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The abandoned war: Why no one is stopping the genocide in Sudan
- anovikov 5mo ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoWhat made the Israel-Palestine conflict profitable for influencers (initially on both sides, I’d guess mostly on the pro-Palestinian side now) before the Iran War that doesn’t apply to Sudan?
- thaumasiotes 5mo agoAudience interest? Same thing that makes any other videos profitable.
- testdelacc1 5mo agoThere are large groups of people have very strongly negative opinions about one side or the other in Israel-Palestine. Only a tiny fraction of people in Europe or North America could point to Sudan on the map. And even fewer could explain the differences between the factions involved. There’s no simple good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric that’s easy to join.
- tovej 5mo agoI mean, the RSF is very clearly the bad guys in this conflict. The reason there is no coverage is that there is widespread agreement on this point, and western govts aren't directly funding the bad guys as is the case with Israel.
- Mainan_Tagonist 5mo agowestern governments funding Israel? What western governments exactly? Isn't Israel capable of funding itself through its own economy?
- testdelacc1 5mo agoAmerica hands out military aid to Israel. Coupons that can be redeemed for weapons with American manufacturers. It’s a subsidy to Israel and to American military primes. This comes to billions each year. That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way.
- Mainan_Tagonist 5mo ago"That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way." My point, exactly!
- tovej 5mo agoGermany, Great Britain, Finland, many other European partners. They are purchasing military equipment from Israel, funding their development. Many European institutions also have investments in Israel. And arms used in the Palestinian genocide are being produced in European countries.
- testdelacc1 5mo agoI don’t think that would be the common meaning of funding. Funding doesn’t mean “have a commercial relationship with”.
- tovej 5mo agoIt's not just a commercial relationship, Israel is dependent on US subsidies and European trade to fund its war effort, and Europe has shown itself to be very slow at reacting to the genocide. Effectively Europes stance is funding the genocide. Whether a lawyer would consider this funding is besides the point. I think there are very concrete ways to argue that what Europe does would constitute funding, but I don't particularly care about that semantic argument. The main point is that Europes actions support the genocide.
- anovikov 5mo agoI don't get it, why? RSF fights on Ukrainian side, SAF on Russian since 2024. It's the SAF that's the bad guy now. They flipped.
- throwaway27448 5mo agoHow did you manage to make a civil war in sudan about a european conflict? Neither plays much role at all compared to the gulf states and eritrea/ethiopia.
- harvey9 5mo agoAnother reason there's no coverage is nobody in Sudan has the social media expertise and budget that Iran has.
- boxed 5mo ago[flagged]
- tovej 5mo ago"The IDF doesn't want to kill children", he says.
- sosomoxie 5mo agoThere are thousands of videos of Israel murdering children.
- boxed 5mo agoYou know what happens if an Israeli soldier is caught killing non-combatants? They get prosecuted. You know what happens to a Hamas fighter that is caught killing non-combatants? They get a promotion.
- sosomoxie 5mo agoIsraeli soldiers do nothing but kill civilians. They aren’t prosecuted, genocide is literally the foundation of Israel.
- actionfromafar 5mo agoWell they don’t get caught. Either that or small children are enemy combatants. Russia operates the same way. Everyone is a nazi according to them.
- notabotiswear 5mo agoBoth side are the “bad side.” The RSF just wins the award of being the “worst.”
- two_cents 5mo ago[flagged]
- 4gotunameagain 5mo ago[flagged]
- MisterTea 5mo agoThis reads like a bad parody of the Soviet "west = bad" trope. Big wide brush strokes, painting ALL Europeans as somehow enabling this when it was only a few players and likely no real European peoples made decisions beyond a few powerful people. Buffoonish thinking.
- 4gotunameagain 5mo agoOh I am European, and I (or my country) certainly had zero involvement in the events that are playing out now. But they are not critical of them, not aloud at least. As much as I love Europe, we are complicit to this genocide, and we are hypocrites. We laud European values, but only their theory.
- throwhhjs 5mo ago[flagged]
- DFHippie 5mo agoAfter a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list. France isn't seeking reparations from Italy for the conquest of Gaul, for example.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list I'm actually curious for you to expand on this. It's broadly, I think, my view. And it's been a reason I've come to disregard pretty much all historical claims to land in the Middle East, focussing on the quality of life of the people alive today where they are over where they or their ancestors were at some arbitrary point in the past. But that largely erupts from me drawing my line between the living and the dead. (International lawyers would draw it at the end of WWII.) How do you draw yours?
