On a late May evening in the barren steppe of Sudan, where the Sahara meets the foothills of a rolling mountain range, Adam Hasan walked through a camp of straw huts and tarps. Moonlight reflected off the still-warm, rust-colored earth. Hasan’s eyes were red and weary.
“They must be coming soon,” he mumbled.
Early in the morning of the previous day, his two eldest sons had set out to gather what little food they could find in the bushes in this desolate region, far from the cities, just before the rainy season: small, almost wooden fruits from a palm tree, and leaves from trees and bushes. It was a 10-hour walk each way.
“If they don’t make it today, it will be the second day without food,” he said.
Just a few weeks earlier, he and his family had fled the capital, Khartoum, some 450 miles away, for the Nuba Mountains in the south. Like him, hundreds of thousands have sought refuge here since Sudan’s brutal civil war began.
Torn by the rivalry between two generals vying for power, much of the country has turned into a battleground, leading to one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. The war, which began in April 2023 as a dispute between the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known by the mononym Hemedti), may have killed up to 150,000, according to the United Nations. An estimated 11 million people have been forced from their homes, making Sudan the world’s largest displacement crisis.
More than 18 million people, equivalent to the population of the Netherlands, are currently at risk of hunger, with more than a quarter at risk of starvation, according to the U.N. With the victims largely ignored by the international community, experts warn that a Sudanese famine could surpass the Ethiopian famine that shocked the world in the 1980s.
Situated in the south of the country, the Nuba Mountains have been known for decades as one of its most perilous regions. For over a decade, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) has waged a bloody war against the Sudanese government, fighting against the oppression of the region’s non-Arab population. In recent years, Sudanese army bombers have repeatedly targeted rebel positions in the mountains, often striking civilians. However, with the outbreak of war last year, the fortunes of the mountains shifted. As SAF and RSF forces were ensnared in their own power struggles, the region became a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Crossing the border unofficially into Sudan from South Sudan, we drove for hours along sandy tracks into the mountains, reaching a region that despite its vastness is merely a corner of Africa’s third-largest country. Yet we were able to witness firsthand the immense impact of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises — and how, if left unaddressed, it could escalate much further.
The road through the mountains led us to a parched steppe. A few weeks before the rainy season, the green of the trees and bushes had faded to a dark, almost barren gray. Women and children in colorful robes walked along the road, balancing buckets of water on their heads. After decades of conflict and tension, the Nuba Mountains remain largely isolated. There is little electricity and no telephone network, and only two major hospitals serve the region’s estimated 2.2 million people. The roads are little more than mountain trails that turn impassable once the rainy season arrives.
Seventeen months into the war, Sudan has fragmented into a tattered patchwork. The RSF now controls areas west of the Nile, including much of Darfur and parts of Khartoum, while the regular Sudanese army has relocated its government to Port Sudan and is concentrated east of the Nile. Millions have been displaced. While most have fled to the east and northwest of the country or to neighboring countries like Chad or Egypt, tens of thousands arrived in the Nuba Mountains within the first weeks of the war alone.
Situated southeast of Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan, Sobouri stands as one of the three largest three refugee camps in the region, hosting approximately 35,000 of the nearly 700,000 registered here since the onset of the war. In the camp, we met Hasan, a 62-year-old day laborer whose face is etched with deep wrinkles. Like most who fled to the mountains, he belongs to the Nuba tribe. Numbering between 1 and 2 million, they are a diverse group of peoples of Black African descent, most of them Muslim or Christian.
Living in an area once located in the center of Sudan, the Nuba have for centuries been based on the geographic fault line between the predominantly Islamic and Arab north and the predominantly Christian and Black African south. During decades of conflict and insecurity, many moved from the mountains to Sudan’s larger cities or Khartoum in search of work or education. Now, as war devastates the country, they are returning to their ancestral lands.
“Whatever comes, we’re not going back,” Hasan said. He and his family have lived here in the refugee camp, just a few miles from the front line between the SAF forces and the Nuba rebels, for several months. Nestled in a small valley surrounded by dry slopes of bare rock, rows of small thatched huts blend into the ocher landscape. Hasan’s children play on a dusty carpet in front of his hut.
“Sometimes, when they’re hungry, I give them water,” he said, “but it doesn’t help.” For weeks, he has watched their bodies turn thinner and thinner.
