Paulo Casaca is director of the South Asia Democratic Forum. He is a former Member of the European Parliament, Portuguese National Parliament and Azorean Regional Parliament. He is also a former councilor at the Portuguese Permanent Representation to the European Union and served as a ministerial chief of cabinet (chief of staff) to the Minister for Territorial Planning and Public Works in Portugal.
(Oct. 19, 2026 / JNS)
The global information space has been dominated since 2022 by a succession of major geopolitical crises: Russia’s war on Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and, most recently, the confrontation involving Iran. Each has understandably commanded enormous political and media attention.
Yet one of the world’s most devastating humanitarian catastrophes has remained remarkably easy to overlook: Sudan.
That catastrophe began in April 2023 when war erupted between Sudan’s two most powerful armed factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both had previously participated in the overthrow of President Omar al-Bashir and, later, in the 2021 coup that derailed Sudan’s fragile transition toward civilian government. Their alliance eventually collapsed into a struggle for power that has devastated the country.
Three years later, the scale of the suffering is almost incomprehensible.
Sudan, a country of roughly 50 million people, has been facing the world’s largest displacement crisis since the war began, with more than 14 million people forced to flee their homes. Some 28.9 million people are acutely food insecure, including more than 10 million facing severe or extreme hunger. Famine has been confirmed in parts of the country, while Sudan’s already fragile health system has been shattered by war.
The International Rescue Committee has placed Sudan at the top of its Emergency Watchlist for three consecutive years. The organization’s president, David Miliband, has described the country as suffering both a humanitarian crisis and a crisis of neglect.
That second crisis deserves particular attention.
Sudan’s present war did not emerge out of nowhere. Its roots lie in the failed democratic transition that followed the 2018-19 popular uprising that overthrew al-Bashir’s three-decades-long Islamist-military regime.
The protesters sought more than the removal of one dictator: They wanted to dismantle a political system in which the military and security establishment had accumulated enormous political and economic power, and replace it with civilian government and democratic institutions.
Instead, the revolution was caught between competing centers of military power.
Looking at Sudan’s trajectory today brings to mind Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, a masterful account of the evolution of Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11. Wright’s narrative contains an important chapter on Sudan: Osama bin Laden spent several years in Sudan under the protection of Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamist regime, using the country as a base from which to build networks, businesses, and eventually, a global terrorist organization.
The lesson is not that today’s Sudanese conflict is simply a replay of the 1990s. It is not. It is more uncomfortable: The international community has repeatedly underestimated what can grow out of political collapse, institutional weakness and the empowerment of armed ideological networks. The question today is whether it will make the same mistake again.
Sudan does not have to become another incubator of transnational terrorism to constitute a major international security threat. A country of 50 million people, positioned on the Red Sea and bordering seven states, cannot descend indefinitely into state fragmentation, mass displacement, famine and armed competition without consequences far beyond its borders. The longer the war continues, the greater the risk that Sudan becomes not merely a humanitarian emergency but a permanent regional security crisis.
There is another reason for concern: Sudan’s civil war has taken on a disturbing new dimension with allegations that the SAF has used chemical weapons against RSF positions.
Do not wait for the next disaster to make the present one strategically important.
In April 2025, the United States determined that the Sudanese government had used chemical weapons in 2024 and, in May, announced sanctions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act. Washington also called for international access to evidence and affected sites.
The allegations were further strengthened last October, when Human Rights Watch reported evidence that SAF units had used chlorine as a weapon. Chlorine is a common industrial chemical, but when deliberately released as a toxic gas to injure or kill, it constitutes a chemical weapon. Witnesses described symptoms consistent with chlorine exposure, including breathing difficulties, burning eyes and foaming at the mouth. The alleged attacks occurred in parts of Darfur and Kordofan, areas most severely affected by the war.
The very possibility that chemical weapons may have been used in a conflict already characterized by mass atrocities should be enough to demand serious international investigation, evidence collection and accountability. The international system was built precisely around the principle that certain weapons and certain crimes cannot become normalized through repeated use.
Sudan is a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, whose members have committed never to use chemical weapons under any circumstances. The destruction of all declared chemical-weapons stockpiles was completed in 2023, but the OPCW has repeatedly stressed that the mission is far from over because allegations and documented instances of chemical-weapons use continue to emerge. Any confirmed use would therefore represent not only another grave atrocity in Sudan’s war, but a direct assault on one of the international system’s clearest red lines.
The allegations demand independent investigation, preservation of evidence and accountability. Chemical weapons cannot be allowed to become another item on Sudan’s already crowded list of atrocities.
The war also has a strategic dimension that deserves greater attention: Iran’s involvement. Tehran restored diplomatic relations with Sudan in October 2023 after a seven-year rupture. Since then, Iranian-made drones, including the Mohajer-6, have been supplied to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Independent reporting has documented the military significance of these systems, which helped the army regain territory from the RSF.
Iran’s interest, however, is not limited to providing weapons.
Reports have indicated that Tehran sought access to Port Sudan for a military facility. Sudanese authorities reportedly rejected the proposal, concerned about the reaction of regional and Western powers. But the proposal itself illustrates the strategic value that Iran attaches to Sudan’s Red Sea coastline.
This matters because Sudan sits on one of the world’s most strategically important waterways. The Red Sea is already under pressure from conflict and disruption. An enduring Iranian military presence on Sudan’s coast could potentially add another layer to the security equation stretching from the Persian Gulf through the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal.
Iran’s role should therefore not be reduced to the familiar question of which side it supports in Sudan’s civil war. The more important question is what kind of regional security environment the war is creating.
This is where supporters of either Sudanese military camp should think beyond short-term battlefield calculations. External assistance can help one side gain territory today while simultaneously making a negotiated settlement harder tomorrow and creating strategic vulnerabilities that may outlive the war itself.
The war has a strategic dimension that deserves greater attention: Iran’s involvement.
Sudan’s tragedy is often described as the world’s forgotten war. That description is accurate but incomplete. The deeper problem is not simply that the world has forgotten Sudan. It is that the international community has repeatedly demonstrated that it can recognize a catastrophe without developing the political will to stop it.
There is still time to change that.
A meaningful international strategy would begin with sustained pressure for a ceasefire and humanitarian access; coordinated efforts to cut external arms supplies; serious investigation of alleged chemical-weapons use and other international crimes; stronger diplomatic engagement with regional actors; and, above all, political support for a credible civilian transition. Sudan does not need another declaration of concern. It needs sustained attention, political pressure and a realistic strategy for peace.
The alternative is frighteningly clear: A prolonged war could turn Sudan into a permanently fragmented state, deepen famine and displacement, create new opportunities for extremist and criminal networks, and further destabilize the Red Sea and the wider Horn of Africa.
The world has seen this movie before. In the years preceding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America, warnings were available. They were simply not connected, prioritized or acted upon with sufficient urgency. The lesson of Sudan should therefore be simple: Do not wait for the next disaster to make the present one strategically important.
Sudan’s civilians have already paid an unbearable price. The least the international community can do now is to make sure that their suffering is not rendered invisible and that somewhere beyond the ruins, a light remains visible.