- MisterTea 5mo agoThe Sudanese population and diaspora hold no great financial or political influence globally so they have no visibility hence, no audience.
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoThe most accurate way to say it indeed
- the_arun 5mo agoWe need to say Sudan has natural resources. Eg Oil. The world turns around
- Symmetry 5mo agoIt does have oil. And the reason the UAE is backing the RSF is that they have gold interests there.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Sudanese population and diaspora hold no great financial or political influence globally so they have no visibility hence, no audience This makes sense. But the Palestinian diaspora is tiny. Did it really kickstart the economics for new content?
- KumaBear 5mo agoWell from a moral perspective our tax dollars are funding the weapons used in the conflict.
- dralley 5mo agoFrom moral perspective, the same entities (UAE, Qatar) who have done the most to raise the profile of the I/P conflict with funds and media campaigns are directly funding and sending weapons to the parties responsible for the genocide in Sudan. Which has much clearer properties of "genocide" than the I/P war, and killed 3 times as many people in the same timeframe despite having far more primitive and less powerful weaponry involved. >> In the first three days of the capture, at least 6,000 killings were documented. 4,400 inside the city. 1,600 more along escape routes. The UN writes explicitly that the actual death toll from the week-long offensive was “undoubtedly significantly higher”. The governor of Darfur spoke of 27,000 killed in the first three days alone. The Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory estimated 100,000. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab assessed that of the 250,000 civilians remaining in the city, nearly all had been killed, died, been displaced, or were in hiding. >> RSF fighters, according to survivor testimony, said things like “Is there anyone Zaghawa here? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur”. Men and boys under 50 were specifically targeted, killed or abducted. Women and girls of the Zaghawa and Fur communities were systematically raped, often in groups, sometimes for hours or days. Those perceived as Arab were often spared.”
- sosomoxie 5mo ago> the same entities (UAE, Qatar) who have done the most to raise the profile of the I/P conflict with funds and media campaigns Israel and its MSM media outlets in the west are the only people “raising the profile” of the colonization of Palestine. Every US politician promotes Israel to the point where they can hardly be said to represent American citizens. That is why people in the west stand against Zionism. It has nothing to do with Qatari boogeymen.
- hollywood_court 5mo agoOur (the US) current leadership is beholden to Israel.
- lostlogin 5mo ago‘Beholden’ might be the wrong work, but Netanyahu sure played this administration. It’s astonishing how easily he got his way. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...
- pmontra 5mo agoIt does not apply. Many vocal Westerners don't find an enemy of their enemy (the USA way to capitalism or to imperialism or pick your -ism) in Sudan so there are no votes to gain, careers to foster, people to gather in protests. "The enemy of my enemy is not my friend but at least is the enemy of my enemy" effect is totally lacking. Who do you protest against? Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran? As a public figure said in my country about the protests for Gaza, "we protest against our government."
- throwaway27448 5mo agoWhere did influencers come from? They didn't perpetrate the indiscriminate slaughter of an entire people. They certainly didn't cause this war. And when has reporting on a genocide ever brought about its conclusion? maybe you could argue this about the bosnian genocide....?
- boxed 5mo ago[flagged]
- ahhhhnoooo 5mo agoRight, it's not constrained to Gaza. The genocide against Palestinian people is occurring across the nation of Israel.
- boxed 5mo agoPalestinian muslim arabs are 20% of Israels population. Remind me how many percent of Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, are Jewish? This is the worst genocide ever. They even have representation in Knesset. They serve in the IDF.
- newspaper1 5mo agoPalestinians,Lebanese and Iranians (of all religions) represent 100% of the victims of Israel’s genocide.
- boxed 5mo agoIsn't that a good thing? Compared to Hamas who murders its own citizens and random christians who are out dancing?
