The city of Khartoum was once called the place where the two Niles meet — the Blue Nile rushing cool and turbulent from the Ethiopian highlands, the White Nile drifting grey and steady from the lakes of equatorial Africa. For centuries, their confluence gave Sudan its identity: a crossroads of cultures, faiths, trade routes, and peoples, a place where Arab and African traditions braided themselves into something singular. Today, Khartoum bears different distinctions. It has been an urban battlefield, a ghost city pockmarked by artillery, and — as of early 2025 — a city slowly, painfully clawing itself back from the void. The two generals whose quarrel ignited the war did not choose this symbolism, but it is apt nonetheless. Sudan remains, in the most literal sense, a nation at the confluence of forces too large and too interested to leave it alone.

When fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known universally as Hemedti — the international community reacted with the weary alarm of a world already processing Ukraine, Gaza, and a dozen other emergencies. Two years on, the war has metastasised into what the International Rescue Committee identifies as the largest humanitarian crisis on the planet by sheer volume of human need. Over 33.7 million people — two-thirds of Sudan's population — require humanitarian support. Some 14 million have been displaced, more than at any point in Sudan's troubled modern history. An estimated 150,000 to 400,000 people have died, depending on the methodology of counting.

Yet Sudan remains what one American analyst, writing in Foreign Affairs, called a crisis of the periphery — catastrophic in scale, minimal in primetime coverage, inadequate in funding, and grotesquely under-served by the diplomatic architecture supposedly designed to prevent exactly this kind of collapse. This longread is an attempt to hold the gaze, to understand not merely the military map of the conflict but its technological dimensions, its cultural consequences, its devastating toll on mental health, and the fragile, irreplaceable role that music and art have played in keeping a people's soul intact.

To understand 2023, one must understand 2019. When the long, brutalising reign of Omar al-Bashir — himself an ICC-indicted war criminal — finally collapsed under the weight of street protests and military calculation, Sudan experienced a moment of extraordinary possibility. A transitional government, civilian and military in uneasy tandem, was charged with shepherding the country toward democratic elections. The Sudanese Professionals Association, which had coordinated the uprising with remarkable discipline, embodied the aspirations of a generation that had known nothing but authoritarian misrule. The world, briefly, paid attention and applauded.

That promise was snuffed out in October 2021, when al-Burhan and Hemedti staged a coup, dissolving the civilian government, arresting its leaders, and reasserting military primacy. International condemnation was swift but ultimately toothless. The United States suspended aid. The African Union suspended Sudan's membership. But neither the SAF nor the RSF blinked. The real confrontation was deferred, not resolved. The question of how — and when — the RSF's formidable paramilitary force would be integrated into the national army, and who would command the resulting structure, became the pressure point around which all subsequent history pivoted.

The RSF itself has a genealogy that should have prompted greater international vigilance. Its roots lie in the Janjaweed militias — the horse-mounted killers who carried out the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, in which an estimated 300,000 people perished and 2.5 million were displaced. Bashir rebranded and re-armed them as the RSF, installing Hemedti as their commander. By 2023, the RSF had evolved into a highly capable paramilitary force with its own economic base — built substantially on Sudan's gold fields — its own foreign relationships, and its own territorial ambitions. When Burhan moved toward integration timelines that would have effectively subordinated the RSF to SAF command, Hemedti calculated, correctly, that acquiescence meant political death. He chose war instead.

The conflict has moved in distinct phases. In the first months — April through December 2023 — the RSF seized the initiative with terrifying speed. Khartoum, the capital that was supposed to be the SAF's natural stronghold, fell largely to RSF control. Fighting spread rapidly to Darfur, where the RSF and allied Arab militias began a campaign of mass atrocity against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities that echoed, with devastating precision, the Janjaweed massacres of twenty years prior. The assassination of West Darfur's governor, Khamis Abakar, in June 2023 — executed almost certainly by RSF-aligned forces — removed the most vocal African official documenting the killings in real time.

