Sudan 2

Trump has pledged to help end the fighting in Sudan. Will it be enough?
Jennifer Hansler | 27 Nov 2025

"... President Donald Trump has pledged to use the “influence of the presidency to bring an immediate halt” to the two-year-old war in Sudan that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates has displaced nearly 12 million people.

... Trump, who has touted himself as a peacemaker, said last week that it was “not on (his) charts to be involved” in ending the war. However, after a personal request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Trump said he would engage on the issue.

“I thought it was just something that was crazy and out of control. But I just see how important that is to you and to a lot of your friends in the room, Sudan, and we’re going to start working on Sudan,” he said at an event alongside the Saudi leader in Washington, DC last Wednesday.

... The US has been working for years alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt as part of what’s known as “the Quad” to try to broker an end to the fighting and establish a path to a democratic transition in Sudan. The efforts by the Trump administration have been led by Special Envoy Massad Boulos, a Trump ally and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law.

... But to date, the White House has stayed out of the negotiations, which changed with Trump’s direct commitment last week and has created some optimism among experts.

Still, a week after his commitment, it is unclear how specifically the president plans to personally use his influence. Diplomatic efforts continue to stall; Sudan’s top general rejected the latest ceasefire proposal this weekend and accused the mediators of bias ..."

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/28/politics/trump-sudan-war-negotiations

Sudan’s protesters built networks to fight a tyrant – today they save lives in a war (The Conversation)

Sudan has a long history of civilian-led resistance, with young people playing a key role. For example, informal neighbourhood networks established in 2013 to survive repression under three decades of authoritarian rule have since transformed into vibrant support systems... The committees represent a unique blend of political and practical action. They serve a dual functionality – mobilising for change while addressing immediate community needs. This underscores the potential of informal, decentralised networks to drive both political and social transformation... The committees’ ability to adapt to new challenges underscores the importance of grassroots networks in both political and humanitarian contexts. The concept of political togetherness, as seen in Sudan, reveals how temporary alliances across class, gender and ethnic divides can create a cohesive force for change...

Investigators say El Fasher massacre death toll comparable to that of entire Gaza war in just three weeks (MSN)

Investigators said the death toll of the El Fasher massacre is much larger than previously estimated, with some saying at least 60,000 have been killed... new investigations suggest the massacre could rank as the single greatest mass killing of the 21st century... If the British government figure is even close to true, the El Fasher massacre would dwarf every other massacre in the 21st century. Some estimates considered the Camp Speicher Massacre in Tikrit, Iraq, by ISIS forces, which had a death toll of between roughly 1,100 and 1,800, to be the previous record holder. The United Nations put the number of civilians killed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, which is considered to be Russia's worst act of brutality of the war in Ukraine, at just 73-178. Another way of contextualizing the scale of the bloodletting is the war in Gaza, the bloodiest round of fighting between Israel and Palestinian terrorists since the latter's war of independence in 1948. Exact casualty figures are hard to find, but the most commonly cited figures are those of the Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas oversees. It claims over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war...

While UAE Backs Sudan Genocide, NBA Cup Should Drop Emirates Sponsorship (Common Dreams)

The NBA’s credibility as a league that stands for justice and fairness is at risk. Will they take actions to break off their connection to a government that is funding and arming some of the worst atrocities in the world?...

The Oil Company Drilled. The Government Slaughtered. Who Is Guilty? (NYT)

At the end of the 1990s, a Swedish company called Lundin Oil started drilling in a war-torn region of what was then Sudan. To secure the drilling sites, the company contracted with the Sudanese government. Over the next several years, the price of oil skyrocketed, and Sudanese government and allied forces displaced, as human rights groups estimate, 160,000 people in the area, bombing and burning their villages. The groups say some 12,000 people were killed. Two former executives of the company, which has since been renamed and reconfigured, are now defendants in the longest criminal trial in Swedish history — it began in September 2023 and is expected to continue through next May. They stand accused of complicity in war crimes. The defendants reject the charge, and the company maintains that there is no legal basis for the prosecution. The company also disputes the casualty figures... It may be the longest criminal trial in Swedish history, and it may be legally novel, but it is a very normal trial of some very normal people. The Nuremberg trials showed us that normal people can commit war crimes for normal reasons, such as wanting to make a profit or to keep their job. What hasn’t been normal is to see them held accountable.

