Follow a line south and west from the Gaza Strip, continue through Egypt, and you’ll end up in another place where a genocide is in progress. It’s one we don’t hear much about in the United States, probably because it’s happening in an African nation, one of those places Donald Trump refers to as “shithole countries.” (Interestingly, another of the places he included under that designation during his first term in office was El Salvador, which is run by his new BDF—Best Dictator Friend—Nayib Bukele. Nothing like providing access to your national torture center to get you back on Trump’s A-list, I guess.)

The place I’m talking about is the nation directly south of Egypt and across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia: Sudan. It’s big—the 15th-largest country in the world and the third-largest in Africa—with an area a quarter the size of the United States and around 50 million inhabitants. Its name derives from the Arabic for “Land of the Blacks.” The population is 70% Arab, with the remainder being mostly of northern and eastern African descent.

Right now, about 45% of those people, 21.2 million of them, “are facing the highest levels of acute food insecurity,” according to the United Nation’s World Food Program. Famine has been confirmed in at least two Sudanese cities, with 20 other areas on the verge of it. And the situation is only expected to worsen next year, as what food stocks exist dry up and the fighting that has ravaged the country since 2019 continues. At least 12 million people have been displaced. To put that in perspective: Compared to the ongoing genocide two countries to the north, the number of starving people in Sudan is 10 times the entire population of Gaza, while the number of displaced Sudanese is almost six times that number.

In addition to presenting the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, I suspect the situation in Sudan holds an important warning for the movement opposing Donald Trump in this country. But more on that later.

Like many people, I’ve spent the years since Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel watching the buildings fall down and bodies pile up in Gaza, even as I kept wishing that the US media would do a better job of describing what was happening there. In the spring of 2024, while American college students risked expulsion and deportation to raise hell about the genocide already underway in Gaza, the New York Times told its journalists to look the other way, as the Intercept reported, restricting the use of terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” and even “Palestine.”

If the media were slow to acknowledge an unfolding genocide in Gaza, they have given far less coverage to the one developing in Sudan.

By December 2024, the Times was doing better. It covered Amnesty International’s 296-page report accusing Israel of “carrying out genocide in Gaza,” despite, in the story’s first sentence, reporting that the accusation had drawn “a rebuke from Israeli officials who denied the claim.” Unfortunately, that story appeared not on the front page of its print edition, but on page eight. By July 2025, the paper was no longer afraid to use the “G” word or run a string of stories and op-eds, including coverage of the UN’s determination that Israel “was committing genocide against Palestinians.”

All in all, however, the major US media were slow to recognize the horror unfolding in Gaza. Even now, their coverage of Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s “peace” plan remains disturbingly credulous.

But if the media were slow to acknowledge an unfolding genocide in Gaza, they have given far less coverage to the one developing in Sudan. An important exception is the work of the Times’s chief African correspondent Declan Walsh who, along with Times staffers, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for his work on Sudan. Too bad so many of his articles initially appeared not on the front page but inside the paper’s print edition.

A civil war has raged in Sudan since shortly after a massive, nonviolent popular uprising dislodged Omar al-Bashir, the country’s longtime autocratic ruler, in 2019. The final push to unseat him came from his own security forces. A group of military officers then formed a Transitional Military Council, which initially agreed to establish a transitional government together with organizations like the Sudanese Professionals Association and an umbrella civil society group known as the Forces of Freedom and Change. An executive council and prime minister were sworn in. In October 2019, the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy observed that, “[d]espite these positive developments, doubts remain about the future of the transition.”

Those doubts would prove prescient. Soon after that article appeared, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) overthrew the nascent government and established military rule. Then, in April 2023, an old split in the Sudanese military erupted into open warfare, as a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) turned their weapons on the SAF. Fighting initially developed in and around the capital city of Khartoum, in the center of the country. The SAF eventually drove the RSF out of Khartoum and the conflict moved to the region known as Darfur, the westernmost part of the country, where the RSF had deep roots.

The RSF emerged from the Janjaweed, one of the groups responsible for a genocidal campaign in Darfur between 2003 and 2005. The roots of that genocide, in turn, lay in one of humanity’s most enduring conflicts: the one between nomadic herders and settled farmers, in this case exacerbated by a drought brought on, at least in part, by climate change. The Janjaweed supported the Arab herders against the farmers, who are primarily Black Africans.

The conflict over land use between farmers and herders is an ancient one. Those familiar with the biblical book of Genesis will recognize it in the story of the struggle between the first two sons of Adam and Eve—Cain, a farmer, who killed his shepherd brother, Abel. That tale reflects a tragic struggle rooted in deeply contested scarce resources that would have been as familiar to its original fifth century Middle Eastern readers as it is to 21st-century Sudanese.

The civil war now devouring the people of Sudan is also a struggle between two men who were once allies in Sudan’s short-lived military government, with the entire country as their casualty. They are the RSF’s commander Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo Musa, known as Hemedti, and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the SAF. The two of them had worked well together in the government of al-Bashir but fell out over how to integrate Hemedti’s RSF into the Sudanese military.

Having lost Khartoum for 18 months, the RSF besieged the Darfurian city of el-Fasher, surrounding it with an earthen berm, effectively walling in and starving its inhabitants. In October 2025, they finally made their way into the city, massacring civilians (including “500........

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