By late 2023, the RSF controlled most of Darfur, most of Khartoum, and had advanced deep into Kordofan and Gezira state, Sudan's agricultural heartland. The seizure of Wad Madani, Gezira's capital, in December 2023 was particularly devastating: it disrupted food production across a region that had traditionally fed much of the country and triggered a new wave of displacement. Famine — actual, clinically-defined famine — was declared in parts of Darfur by mid-2024, the first such declaration in Sudan in decades.

The SAF's fortunes began to reverse in the latter half of 2024. A coordinated offensive around greater Khartoum caught RSF forces off-guard, and by January 2025, the army had retaken Omdurman, expelled the RSF from the vital oil refinery north of the capital, and lifted the siege of Obeid in North Kordofan. On March 26, 2025 — almost exactly two years after the war began — Burhan announced the recapture of Khartoum proper. The images of soldiers in what remained of the capital were striking: buildings gutted, streets empty of everything but rubble and memory.

The front line has since shifted to central Kordofan, where neither side has been able to deliver a decisive blow. Meanwhile, the RSF — denied a quick military victory — moved in February 2025 to formalise a political alternative, gathering in Nairobi to sign a charter for a parallel government premised on secularism, decentralisation, and democracy. That an organisation credibly accused of genocide should announce its commitment to democratic governance would be darkly comic were the stakes not so catastrophic.

Sudan's war would not have reached its current scale without the active participation of foreign powers pursuing interests that have little to do with Sudanese welfare. The conflict has become, in important respects, a proxy arena — and the willingness of external actors to supply weapons, funding, and political cover has consistently outpaced the international community's ability or desire to impose costs.

The United Arab Emirates has emerged as the most consequential external actor supporting the RSF. American officials confirmed that the UAE used an airport in Chad to funnel weapons and drone components to RSF positions in Darfur, sometimes using humanitarian-aid delivery as cover. The UAE's motivations are multiple: strategic competition with Egypt (which backs the SAF), access to Sudanese gold, and a broader regional agenda that favours strong-man politics over civilian democratic transitions. The UAE has denied all allegations. The denials have satisfied almost nobody with access to the intelligence.

Egypt has provided the SAF with weapons and diplomatic support, driven partly by the deep personal relationship between Burhan and Egypt's President el-Sisi and partly by Cairo's alarm at the prospect of an RSF-aligned government on its southern border. Russia has been playing both sides with characteristic cynicism: Wagner Group assets supplied surface-to-air missiles to the RSF in 2023, while Moscow subsequently offered to support the SAF in exchange for a naval base on Sudan's Red Sea coast — a basing arrangement that would give Russia a strategic foothold in one of the world's most critical maritime choke points.

The regional spillover is already under way. Chad — itself fragile — has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees, straining its own capacity and social fabric. The Central African Republic, Libya, and South Sudan have all been touched by the conflict's tremors. An Amnesty International briefing in June 2024 documented weapons from China, Russia, Turkey, Yemen, the UAE, and Serbia flowing into Sudan in significant quantities. Both sides have deployed Chinese-manufactured drones, drone jammers, and anti-material rifles. The battlefield of Sudan has become a showroom for arms merchants unconstrained by the moral weight of the carnage their products enable.

At Zack Technology LLC, we cover technology not as an abstraction but as a force that shapes human experience in the most concrete terms. Nowhere in the world today does the politics of connectivity carry higher stakes than in Sudan. The weaponisation of internet shutdowns has been a defining feature of this war — and it speaks to a troubling global trend that demands far more attention from technologists, policymakers, and civil society than it has received.

Sudan's relationship with internet shutdowns predates the current conflict. The first major recorded blackout occurred in 2013, when the Bashir government cut access amid Arab Spring-era protests. A 68-day shutdown in December 2018, a 37-day blackout during the June 2019 Khartoum massacre — when over 100 civilians were killed by security forces — and a 25-day disruption following the 2021 coup each demonstrated how consistently Sudanese authorities reached for the kill switch as a tool of political control.

