David Remnick: Your news feed is undoubtedly filled with the crises in Los Angeles and Washington. From abroad, it's likely filled with stories from the Middle East and Ukraine, but the civil war in Sudan, which the State Department has called a genocide, receives relatively little attention. Recently, the New Yorker published a brilliant report from Sudan by a longtime contributor, Nicholas Niarchos. The civil war pits the Sudanese army against a militia group controlled by a billionaire general.

The groups were formerly allies, but now they occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group's territory and committing atrocities against civilians, atrocities that are directed in particular against members of Sudan's Black ethnic groups. At least 9,000 civilians have been killed in the last two years. Over 5 million people have been displaced. That's all according to Human Rights Watch. I want to mention that our story today addresses widespread sexual violence carried out by soldiers and may not be appropriate for some listeners.

Our writer, Nicholas Niarchos, did his reporting from a refugee camp deep in Sudan's Nuba Mountains. Nick, the war in Sudan is something that has not been covered nearly enough. You did a remarkable piece in the New Yorker, and you were recently there. How did you get there, and what did you see?

Nicholas Niarchos: I joined up with a Human Rights Watch team and flew to South Sudan. Then we took trucks for five days through rebel territory, crossing the border into the Nuba Mountains. This was a very, very muddy part of the rainy season, and many of the roads were flooded. They had this remarkable way of attaching tractors to trucks and then dragging them out of the mud. You had this metal bark that had been welded together in the market. Then you'd always have a tractor with you, and they would basically rev the tractor until it just jerked you out of the mud. It was incredibly unpleasant, but actually quite effective, if fairly slow.

Essentially, we were traveling for days and days in this way. We arrived at the Al Hilu camp in an area that, on first impressions, looks incredibly beautiful. You see these mountains. It's essentially dry grassland with these peaks looming above you. They're peaks that are very significant to the Nuba people because they're peaks that have sheltered them for generations. They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains.

Then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled, and you start seeing the fear in the faces of young mothers who have brought their babies in suitcases, essentially, and had their babies sitting outside in cribs that have been improvised out of suitcases.

David Remnick: Let's start with the basics. This is a very complicated conflict. Tell me what's at stake, who's fighting whom, and what are the perils?

Nicholas Niarchos: The conflict in Sudan started in April of 2023 in earnest, when a paramilitary faction called the Rapid Support Forces-

David Remnick: The RSF.

Nicholas Niarchos: -started to try and take power in Khartoum through coup d'état. They attacked the presidential palace and the airport, and then began this very, very violent campaign in the countryside. The army fought back against the RSF. This has basically led to a fragmentation of the country, and a whole bunch of local militias have essentially become empowered and have been given weapons by different actors. The conflict has devolved into what the State Department has called genocide.

David Remnick: What led up to the RSF attack that began this conflict in the first place?

Nicholas Niarchos: The war started really as a clash of personalities. The dictator, Omar al-Bashir, had been deposed in 2019. There had been this transitional government, this moment of great hope for Sudan, which is a country that has been through three civil wars. It's been through dictatorship after dictatorship. The army decided that they were going to take power, and they concentrated their power in the figure of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a former military intelligence officer who had worked in West Darfur during some of the worst days of the genocide.

Also, another very, very popular general, one news report called him a star of the new militarism, was Mohamed Dagalo. He is known as Hemedti, which means little Muhammad. He essentially started life as a camel herder and then took part in the war in Darfur, and took part in, really, some of the most shocking examples of the genocide. He rose through the ranks of the Sudanese army and was used as a tool during the 2010s by both the UAE and the Sudanese army to quell dissent at home and to fight the war in Yemen.

He, at the same time as doing this, solidified his own wealth. He basically used his militia to take over gold mining areas. He used his militia to seize control of important supply routes, and he became a billionaire.

David Remnick: The leaders of the warring parties are both from Sudan's dominant Arab ethnic group. They actually worked together to take down the former dictator. What made them turn on each other?

Nicholas Niarchos: This was a situation in which you had this one very powerful, very rich person coming to Khartoum, and you had the army taking power. You could see that developing into a situation in which they both decide to share power, or they both decide to rule together, but of course, that's not what happens. There's this great animosity that develops between both Burhan, the general at the head of the army, and Hemedti, who's the general at the head of the RSF. As one official who has been involved in peace talks in Sudan told me, it was basically as if Hemedti, despite his wealth, despite his power, he was not allowed into the country club.

There was this deep resentment that built up, and he thought, "Look, I'm better than you," and decided to try and seize power.

David Remnick: How is Sudan divided up ethnically and in terms of language, in terms of race, and in terms of politics?

Nicholas Niarchos: Sudan is an Arabic-speaking country. It is a country that has a majority of Arabs, but you have this Black population in the south and in the west in a region called Darfur and in a region called Kordofan. Those populations are treated as second-class citizens or worse by the supremacist Arab populations.

David Remnick: In your piece in the New Yorker, Nick, you focused on a couple whom you met by the name of Wanis and Intisar, as well as their children. The family made an extremely dangerous journey through the war zone to the Nuba Mountains, where you met them.

Nicholas Niarchos: Wanis had actually been a courier and a baggage handler at the airport in Khartoum. He was a simple guy, but also a pillar of his community and was known as somebody who would help out in this very, very poor community of Nuba African, and these are black-skinned African populations who live in various parts of Sudan, but they're originally from this area called the Nuba Mountains. These people were living in a suburb of Khartoum, which was taken by the RSF, by this paramilitary group. They saw people that they knew, their neighbors, and people who looked like them, a lot of Nuba people being targeted specifically for their race.