When RSF fighters began their assault on Sudanese military bases in Khartoum on April 15 last year, Hasan was working on a construction site in a suburb of the capital. Within days, artillery and gunfire blanketed the city, turning it into a charred battlefield. Sudanese military airstrikes later reduced entire streets to rubble as RSF militia members hid among civilians. Originally created by then-dictator Omar al-Bashir as a mounted Arab fighting force to quell insurgents and non-Arab minorities — a successor to the infamous Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s — the militia had turned against its creator, the Sudanese army. RSF fighters swept through the town, looting everything in sight: gold, silver, food and even televisions and refrigerators.
Hasan hid with his family in their small apartment for months, rarely venturing out to get essentials from abandoned supermarkets. He recalls the constant unpredictable danger: neighbors dragged from their homes and shot by militias who suspected them of collaboration, others caught in deadly crossfire on the streets as they navigated the war-torn city.
“We were trapped in our neighborhood,” he said. “It was hell.”
It’s not the first time he has been at war. In the 1980s, Hasan fled the mountains to Khartoum during Sudan’s second civil war. With only a third-grade education, he dreamed of providing his children with a better life. However, as a Nuba, he felt he never truly belonged in Khartoum, where wealth and schools were reserved for the Arab majority. When the current war erupted, violence, particularly from the RSF militias, quickly turned against the non-Arab population.
“If they see you’re Black, they attack you,” he said. Like many others, he decided to take the risk and return home.
The roots of Nuba oppression go back to British rule in the 1950s, when the Nuba were already politically and socially marginalized, with no access to education. When civil war erupted in the 1980s, Nuba people embraced the message of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which advocated for a unified and secular state, turning the mountains into a major rebel stronghold. Following his military coup in the late 1990s, al-Bashir declared a “jihad” against the inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains, calling them “not true Muslims” and justifying attacks on Christians and other religious groups. A massive offensive in the mountains ensued.
The war, which claimed nearly 2 million lives, ended in 2005 with a peace agreement that granted the southern part of the country a referendum on independence. But when new borders were drawn after the war in 2011, with the formation of South Sudan, the Nuba found themselves stranded in what remained of Sudan. For a time, they hoped to negotiate greater autonomy. But when the government reneged on its promise to hold a vaguely defined “popular referendum” and pushed for disarmament, they returned to fighting for their autonomy instead.
After the fall of al-Bashir in 2019, following months of street protests across Sudan, hope for a lasting peace returned to the Nuba Mountains. But this optimism was short-lived: SAF chief al-Burhan and RSF leader Hemedti, who had ruled the country with mafia-like methods for years, delayed the handover of power to a civilian government. Although they agreed to power sharing in 2021, they clashed over merging their armies. More coups followed, culminating in the outbreak of the war last year.
It was an early November morning. SAF warplanes were still thundering over Khartoum as Hasan and his family clung to the back of a battered truck, navigating the shifting front lines. When they reached an RSF checkpoint in El-Obaid, RSF fighters descended on them and stripped them of their last semblance of security — their cherished belongings. Hasan was interrogated for hours, suspected of belonging to the opposing forces, before being released. Days passed as they trudged from the town of Dalang with only the clothes on their backs. Under the veil of night, they finally slipped into the safety of the mountains.
In Sobouri, he built a straw hut for his older children and another for himself, his wife and the youngest. As soon as possible he wants to set up a farm again, moving to his old village a few hours away from the camp.
“This is the first time that nobody can take our land away from us,” he said. “We are finally back in our homeland.”
Yet the hunger persists.
The danger of fighting has passed for Jawhir Ibrahim, but the war’s shadow still looms large. Now, she faces the threat of starvation. We met her a few hundred yards away in the shade of her small straw hut. Her two twins suckled at her breast as she sorted tamarind leaves. After SAF troops clashed with Nuba rebels in her village near Dalang, just 90 miles northeast of Sobouri, her husband, a rebel soldier from the mountains, surrendered to the SAF.
Caught in the fighting, 24-year-old Ibrahim found herself alone with her three older children and newborn twins, Marman and Nistan. Unable to feed her family, she and her mother, holding the twins and their siblings in their arms, desperately made their way across the front line and at night sneaked into the mountains, where the family originally came from.
After months of malnutrition, her twin sons have lost weight and their hair has fallen out. They suffer from diarrhea, she says — a common symptom of malnutrition. One of them is now significantly shorter than the other.
“I don’t have enough breast milk for them both,” she said.
