Why the War in Sudan is Erased?
*Samuel Hyde
Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com
Just six months before Hamas’s October 7 massacre, violence erupted on April 15, 2023, within Sudan’s military establishment. It was not a coup in the traditional sense, but a descent into fratricide, pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known to the world as Hemedti.
The fighting began in Khartoum, the heart of the state, and soon bled westward into Darfur, where it reawakened the darkest pages of Sudan’s history. Massacres targeting the Masalit people have been underreported, yet described by third party observers as acts of ethnic cleansing. By early 2025, the United States formally declared that the RSF and its allied militias had committed genocide, with non-Arab groups such as the Masalit being the primary victims and intended targets.
The statistics are staggering, but they only hint at the abyss. Nearly 25 million people are now facing extreme hunger, the largest hunger crisis in the world today. Famine conditions have been confirmed in parts of North Darfur. Over 522,000 children are estimated to have died from hunger alone, while the true death toll—including those killed by violence, disease, and forced displacement—remains unquantifiable.
In Khartoum alone, at least 61,000 people have died, with 26,000 killed directly in combat. More than 8.8 millionSudanese have been internally displaced, and over 3.5 million have fled as refugees across borders. The Sudanese Journalists Syndicate documented over 40 war crimes in May 2023 alone. Dozens of journalists were injured or killed. Humanitarian workers were also targeted, with 18 killed and many others detained. No ceasefire has been reached, and the war continues with severe humanitarian consequences and regional implications.
There are wars that apparently pierce the conscience of the world and then there are those that vanish from it entirely. To understand why, we must first understand the nature of the Sudanese catastrophe—and the ideological fault lines it threatens to expose.
Sudan’s war cannot be contorted into potent narratives that amass outrage among the modern inverters of justice, some still call activists. There are no colonial villains. No Zionist specters. No corporations to boycott. It cannot be defined as a battle between “oppressor” and “oppressed”, nor a clean binary of “resistance” and “colonialism”. It is a post-colonial war, an African war, an Arab war, an Islamic war, a war between two brutal factions each claiming legitimacy while operating with impunity. The RSF are historically responsible for unspeakable atrocities: ethnically motivated killings, mass rapes and child conscription. The SAF shells entire neighborhoods into nonexistence. Both the perpetrators and the victims are overwhelmingly Black, Arab, and Muslim. There is no progressive cause to be advanced. No liberal guilt to be cleansed. No poster to be printed in time for Pride Month. And so, the war disappears.
But Sudan’s vanishing is not a fluke. It is the latest chapter in a longer, more damning story—a story about the selective conscience of the postmodern West, and about the ideological ruins we now call progress.
Let us recall: it was in Darfur, two decades ago, that the world first glimpsed the consequences of this selective outrage. Between 2003 and 2005, the Janjaweed militias, backed by Sudan’s Islamist government, waged a genocidal campaign against non-Arab tribes. The world briefly took notice. There were minimal campus protests. There were a few celebrities with “Save Darfur” wristbands. But as soon as the war failed to fit into a neat schema of imperial guilt, interest faded. The perpetrators were not fit for purpose. They were not Americans. They were not Zionists. They were Sudanese Arabs, many of them devout Muslims, and the genocide they waged was not against infidels, but against fellow Muslims deemed insufficiently Arab. That silence is today’s precedent.
In the years that followed, as Sudan inched toward democracy, its struggle was treated not with solidarity but with suspicion—among Western liberals, ironically. Many diplomats and intellectuals viewed Sudanese liberalism with condescension. One can imagine them behind closed doors—though never aloud, asking: Who were these Black and Arab Muslims to speak the language of constitutional democracy and secular law? It was easier, more fashionable, to see the Islamist strongman Omar al-Bashir as an anti-imperialist bulwark than to listen to the dissidents he imprisoned and tortured.
Even after the revolution of 2019—when young Sudanese toppled Bashir through nonviolent protest, waving flags and chanting for freedom—the world yawned. The same Western progressives who exalted Tahrir Square in Egypt, who elevated the Syrian revolution before abandoning it, met Sudan’s democratic movement with indifference, or worse contempt. And when that fragile civilian government was toppled in a coup in 2021, the West barely muttered its regrets and moved on.
Now, the final unraveling has come. And still the world looks away. Why?
The answer, I believe, lies in the identitarian architecture of the age. The Western Left’s moral radar, it seems, is calibrated not to human suffering, but to ideological utility.
And why is Sudan inconvenient to this utility? It is a country whose descent into bloodshed lays bare the complete collapse of the post-colonial dream—a dream birthed in the lecture halls of Paris and the revolutionary fantasies of the global South. It was a dream midwifed by some of the most intellectually bankrupt figures of twentieth-century France— from Foucault to Derrida. Their theories were adopted as moral scripture by a generation of Western academics who came to believe that oppression could only flow in one direction. And now, as Sudan collapses into genocide (again), those same voices are silent. They cannot compute this kind of suffering. It does not conform, nor confirm. The oppression flows the other way. It offers no symbolic redemption.
Moreover, Sudan reveals not only the violence of its warlords, but the failure of an entire political tradition. It reveals the collapse of Arab nationalism into kleptocracy. It reveals the betrayal of Islamist justice, which could only ever by its nature yield tyranny. It reveals the impotence of pan-Africanism and its institutions, the cowardice of global diplomacy, and the moral provincialism of the Western Left.
And yet, within this nightmare, in cities under siege, doctors continue to perform surgeries without anesthetic. Civilians organize food convoys under threat of airstrike. Women, who have borne the brunt of this war, continue to raise their voices against both factions, risking rape and death for the right to speak.
What Sudan demands, then, is not only aid or intervention, but memory. To do so, requires the burial of the lazy pieties of ideological utility. The forgotten or shall I say erased war is not Sudan’s. It is yours, dear Westerner.
*Author Samuel Hyde is a writer and a political researcher, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Hyde works at The Jewish People Policy Institute, previously at The Foundation For Defense of Democracies, Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance and the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre. He is the editor of “We Should All Be Zionists” by former Knesset member Dr. Einat Wilf.