- ahhhhnoooo 5mo agoI can tell you are unable to approach this topic rationally. No one made the claim this is the worse genocide ever. It does not need to rise to that bar to be a genocide. Your hyperbole is not a good faith effort to discuss the topic. And the whataboutism is a deflection. Genocide is bad everywhere it's occurring. Right now it's occurring in many places, one of which is within Israel/Palestine. If you believe it's also happening elsewhere, we should condemn those as well, not absolve the actions of Netanyahu.
- thrance 5mo agoWhat are you even talking about. There was and still is much more money to be made on the pro-Israel side. Which media magnates have ever sided with Palestinians again? Virtually all the propaganda money goes to defending the actions of Israel in the Middle East. And the thing that motivated so much grassroot support for Palestinians was the West's total material and moral support to the Zionist project, while the genocide in Sudan is much more indirectly related to the West.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> There was and still is much more money to be made on the pro-Israel side Has anyone actually measured this? If I were to create two sock-puppet AI-content accounts and let them loose on social media, I'd guess I'd be monetising at a multiple with the pro-Palestinian one. It's just the more-mainstream position in today's media environment across the aisle.
- thrance 5mo agoI really don't want to dive in this rabbithole, but Israel and its allies are very present online and spend obscene amounts of money to buy influencers, politicians and media. The video of Netanyahou repeating "TikTok, TikTok, TikTok" to sponsored influencers in a seminar comes to mind. And now Ellison, a notorious Zionist, straight up bought the platform to align it with his ideas. There is nothing even remotely comparable happening on the other side. Based on platform revenue though, certainly pro-Palestinian content must be generating more organic clicks and views, seeing how this conflict has become a 90-10 issue among liberals. But that's not where the lion share of profits are made. Certainly, if I was a morally bankrupt influencer/politician/journalist, I know which side I'd pick to maximize my income.
- unpopularopp 5mo ago[flagged]
- newspaper1 5mo agoIsrael’s genocide has nothing to do with “influencers” and everything to do with stealing land. The “profit” is Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the whole of Palestine post-Balfour Agreement. Some blue check on Twitter does not register.
- WarmWash 5mo agoAnd you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change. People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, and then walk away. People just revert to the same conditions that led to war in the first place. So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population), for every single bump in the totally mangled war-torn road to recovery. No thanks.
- throwaway27448 5mo agoYou can develop a country without extracting its wealth.
- Drakim 5mo agoCan you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.
- ahhhhnoooo 5mo agoYou two are using different definitions for "can". You are using it in the "is it probable or realistic to expect it" sense and the parent poster is using it in the "is it mechanically possible" sense. I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.) But I also agree it's vanishingly unlikely.
- watwut 5mo agoWhat you described is not "developing the country". It is "colonization and extraction of wealth".
- marvel_boy 5mo ago[flagged]
- bell-cot 5mo agoI'd phrase it as 99% of Westerners feeling that they have no interests at stake. Whether that's literal money, or physical resources (say, rare earth mines), or transportation routes (say, a route out of the Persian Gulf), or meaningful ties to a side in the war (either "I know them" or "they look like somebody I care about" feelings). Plus - talking about Sudan on social media looks like an opportunity to score zero cred, while slowly burning your own relevance.
- Vasbarlog 5mo agoOr because our governments didn’t bankroll the side of the conflict committing the genocide.
- morkalork 5mo agoUAE seems to think it's a good investment
- nielsbot 5mo agoI think it’s the other way around. Colonial powers ARE making money (minerals) so they don’t want it to stop.
- Synaesthesia 5mo agoAfrica sadly just gets ignored. But one day it will unite and develop itself, so I hope anyway.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- y0eswddl 5mo agoMany countries have already begun to claw back their part of the continent from the hands of colonizers. I hope this continues.
- dwa3592 5mo agoThis is heartbreaking. Is there a place where I can donate? Will it help in anyway? Edit: Thank you for your responses. Ended up donating to Doctors without borders. Hope it reaches someone. I was going to say humans are really just wild animals but then i thought that would be a disrespect to wild animals.
- voodooEntity 5mo agoDont wanne be the devils advocate here, but reality is that even if you find something "looking legit" in terms of donation, especially in such regions the most money will be "lost" halfway, and even if some will reach the destination it is more than rare that it will even help to benefit those suffering, and not land in the pockets of a few "in power" or just used to buy more weapons to kill more people..... Yes helping is a good thing, tho reality is its not as "easy" as transfer some money. Tho respecting your good intentions
- jvanderbot 5mo agoThat's overly cynical. Donating to local warlords / psuedogovernment actors can be sketchy. Donating to e.g., UNICEF is much more likely to produce good results for refugees, especially children and mothers. I'm not aware of where to send money to stop wars - it's likely to have the opposite effect, sadly.
