Updated April 15, 2026 at 4:50 AM MDT
LAGOS, Nigeria — A year ago, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, was an eerie ghost town of battered storefronts, homes and buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. Now, steady traffic threads through lively streets.
Government institutions have returned from the temporary war-time capital, Port Sudan. The airport has reopened. And the United Nations says hundreds of thousands of people — among millions displaced — have come back over the past year.
It has been three years since fighting erupted in the capital of Sudan, devastating what was once one of Africa's major urban centers, then spreading across the country. Today in Khartoum, there are signs of a slow revival, but it remains a shadow of its former self.
State services like electricity and running water are still scarce. Schools, hospitals and mosques are only gradually being repaired but much of the city remains heavily damaged. And despite the relative calm in the Army-run capital region, the threat of violence from a rising number of drone strikes across the country hangs over millions working to rebuild their lives.
But in many areas beyond the capital region, even a fragile peace is out of reach, and the grip of the war is tightening. The fighting between the Sudanese army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and its former ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, is far from over.
What began as a power struggle between the army and the powerful paramilitary force — former allies in a coup that removed a civilian government — has spiraled into a devastating war. Now entering its fourth year, it has become the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe.
The scale of the crisis is staggering. Nearly 14 million people have been displaced, according to the U.N. Millions more face severe hunger and famine. Some estimates suggest as many as 400,000 people have died.
A deepening catastrophe
Outside Khartoum, the picture is far bleaker.
Entire communities have been uprooted. Millions are now living in makeshift camps, their lives fractured by displacement and uncertainty.
"Here you can see the sorrow, here you can see the hunger," says Mohammed Tijani, who works with the aid organization Care in Darfur, in Sudan's western region.
In this vast, remote part of the country, hundreds of thousands are now facing famine, according to the U.N., as the impact of war deepens.
Today's fighting in Darfur echoes the traumas of its recent history. Brutal ethnic violence erupted there in 2003, when the government deployed the Janjaweed Arab militia - the precursor to today's RSF - to crush an uprising by non-Arab groups, killing hundreds of thousands in what the U.N. called a genocide.
Now, the specter of genocide and famine haunts the region once again.
Tijani describes scenes of extreme suffering in hospitals. "I met a woman in Nyala who told me she would rather die than see her child crying for food," he says. "Another said she buried two of her children because of hunger."
Many boys and men have been killed in the fighting —soldiers and civilians alike. The women and girls who survive the fighting frequently face brutal sexual violence. According to a recent report by MSF, French for Doctors Without Borders, rape and sexual abuse has become endemic, committed by the RSF.
"In the street, they search you," said a teenage girl living in a displacement camp run by Plan International, an NGO operating in Darfur.
"They search your whole body, and they humiliate the girls."
NPR has withheld her identity for her safety. She fled El Fasher, the historic capital of North Darfur. The city endured an 18-month siege by RSF forces before falling last year. Tens of thousands were killed in violence that the United Nations says bore the hallmarks of genocide.
The teenager recalls harrowing abuse.
"One girl was tied to a tree for three days in front of us," she says. "Our friend was raped and couldn't speak."
After fleeing with other women, she says they were stopped by RSF fighters along a desert road.
"They raped the two girls I was with in front of me," she says. "Then they whipped all of us. Only then did they let us go."
A war expanding — largely unchecked
According to the conflict monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, the first three months of this year saw more civilians killed in drone strikes than at any previous point in the war.
The frontline has now shifted to central Kordofan in the heart of the country, and continues to draw in outside countries. The United Arab Emirates, a key US ally, has been widely accused of backing the RSF, while Egypt and Saudi Arabia are seen as more closely aligned with the Sudanese army.
These competing alliances have intensified the conflict, complicated international efforts to end it, and raised fears of a widening regional war, as the violence spills across borders into already weakened neighboring states such as Chad, the Central African Republic, Libya, and South Sudan.
But the conflict is now casting longer shadows, with growing indications that new external military actors are becoming involved, according to Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab.
"The recent report by our team shows evidence that the government of Ethiopia has been providing military assistance to the Rapid Support Forces," Raymond says. Ethiopia denies the allegations.
Raymond says human rights investigators repeatedly believed atrocities would force action, and the world to pay attention.
"Since the war started, war crimes investigators like myself kept thinking when the El Geneina massacre occurred, when the El Fasher massacre occurred, that all that was required for concerted international action was just one more massacre."
For Raymond, the pattern has become clearer over time. "Now as we reach the third year, the state of the war in Sudan has become a mirror that reflects back the world's inaction."
This week Denise Brown, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, said the war was not a forgotten crisis but an abandoned one, with little coordinated effort to pressure both sides and stop the continued atrocities.
Yet for Sudanese like Mohammed Tijani in Darfur, who have already endured three years of war, the consequences are stark.
"It's the first time for me to understand what it means to be humiliated and broken, powerless."
Copyright 2026 NPR