She pointed to a small woody nut that one of her older sons was chewing. The fruit of the doum palm, which is abundant in Sudan, especially around the White Nile where little else grows, has become a lifeline for many people in the mountains. Sometimes, when they gather enough, they make a bitter, sour soup from the leaves or a porridge from the palm nuts. Their last proper meal was months ago.
Every other morning, before dawn, she or her mother gets up and leaves camp for a nine-to-10-hour trek in search of the last trees that still have fruit or leaves. Yet each passing week brings smaller harvests, longer distances to travel to find food and worsening hunger. Aid from local nongovernmental organizations has not arrived for months.
Leaving Sobouri, we drove through the rust-red countryside, past villages built like fortresses out of the mud they sit on, with small straw towers. While the crisis initially affected mainly displaced refugees, it has now spread to the local population. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of people could face starvation in the coming months, according to local aid agencies.
“I have never seen anything like this in my 20 years of experience,” said Faudaf Tutu Kuku, a nutrition specialist we met in a small, crumbling concrete building an hour’s drive from the camp. Trained by the International Red Cross in 2005, shortly after the second civil war ended, he specializes in treating malnutrition and disease stemming from conflict.
The health center is the only medical facility in this part of the mountains. There are no doctors — just a nurse, a caregiver and Kuku, the nutritionist. On a small, crumpled piece of paper, he had recorded the crisis numbers. Malnutrition among children had nearly tripled since last year, he said. He and his colleagues registered nearly 600 cases in the previous two months, nearly 100 of them critical. Fifty children had already died, all under the age of 5.
“Just yesterday we buried a newborn from the neighboring village,” he said.
The rainy season, typically lasting from June until October, signals the onset of the most challenging period of the year, when farmers traditionally plant new crops. This year, however, the combination of last year’s below-average rainfall and a locust infestation has resulted in poor harvests, which are insufficient to feed a population swelled by the influx of refugees. It is a toxic mix of factors, he said. The war has left much of the land uncultivated, nearly doubling in recent months the price of sorghum, the main crop grown in the regions.
Kuku knows how to determine a child’s nutritional status and that hunger usually develops gradually. But there is nothing he can do. A month earlier, his clinic ran out of therapeutic food for children. He can no longer provide electrolyte solutions for diarrhea. For those unable to afford the nearly $5 it costs to travel to the nearest major hospital, a six-hour drive away, hope is fading. He has stopped taking new patients. “It’s already too late,” he said.
According to the Dutch think tank Clingendael, which has been studying the situation in Sudan for decades, critical famine thresholds have been reached in many parts of the country. People are starving as part of a strategy to cut off the enemy’s supplies and resources, with crops burned, aid convoys blocked and seeds looted across the country. Farmers are unable to access their fields because of the violence. By September, nearly 2.5 million people could be at risk of starvation.
However, the United Nations and the international community have long been reluctant to declare an official famine because of a lack of comprehensive data. While the first declaration of famine in the country was made in July in a refugee camp in North Darfur near the town of El-Fasher, much of the country is inaccessible to the U.N. or NGOs, because either it is too dangerous or, as in the Nuba Mountains, al-Burhan’s government denies official access. Nevertheless, few doubt that famine is already ravaging other parts of the country as well.
With many of the main lifelines blocked by fighting between RSF and the army, aid to the Nuba Mountains can be delivered only from neighboring South Sudan — if at all. The government officially denies access, and the road leading to the mountains has never been declared mine-free after decades of conflict. The United Nations and many other aid agencies are reluctant to enter the area. For months, the SPLM-N has been negotiating with the Sudanese government for a peaceful solution and to facilitate aid deliveries to both sides of the front lines. But talks have been slow, the two sides do not trust each other, and tensions have been high for a while. And there is still a risk of renewed military escalation.
As we approached the front line between the rebels and the Sudanese army, charred wreckage littered the roadside every few miles. Burned tanks, howitzers and other military vehicles of the Sudanese army lay scattered across the landscape — remnants of last year’s fighting, when the rebels extended their defenses around the mountains and pushed back the Sudanese army. Troop carriers passed by with armed SPLM-N fighters on the back, some of them teenagers clad in tattered uniforms, carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing flip-flops.
On a small hill an hour’s drive from the Sobouri camp, a group of fighters in tattered uniforms crouched in the shade of a small shelter. This is where the Nuba Mountains begin, and the rebels have dug in. It is their last line of defense. Just a few weeks earlier, the SAF had bombed civilian settlements in the area.