The current conflict has introduced a disturbing innovation: both sides now weaponise connectivity against each other's civilian populations. In February 2024, RSF forces seized data centres operated by Sudan's three major telecoms — Zain, MTN, and Sudani — cutting off internet services for approximately 14 million users. The Cloudflare Radar data was unambiguous: complete outages of MTN Sudan and Sudatel registered beginning at 4:15 PM local time on February 2, 2024. The RSF apparently initiated the blackout in retaliation for earlier SAF-directed disruptions in Darfur. What neither side acknowledged was that the people bearing the consequences were civilians with no stake in the generals' quarrel.

The human cost of these shutdowns extends far beyond the inconvenience they might represent in a stable, wealthy society. Bankak, Sudan's dominant e-banking application, became a lifeline when the conflict rendered cash-based transactions dangerous or impossible. When the app went offline, millions were, in the words of one advocacy group, "stranded and starving" — unable to access remittances from relatives abroad, unable to purchase food or medicine, unable to confirm that loved ones in conflict zones were still alive. Sudan has also been cut off from remote work, education platforms, and, critically, the ability of journalists and human rights investigators to document atrocities in real time.

Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet service, has emerged as a critical — if ethically complicated — workaround. Satellite connectivity is not officially authorised in Sudan, but its use has surged in RSF-controlled zones and among humanitarian organisations operating in areas where terrestrial networks have been destroyed. The late 2023 TPRA ban on importing satellite internet devices without explicit permission was widely understood as an attempt to choke off this alternative. In November 2025, a two-day nationwide Starlink blackout was reported amid intensified fighting in Kordofan and El Fasher — demonstrating that even satellite connectivity remains vulnerable to deliberate interference.

Perhaps most insidiously, the digital sphere has become a sophisticated arena for information warfare. The RSF has run coordinated Arabic-language social media campaigns deploying hashtags such as #الجيش_يقتل_المدنيين (The Army Kills Civilians) alongside English-language tags like #HumanitarianAid, crafting parallel narratives for domestic and international audiences simultaneously. The SAF has countered with its own propaganda apparatus. In a conflict where humanitarian access is systematically denied, the information environment becomes both weapon and casualty. Truth is among the first displaced persons of every modern war — and Sudan's war has been no exception.

The diplomatic record on Sudan is a chronicle of good intentions and catastrophic outcomes. It is a record that should trouble anyone who believes in the capacity of multilateral institutions to prevent or end mass atrocities — and it should prompt serious reflection on the structural reasons why that capacity has so consistently failed in this case.

The Jeddah process, co-hosted by the United States and Saudi Arabia in May 2023, produced the Jeddah Declaration — a document in which both the SAF and RSF committed to maintaining Sudan's unity, respecting international humanitarian law, and protecting civilians. They have not adhered to it in any meaningful sense. The process collapsed in late 2023, criticised for excluding civilian Sudanese actors and for failing to impose any mechanism of accountability or consequence on parties who violated their commitments. The failure was predictable. Both generals had calculated that time favoured them militarily, and that signing paper agreements cost nothing while buying international patience.

Subsequent attempts — the ALPS Group, co-hosted by Switzerland and Saudi Arabia with African Union and UN participation, launched in 2024 — have similarly stalled. The problem is structural as much as procedural: both the SAF and the RSF have external backers who profit from the war's continuation, either through gold extraction, weapons sales, or strategic positioning, and who have little incentive to push seriously for peace. The UAE's arming of the RSF and Egypt's support for the SAF create precisely the conditions under which both sides can sustain military campaigns indefinitely, making any diplomatic timeline essentially advisory.

In November 2025, the RSF agreed in principle to a humanitarian ceasefire proposal advanced by the United States. The SAF rejected it, arguing that the RSF's ongoing genocidal campaigns in Darfur disqualified it as a negotiating partner. There is a grim logic to both positions that diplomatic optimism cannot easily dissolve. Sudan's Transitional Sovereignty Council, which governs in the SAF-controlled areas, suspended its membership in IGAD — the Horn of Africa regional bloc — in 2024, after IGAD reached out to RSF leader Hemedti. The government also imposed severe restrictions on media access inside Sudan, ensuring that its own version of events faced minimal journalistic challenge.