- voodooEntity 5mo agoEven donations to organisations such as UNICEF often end up in the wrong hands. Lets go for the optimistic scenario in which UNICEF will only take a very small portion for the "processing" and really deliver lets say food and medical supplies to the region. Those warloard will simply come and take it away from those citizens and provide to their armies. Theres nothing those citizens can do against it. Do i wish it would be different? Absolutely. But sadly the world doesn't work as i would wish it to.
- steinwinde 5mo ago
- goodcanadian 5mo agoI feel like I have seen better analysis of this elsewhere. In a nutshell, it is not simply a civil war. Regional actors are involved as a proxy war: Saudi Arabia against the UAE, for example (who are also having a proxy war in Yemen). And Egypt against Ethiopia. The wikipedia article covers some of the complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80%93present)#Foreign_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80... EDIT: This is what I am thinking of: https://youtu.be/bpH37vGoRJc https://youtu.be/bpH37vGoRJc
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- b450 5mo agoThere is a section of the article covering precisely this, headed "The external actors: arms to both sides"
- goodcanadian 5mo agoIt is not covered in anywhere the same level of detail, in my opinion.
- ResPublica 5mo agoI appreciate your feedback and understand your criticism. I'll be sure to add more detail in future analyses. My main goal was to draw attention to this matter.
- nixon_why69 5mo agoI almost commented before realizing I hadn't RTFA and deleting my draft in shame. Having read it, how are UAE and the Saudis opposing each other in this proxy war while being nearly joined at the hip in their actual neighborhood? Your article was informative and I learned from reading it but this whole dynamic still makes zero sense to me. They don't talk? Maybe it makes zero sense to anyone.
- csense 5mo agoLet's be honest. If someone did send in the troops to restore order, people would be screaming "How dare you invade a sovereign country" or "You're only doing this because you want oil" or "The President wants to make Sudan the 51st state" or "You're wasting money and soldiers' lives messing around in a place most of us can't even put on a map" or "You're just doing whatever the Jews tell you to do."
- LightBug1 5mo ago[flagged]
- nradov 5mo agoWhich international peacekeepers? They have to come from somewhere. How would they be armed? Would they have artillery and air support or small arms only? What would the rules of engagement be?
- LightBug1 5mo agoWhat do you think international peacekeepers means? Where do you think they've come from before? How do you think they've been armed before? What have the rules of engagement in previous peacekeeping missions been? I notice you skipped the piece about pressuring the key players, which is much closer to a solution than what you chose to focus on. Any more questions? Because that seems to be all you have. Pop over to Claude or GPT. I heard it might have some answers.
- nradov 5mo agoWhat a silly, low-effort comment. It's always sad to see that level of arrogant ignorance on HN. There haven't been many examples of international peacekeepers imposing peace by force. In the few cases where peacekeeping missions sort of worked usually the warring parties already had some sort of truce or at least the major fighting had stopped. Where there was no peace to keep, the international peacekeepers have been ineffective. Sometimes they even ended up becoming victims themselves due to restrictive RoE and lack of firepower. The reality is that only the USA and maybe France has the expeditionary military capability including tactical air power necessary to execute a mission like this. No other country is in a position to even try. And I wouldn't want to see American lives wasted trying to impose peace in Sudan.
- cess11 5mo agoOne factor this article skips over is that UAE and the Abraham Accords makes the US reluctant to rein in their buddies. This might change due to the UAE not being very happy about the US dragging them into a regional war.
- ResPublica 5mo agoYou're right, I underweighted that. The Abraham Accords logic sits underneath the whole US posture toward the UAE and I should have named it directly. The piece treats it as part of the "economic interests" frame but that's too abstract. Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included. On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows. Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.