“We have everything under control,” said rebel commander Daoud Khamis, a short, stocky man with a mustache and broad shoulders. He guided us over jagged rocks down to the open steppe. Khamis, 54, wore a light camouflage suit and sneakers. Men armed with Kalashnikovs and machine guns flanked us on both sides. He pointed into the bush, where a few houses could be seen just over a mile away.
“Over there are the SAF forces,” he said.
Following the start of the war between the SAF and the RSF last year, the SPLM-N initially remained neutral. The party, which was founded after South Sudan’s independence in 2011, is committed to an independent, secular Sudan that embraces all ethnic groups, regardless of ethnicity or religion. They are supported by the South Sudanese government, among others. In recent years, the SPLM-N and SAF have alternated in controlling territory. The SAF had air superiority with Russian Antonov planes converted into fighter-bombers, but the SPLM-N fighters had the advantage of knowing the complex terrain of the mountains.
However, alarmed by events in Sudan’s West Darfur and the RSF’s recruitment of militias in South Kordofan, the SPLM-N soon mobilized to exploit its opponents’ weaknesses while they were pinned down on other fronts. The rebels launched attacks on RSF bases and captured SAF outposts near Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan, which had been occupied by the SAF since the conflict with the rebels began in 2011. They seized dozens of tanks and other army vehicles. Besieged by the rebels for months under horrific conditions, Kadugli has become a symbol of the conflict between the government and the rebels over the past year.
On the front line, in the middle of a small settlement in the lowlands, Khamis stopped in front of a blackened, charred hole in the ground. It was caused by a shell from a government Antonov bomber.
“They know our positions and are still targeting civilians,” he said, his words sounding like a well-packaged message to win support. “We drove them out of here to ensure our safety,” he added.
But another pressing question looms large: For months the war has been unraveling, with small militias and vigilante groups on both sides pursuing their own agendas. Various armed factions, including hard-line Islamists and even former pro-democracy protesters, have joined the fray, complicating the path to a political solution. Moreover, the conflict has rekindled along ethnic lines, raising fears of a resurgence of the genocide of Darfur’s non-Arab population. Rather than a clear divide between the RSF and the SAF, the country, already lacking a functioning state, risks fragmenting into a patchwork of contested territories, resembling post-2011 Libya.
The U.N. and the rest of the international community have been desperately trying to broker a cease-fire, with little success. A U.N. call for a cease-fire at the start of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, was ignored by the generals earlier this year. U.N. special envoy Ramtane Lamamra has been jetting to Jeddah, Nairobi and Geneva, trying to kick-start peace talks that have so far failed, largely because outside actors supporting the opposing sides have failed to get on board. Recently the United States and Saudi Arabia have been desperately trying to broker peace talks in Switzerland to take place starting this week, but it remains unclear whether either side will attend.
Meanwhile, Sudan has become a battleground for foreign powers pursuing their opportunistic interests, whether those lie in the country’s gold reserves or its strategic location on the Red Sea. Reports suggest the Sudanese army receives arms support from Egypt and Iran and foreign mercenaries such as the Ukrainian special forces. The RSF, on the other hand, garners support from the United Arab Emirates, Libya and Ethiopia. Russia is also seeking to expand and secure its strategic interests in Sudan, supporting both the SAF and the RSF through the Afrikanski Korpus (formerly known as the Wagner Group).
The Nuba Mountains may hold Sudan’s largest deposits of gold, historically one of the country’s top exports and a key driver of the conflict between the SAF and the RSF. The rebels understand that any reduction in tensions between the main warring parties, whether through peace negotiations or military victory, could open new opportunities. If the RSF were to prevail over the SAF, the rebels in the Nuba Mountains would face a new adversary.
On the small hill, a few feet above the ground, the rebels have installed a Russian-made machine gun they captured from the Sudanese army last year. From this vantage point, the airstrip near Kadugli is visible only a couple of miles away. During negotiations with the SPLM-N, al-Burhan’s government proposed establishing an airlift to bring aid to the region. However, the rebels are wary of such an airlift, as it could also bring new reinforcements and supplies to besieged government troops in the mountainous area, Instead, the rebels emphasize their commitment to allowing humanitarian aid into Sudan through impartial channels established by the U.N.
“As long as the government does not respond to our demands, we will not allow any planes to land here,” Khamis said.
Asked about plans to extend the defensive lines around the mountains and potentially capture Kadukli, he declined to answer, citing restrictions on discussing military strategy. The SPLM-N leaders are cautious about how their control might be portrayed. The primary goal is to protect their own people, he said.
And: “We are ready to counterattack at any time.”
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