What responsible diplomacy would look like — from the perspective of those committed to civilian protection and long-term democratic transition — involves several elements the international community has so far failed to deliver: a genuine arms embargo with enforcement teeth, targeted sanctions on the individuals and networks financing the war, the inclusion of Sudanese civil society in any negotiation framework, and sustained funding for the humanitarian response. The 2025 Regional Refugee Response Plan faces a crippling funding shortfall. U.S. aid cuts have deepened the crisis, forcing organisations to scale back essential services to refugees in South Sudan and Chad. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the international community, occupied with competing crises and influenced by the UAE's considerable diplomatic weight, has chosen to manage Sudan's catastrophe rather than end it.

Numbers, even the most staggering ones, can become anaesthetic. The 33.7 million in need of aid is an abstraction until it becomes a face: a woman in a Chadian refugee camp nursing a child whose eyes are already glazed by acute malnutrition; a doctor in El Fasher performing surgery by torchlight as airstrikes rattle the windows of a hospital that has been attacked three times and rebuilt twice; a software engineer from Khartoum — once middle class, once employed — now sleeping in an Egyptian church hall with his family of six, his degree certificates on his phone and his savings exhausted.

Famine has been declared in several areas of Sudan, making this the worst hunger crisis the country has faced in a generation. More than half of children under five in North Darfur's Um Baru locality have been found to be acutely malnourished, according to a 2025 UNICEF nutrition survey. The conflict has systematically destroyed Sudan's agricultural capacity: the RSF's advance through Gezira state in 2023–24 disrupted farming across Sudan's breadbasket at precisely the moment when domestic food production was most needed. Heavy floods in 2024 further damaged critical infrastructure, including the Arba'at dam in Red Sea state, leaving over 500,000 people without reliable clean water access and triggering cholera outbreaks.

Sexual violence has been deployed as a weapon of war with a systematic quality that mirrors the RSF's Janjaweed antecedents. The UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission documented large-scale rape used as a tactic to terrorise families in Darfur and southeast Gezira state. In April 2024, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield highlighted evidence of sexual violence against girls as young as fourteen by RSF fighters. On July 11, 2025, the ICC formally reported to the UN Security Council that war crimes and crimes against humanity were actively being committed in Darfur — a statement of the obvious to everyone who had been paying attention, but one that carries legal and political weight nonetheless.

Child soldiers have been recruited by both sides, adding another layer of intergenerational trauma to a conflict already devastating to the young. The Sudanese government has restricted humanitarian access in ways that have directly cost lives — organisations like the International Rescue Committee found it extremely difficult to reach those in need in El Fasher and other contested areas. Aid groups have called the humanitarian response "too slow, too timid, and dangerously inadequate." They are right.

At Zack Technology LLC, mental health is not a sidebar — it is a core editorial commitment. We believe that a conversation about the Sudan crisis that omits its psychological dimensions is a fundamentally incomplete one. War's visible wounds are photographable. Its invisible ones — the PTSD that will follow a generation of Sudanese children into adulthood, the depression gripping mothers separated from their families, the grief that can find no ritual container because the funerals have not been held and the dead have not been named — these travel without passport and arrive in every refugee camp, every diaspora community, every family scattered across borders.

Research on refugee mental health consistently finds elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and — in the most severe cases — psychosis among displaced populations. The World Health Organisation confirms that exposure to conflict, displacement, and prolonged uncertainty are among the most potent drivers of mental health deterioration. For Sudanese refugees specifically, the compounding factors are severe: many fled with hours of notice, leaving behind the professional and social networks that give life its architecture; they arrived in host countries — Chad, Egypt, South Sudan — that lack the resources to provide adequate mental health services; and they face the particular anguish of not knowing whether people they love are alive.

