As Sudan enters its third year of brutal civil war, the scale of destruction, displacement, and human suffering has reached catastrophic levels. The country, once a key political and geographic player in northeast Africa, now stands shattered by the ongoing power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). What began as an internal conflict for control has morphed into one of the world’s most devastating humanitarian emergencies – with implications that extend far beyond Sudan’s borders.

Sudan today is virtually unrecognizable. The capital, Khartoum, once a bustling hub of commerce, culture, and administration, lies in ruins. Government buildings, hospitals, schools, and marketplaces have been reduced to rubble. Infrastructure across the country has been bombed, looted, or left to decay. Roads are impassable, power grids have failed, and water systems have been deliberately sabotaged. Entire towns are depopulated, and those who remain must survive without basic services, often relying on untreated surface water and makeshift shelters.

Luca Renda, the UN Development Programme representative in Sudan, recently described scenes in Khartoum as “massive destruction of infrastructure, no access to water, no electricity and, of course, a lot of contamination of unexploded ordnance.” This is not simply war damage – this is the annihilation of a state’s functionality.

The collapse of Sudan’s physical and institutional framework has created a vacuum in which governance is impossible. Warlords, militias, and criminal networks thrive in the chaos, and civilians are increasingly at the mercy of whichever armed group controls their area on any given day.

The human cost of the war is staggering. More than 13 million people have been internally displaced, making Sudan the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis. An additional 3 million have fled to neighboring countries like Chad, South Sudan, and Ethiopia –........

© Blitz