Image by Ammar Nassir.

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 U.N.’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.

Where Is the Coverage?

Like many people, I’ve spent the years since Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel watching the buildings fall down and bodies pile up in Gaza, even as I kept wishing that the U.S. 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.”

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 

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