- culi 5mo agoYour comment is heavily downvoted because, especially the first sentence, seems AI generated. Was this comment AI generated? HN is for human discussions
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cess11 5mo ago"But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed" Sure, as I understand it, it is mainly structured around flights and spread out over several logistics lines and already partly shadowed by turned-off transponders and so on. Disturbances at sea are unlikely to affect this. However, there has already been squawks from the UAE about having to turn to the renminbi to clear oil sales and the like. China is not particularly fond of the RSF and has had good relations with the sudanese state since the fifties. Choking the Hormuz is likely to make this relation and stability in Sudan even more important to China. More medium term the UAE now has incentive to go look for partners besides the US and Israel. At the moment they try not to, but this is highly likely to change, especially since money is pouring out eastwards from the emirates and to win it back they would need friends that seem stable in the long term, like they did until their remote and nearby allies started beating on one of their largest neighbours. "the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet" That "yet" does a rather hefty deadlift. The UAE has begged the US to shield them from the ICC but as I understand it, it did not result in a clear and reliable response. Perhaps they count on the US to do for them what they've done for Israel, but since the US put all their efforts into protecting Israel during this latest iranian response and left their other allies in the region to help themselves, I kind of doubt that this can last. Russia has an interest in the gold, but I don't think they care whether it comes to them from the RSF or the state, and they are more dependent on China than the UAE. In a pinch I'd wager they would support stability as long as the gold keeps flowing and China is happy. Edit: Personally I believe the US to be so deficient in short-term memory that they can't manage the relations to other West Asia states than Israel with any form for strategic reliability. They might promise the UAE a dollar swap line, do a press conference about it, and then forget to actually open one, or give it to them and then a few weeks later pull the plug on it because budget reasons or whatever.
- dmix 5mo agoFor context: SAF is backed by Saudis/Qatar/Egypt/Iran/Russia and RSF is backed by UAE/Libya/Ethiopia/Chad/previously Wagner but Russia switched sides. The US and others have pushed for negotiations but the competing interests by the gulf states, russia, and other african countries have complicated things.
- ahhhhnoooo 5mo agoIs anyone stopping any of the genocides around the world? Governments and citizenry are engaged in many attempts to wholly eradicate cultures and minorities. Sometimes fast, like Israel attempting to eradicate Palestinians. Sometimes they are slow, like the barriers put into place against indigenous communities after generations of genocide against them. It's not new either. Sudan, Uyghers, Rohingya, Yazidi, Armenians, Hutus, Tutsi, Bengalis, Cambodians. The world has stood by and not intervened in many of these. Heck, Palantir just posted that they believe some cultures should be eliminated in the United States. It's grim out there.
- yostrovs 5mo ago"The world" cares about some more than others. That's why the plight of the Palestinians is daily on the news, while that of the Yazidis or Druze is not.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoI had compassion for Ukrainians weaponized against me here on this site (you are racist, you only care about white people, etc). Many now days use/express compassion as a weapon/political tool.
- ahhhhnoooo 5mo agoMaybe read better news? I've been hearing about the Yazidi through reporting on the YPJ/YPG since circa 2015. But I think theres multiple factors happening. One is scale. Millions of Palestinians are currently experiencing displacement, bombings, and settler colonialism. Thats a large group of people. Multiple times the size of the Yazidi or Druze populations. There's also the scale of the conflict and the weapons deployed. Israel deployed somewhere around 80,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. Thats more explosives than were deployed in World War 2. Add in evidence of white phosphorus being deployed, and the scale of the devastation is newsworthy. And I think access to communication is different, people care about what they can see. Footage of Gaza is readily available and terrible to behold. Finally, and I'm not pleased about this one, I think many in the west excuse behavior of some countries because they have racist ideas about those countries. Like, many Americans probably expect developing nations to have atrocities, but then look at Israel and go, "I thought this was supposed to be a model democracy! We aren't supposed to do genocide!" (Of course this idea is nonsense, developed countries have done genocide many many times, but I think it does drive news cycles.)
- enrightened 5mo agoIt’s abandoned because the killings are being done by Arab supremacists.
- azinman2 5mo agoIt’s been perplexing to me to see the entire US left and college kids protesting against Gaza, yet no one says a word about Sudan.
- cooloo 5mo agoIf you think hard anyone can find the answer. No one call it genocide, no one call the ongoing war in Syria a genocide. I guess no one care to be blant.