They saw, for example, people being shot in the market. They heard stories about rapes that had taken place. Wanis decided to get his family out of Khartoum. On the other side, as well, the Sudanese armed forces fighting back against the paramilitary group would often indiscriminately shell their neighborhood or fire mortar rounds into their street, and so on.

David Remnick: In a sense, their story is one of the oldest stories in war anywhere, is the displacement. You see this in Gaza, you see this in Ukraine, and you're obviously seeing it at extraordinary levels in Sudan. At one point, the RSF has stopped them over and over again, and in one instance, Wanis is threatened after telling the RSF soldiers where they're headed. Let's listen to him here.

Wanis: [Arabic language]

Translator: He told me, "Why are you going there?"

Wanis: [Arabic language]

Translator: Most people migrate to Egypt, other countries, and why you are going there?

Wanis: [Arabic language]

Translator: I told him, "This is my land. If I die, I can die in my land."

Wanis: [Arabic language]

Translator: He told him that, "If you go to Nuba Mountains, we will reach you there."

Wanis: [Arabic language]

Translator: "You Nubian, we're supposed to kill you like dogs."

David Remnick: If they go to the Nuba Mountains, they'll be killed like dogs. How many people are in that kind of circumstance in Sudan today?

Nicholas Niarchos: There are about a million people who fled to the Nuba mountains, and there are tens of millions more people who are desperately malnourished, but the Nuba Mountains is particularly complicated because you just have this huge influx of refugees, especially Black Southern Sudanese refugees who had come to Khartoum to make a better life and then were targeted for their ethnicity by these invading forces.

David Remnick: One of the things that you were hearing a lot about was stories of sexual violence. Why does the RSF, the militias, abuse the civilian population in that way, and what's being done about it?

Nicholas Niarchos: I actually spoke to a Sudanese civil society activist. She said that essentially rape was used as a way of rewarding troops. Then this supremacist ideology, which has existed in Sudan for a long time, comes into play as well. There's this sense that these people are almost subhuman. I think that there's this very, very toxic mix of both supremacist ideology and a culture of giving spoils to troops in lieu of paying them, because these militias are often very poor themselves. Everybody had a story about either they were raped or that they knew people who had been raped or they had seen people raped in front of them.

I spoke to a man from Darfur named John who had seen his mother raped by multiple men from the RSF in front of him.

John: [Arabic language].

Translator: They brought me, and they asked me, "Are you a soldier?" I told them no.

John: [Arabic language].

Translator: They told me, "Whom do you have here?" I told them, "I have my mother here."

John: [Arabic language].

Translator: They brought my mother in front of me and they raped her because they want to see how I react if I am a soldier. Maybe I will bring guns or something like that.

John: [Arabic language].

Translator: I just kept quiet, and they were raping her.

John: [Arabic language].

Translator: My mother advised me, told me, "My son, be patient. As these things happen to us or to me, you need to be patient, because if you are not patient, they will kill you, too."

David Remnick: "God, be patient, because they'll kill you, too." It's appalling to hear. There doesn't seem to be anyone to defend them from these atrocities. Have any other countries attempted to step in and try to stop the killing?

Nicholas Niarchos: The US, especially under the Biden administration, has tried to support a peace process, and the State Department continues to try and do so, but it has been fairly futile because the Sudanese armed forces don't really want to negotiate. Neither do the RSF.

David Remnick: What about something like sanctions on countries that are bankrolling the RSF?

Nicholas Niarchos: The day that the US puts sanctions on the UAE or on Saudi Arabia is the day that this conflict will probably change, but I don't see that coming.

David Remnick: We know what's happened to US foreign aid under the Trump administration, and there's been DOGE cuts that have nearly obliterated USAID. What's been the impact of that on the people in Sudan?

Nicholas Niarchos: At the beginning, there was a lot of chaos, and the ambassadors to Sudan had to reaffirm that, because of the gravity of the situation, USAID to Sudan would not be cut. However, there are many organizations, local organizations, which were sponsored through grants, and those organizations, which are often frontline soup kitchens and things like this, did have their funding cut. Therefore, there's a great deal of effect on the situation and people are not getting food in the way that they used to. The way they used to was not particularly sufficient either.

David Remnick: What would it take to end this conflict? Do you see any sign of a resolution in Sudan?

Nicholas Niarchos: I was speaking to a US official in Washington the other day, and he was saying that he thinks it's a fight to the death, basically. It's this rivalry, they hate each other, and that is going to be the end to the conflict. One of them is going to die. I think that Sudan is really, really on its own.

David Remnick: It sounds like we're going to see a great deal more bloodshed and suffering, misery, and hunger in Sudan for some time to come.

Nicholas Niarchos: Unfortunately, I think that's what we're going to see. I think that there's there has been this idea of, and this was something that the Human Rights Watch team that I went with was very pro, this idea of putting in a UN peacekeeping mission. UN peacekeeping missions have a mixed history, but they're certainly not liked by the Trump administration. The idea of a peacekeeping mission would be to keep the warring parties away from one another, but the question is, would that just freeze the conflict and put it off to another day, or would that seriously resolve some of the deep differences between the different warring groups?

David Remnick: History shows that it tends to do the former, not the latter.

Nicholas Niarchos: That is true, but if it staves off the genocidal violence, perhaps there might be a more pressing short-term need for it.

David Remnick: Nicholas Niarchos, thanks for your reporting. It's always good to see you.

Nicholas Niarchos: Thank you very much, David.

David Remnick: Nicholas Niarchos has been reporting from Sudan. You can read Escape from Khartoum, which is focused on Wanis and Intisar's journey to the Nuba Mountains at newyorker.com.

[music]

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.