Stigma compounds the challenge. In much of Sudan, as across much of the region, mental health conditions are not understood as medical issues requiring clinical intervention. Approximately 71% of people in Sudan experiencing psychosis first seek traditional or spiritual healing rather than biomedical care — a pattern that reflects both cultural context and the absence of accessible mental health infrastructure. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), one of the few organisations providing mental health services in the region, delivered over 9,600 mental health consultations in South Sudan in the first half of 2024 alone, serving communities swelled by Sudanese refugee arrivals. Even so, MSF's own assessment is that these efforts represent a fraction of documented need.

The mental health crisis is not confined to those who have fled. Those who remain inside Sudan — trapped in besieged cities, sheltering in basements, moving between displacement sites — live in a condition of sustained, unresolvable stress that is itself a form of slow violence. The neuroscience of chronic trauma is unambiguous: prolonged exposure to threat erodes cognitive function, damages the developing brains of children, and makes the construction of any stable future psychologically precarious. Sudan will, if and when peace returns, need a mental health reconstruction alongside every other form of rebuilding.

It is at this intersection of trauma, displacement, and the irrepressible human need for meaning that music enters the story of Sudan — not as a footnote to the analysis, but as one of its most vital chapters. Zack Technology LLC is, at its core, a media organisation that takes electronic music seriously as a cultural and therapeutic force. The story of what music has meant to Sudanese refugees and displaced people over the past three years is one of the most moving dimensions of an otherwise almost unrelievedly dark crisis.

In Cairo, where over 419,000 Sudanese have sought refuge, the Sudanese Camirata troupe has been performing traditional Sudanese music and dance for refugee audiences who are frequently moved to tears. The troupe uses the tanbour, a traditional stringed instrument, in combination with nuggara drums and the wooden xylophone-like banimbo. Dafallah el-Hag, the group's founder, describes how the combination of these instruments promotes "forgiveness and togetherness among the Sudanese people." For Hadia Moussa, a refugee in the audience at one October 2024 performance, the melody evoked the Nuba Mountains her family once called home: "Performances like this help people mentally affected by the war. It reminds us of the Sudanese folklore and our culture."

Research supports what performers and audiences know instinctively. The documentary God Grew Tired of Us — which follows the Lost Boys of Sudan through their journey to Kakuma refugee camp and eventually to the United States — documented how music and dance provided moments of genuine psychological relief even in conditions of extreme deprivation. Studies at refugee settlements across East Africa have found that structured music participation reduces symptoms of depression, hyperactivity, and anxiety in displaced children. At the Bidibidi refugee settlement in Uganda — the world's second largest — a brass music programme contributed to a dramatic reduction in suicide attempts, from over 160 cases in one year to fewer than 40 the following year.

Music therapy, as practised in clinical settings with trained therapists, has demonstrated efficacy for populations experiencing trauma, PTSD, and grief. For refugees who are linguistically isolated, or whose trauma is pre-verbal in its origins, music offers a path to emotional processing that bypasses the barriers of language and cultural translation. Sudanese musical traditions — rooted in polyrhythmic percussion, call-and-response vocals, and the intricate melismatic phrasing of Nile Valley Arab musical culture — are themselves rich resources for therapeutic practice. The loss of instruments, performance spaces, and musical communities in the violence of war is therefore not merely a cultural tragedy but a public health one.

As the DJ and producer behind JETLAG RADIO, I have come to understand music not merely as entertainment but as emotional architecture — a way of building, in sound, the spaces that displacement destroys. The Sudanese Camirata's Kawthar Osman, who has been singing with the band since 1997, said that war "pushed the band to sing more for peace." That is not sentiment. It is a survival strategy, and it works.

