argues that both operate as shadow economies embedded within the state, and that there is no fundamental difference between them: both are militias, both are criminal entities, and neither represents a viable option for the Sudanese people. He characterises the war as counter-revolutionary in nature, waged by rival militias and fuelled by regional and global imperialist powers.
As Khalid explained:
“Destruction is sustained by the supply of arms. If both sides had only used the weapons they had started with, the destruction would have been much less. The arms are provided by regional and imperialist powers.”
The real enemy, Khalid believes, is not just one faction or another, but a system – capitalism in its imperialist form – driven by a neoliberal elite and the ambitions of regional and global powers.
A health system under attack
Sarah and Yasser then talked about how healthcare in Sudan is not merely struggling but is being dismantled.
The World Health Organisation has verified hundreds of attacks on facilities and personnel since April 2023. Hospitals have been bombed, clinics looted, ambulances attacked, and health workers detained, threatened, and killed. On 28 October 2025, more than 460 patients and their companions were reportedly killed at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher amid RSF attacks on the city.
When healthcare collapses in conflict, mortality rises quietly but relentlessly as:
- women die in childbirth because there is no safe facility;
- children die of dehydration because oral rehydration salts are unavailable;
- trauma patients bleed to death without surgery;
- diabetic patients die without insulin;
- patients with kidney disease die with no access to dialysis machines.
It is difficult to get aid into Sudan due to active fighting, restricted access, destroyed infrastructure, fuel shortages, communication blackouts, and other security threats; yet the Sudanese Doctors Union (UK Branch) manages to deliver healthcare support across Sudan, particularly through emergency response rooms and local medical personnel. Their union is calling for:
- an immediate and sustained ceasefire in Sudan;
- coordinated diplomatic pressure on all parties to end hostilities;
- enforcement of international humanitarian law;
- protection of civilians and healthcare facilities;
- unhindered humanitarian access to Darfur;
- full funding of humanitarian appeal;
- targeted sanctions and accountability measures against those responsible for atrocities.
Why Sudan is being ignored
It is shocking that, looking back to share what led to the genocide in 2003-2005, we find that the genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are still being inflicted on the Sudanese people today, with healthcare professionals appealing for help in what may be the single largest humanitarian catastrophe ever.
Perhaps even more shocking though, is the lack of coverage that this atrocity receives in our media, as the world stands by watching imperialism at its worst while two forces fight to oppress the Sudanese people and steal their resources.
I am hugely grateful to Khalid, Sarah, and Yasser for visiting Kingswood to share this with us. For more information about the situation in Sudan and how to help, read MENA Solidarity’s pamphlet Sudan’s Revolutionary and Popular Movements: a research report, and use the following link to support the humanitarian work of the Sudan Doctors Union
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