Full disclosure: in November 2025 I gave testimony as a witness in this court case in Stockholm.

“I volunteer because I love my people”: On the ground with Darfur’s mutual aid volunteers

Mutual aid remains at the heart of Sudan’s humanitarian response, and nowhere more so than in the western Darfur region, where the paramilitary-turned-rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has carried out some of the conflict’s worst abuses to date, displacing millions of people. To document these grassroots efforts, Darfuri videographer Alamaldeen Ismail travelled in August 2025 to the border town of Tina, where he met displaced families and members of emergency response rooms – decentralised, neighbourhood-based groups delivering much of the lifesaving local aid...

The gifts I have been given: Survival as a collective act in Sudan

How the kindness of strangers kept a country alive...

Both from the New Humanitarian

Gaza to Sudan: Moral consistency as a colonial alibi (The New Humanitarian)

These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial capitalism, militarism, and abandonment... Against the white gaze’s obsession with comparison, movements for Gaza and Sudan emerge from shared analyses and infrastructures of struggle. These are not competing tragedies but linked sites of racial capitalism, militarism, and abandonment. From London to El Fasher, from Brussels to Goma, from Berlin to Gaza, the same supply chains of weapons, financing, and extraction shape the violence people are resisting. Sudan is not eclipsed by Gaza. Sudan and Gaza illuminate each other. What critics dismiss as selective outrage is, in fact, a refusal of fragmented politics. Solidarity is system-focused: It connects struggles and targets the structures that bind them. Movements grasp what institutions continue to deny: Justice cannot be compartmentalised...

Human Rights Watch Report: Sudan Events of 2025 (HRW)

Conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continued for a third year, with all warring parties committing war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law. The warring parties’ actions made Sudan the worst global humanitarian crisis...

Inside Sudan’s perpetual war (New Statesman)

A very good analysis by Joshua Craze. Full disclosure: I know Joshua personally.

Darfur’s Endless War (The New York Review)

As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province, self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend their homes...

The UAE tries hard to keep its reputation spotless. But with the war in Sudan, how can it? (Guardian)

Outrage is mounting about the Gulf country’s complicity in Sudan’s catastrophic civil war – and it might be starting to hit them where it hurts...

Why Sudan disappeared from global headlines - until the Iran war (Middle East Eye)

There are wars that dominate the global imagination - and others that quietly fall out of it. Sudan has become the latter. For more than three years, Sudan has been living through a catastrophe that would dominate global headlines under different circumstances... None of this is new. What is new is when Sudan suddenly reappears in international headlines - and why. That is exactly what happened in March, when the US Department of State announced plans to designate the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organisation. The justification was explicit: Washington accused the group of receiving support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That moment was revealing. Sudan did not return to global attention because of famine warnings, or because civilians were being killed in markets and displacement camps. It returned because it could be inserted into the larger geopolitical confrontation centred on Iran. This was not a coincidence. It highlighted how attention works. Sudan is not invisible; it is conditionally visible...

Sudan’s War Is Also an Islamist Power Struggle, Activist Warns (i24 News)

The RSF has sought to portray itself as an anti-Islamist force distancing Sudan from the radicalism associated with former president Omar Al Bashir. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), by contrast, have increasingly absorbed Islamist loyalists and allegedly foreign fighters with extremist ideologies into their ranks... the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) over the state is nothing new... Islamist influence extends far beyond the formal armed forces... the violence reflects a broader political project: restoring the Islamist order that dominated Sudan under Bashir. “They want to come back to power and restore what they had during the era of Al Bashir,” he says. Nogoud also argues that Sudan’s Islamists continue to benefit from backing by powerful regional actors...

Thank you for these links about Sudan. There is a lot of competition for the most depressing current news, but I think Sudan is the winner.

Iran war poses new threat to harvests in hunger-stricken Sudan (Reuters)

Summary

- Fuel and fertilizer costs surge due to regional conflict
- Farmers report rising debt, lack of support
- Lawlessness and insecurity plague Kordofan and Darfur
- Hunger has spread in Sudan after three years of war...

US Leaders Know UAE Backs Massacres in Sudan. Stopping Them Would Be Too Costly (truthout)

The Emirates’ promised $1.4 trillion investment in the US appears to be incentivizing Washington to look the other way...