In 2001, Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down brought the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu to global audiences. The film — graphic, kinetic, technically brilliant — was praised for its visceral honesty about the chaos and cost of combat. It was also criticised, with some justice, for flattening its Somali characters into an undifferentiated mass of threat. What survives the film's imperfections, however, is a single piece of dialogue that has stayed with me as a meditation on why bearing witness to war matters — and on the gap between those who have lived it and those who observe it from safety.

Hoot's words speak to the irreducibility of lived experience — the unbridgeable gap between those who have been inside a catastrophe and those who have only observed it. For Sudanese civilians who have endured three years of war, the frustration of that gap is immense. They know something the world's news cycles, think-tank analyses, and diplomatic communiqués cannot fully convey. They know what it means to hear the specific sound of a specific artillery shell at a specific hour of a specific morning and understand immediately whether to run or shelter. They know what it means to count the days since a child last had a full meal. They know what it means to perform a wedding ceremony in a displacement camp because life does not pause for catastrophe, and joy insists on its own expression even in the rubble.

The ethical obligation of those of us writing about Sudan from a position of safety is therefore one of radical humility. We can inform. We can analyse. We can advocate. We cannot claim to fully understand. But we can commit to not looking away — which is, in the end, the most basic form of solidarity available to those of us outside the conflict.

From the perspective of Zack Technology LLC: we see our role not as neutral observers but as engaged advocates for peace, accountability, and the dignity of civilian life. Our left-leaning editorial commitment means we are unambiguous about whose interests the international community has consistently prioritised over those of Sudanese civilians — and we call that out without hedging.

Wars are sustained not merely by ideology or ethnic animus but by economics — and Sudan's war is no exception. The conflict has a remarkably well-defined financial infrastructure that benefits powerful actors both inside and outside Sudan's borders, and understanding it is essential to understanding why the war has been so difficult to end.

The RSF's economic foundation rests substantially on Sudan's artisanal gold sector. Sudan is Africa's third-largest gold producer, and the RSF — through companies affiliated with Hemedti and his family — controls a significant portion of the country's gold mining and processing capacity. This gold moves, primarily, through the UAE: multiple investigations have documented the flow of Sudanese gold to Dubai refineries, where it is refined and traded on global markets without meaningful scrutiny of its provenance. Russia, too, has reportedly benefited from Sudanese gold, with exports helping to partially offset sanctions related to its invasion of Ukraine — an arrangement that gives Moscow a concrete financial incentive to prolong the conflict.

The SAF's economic base has historically included oil revenues and the national banking system, both of which have been severely disrupted by the conflict. Sudan and South Sudan share oil infrastructure — most of Sudan's oil is extracted in what is now South Sudan, but transported through Sudanese pipelines to Port Sudan for export. The war has disrupted these logistics and frightened investors, accelerating Sudan's already severe economic deterioration. The Sudanese pound had lost enormous value even before April 2023; the conflict has rendered Sudan's formal economy essentially non-functional in large parts of the country.

If there is a force that carries a realistic prospect of Sudan's eventual reconstruction, it resides in part with the Sudanese diaspora — a community dispersed across North America, Europe, the Gulf states, and East Africa, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and distinguished by its educational attainment, its political engagement, and its fierce attachment to a homeland it has been forced to leave.

The diaspora has been the primary engine of international advocacy for Sudan since April 2023. Sudanese-Americans lobbied Congress for the State Department's January 2025 genocide determination. Sudanese-Britons organised demonstrations outside the UAE Embassy in London. Sudanese professionals in Europe have maintained encrypted communication networks with colleagues inside Sudan, transmitting evidence of atrocities to human rights organisations and international legal bodies. In the digital activism space, the diaspora has run some of the most effective English-language campaigns directed at Western policymakers, bridging the gap between Sudanese lived experience and the international political discourse that ultimately determines whether aid is funded and sanctions are imposed.

Remittances from the diaspora have also become a critical economic lifeline. The surge in Bankak e-banking activations since the war began is partly driven by Sudanese overseas sending money home — remittances that internet shutdowns directly intercept, with lethal consequences. Every hour that Zain, MTN, or Sudani remains offline is an hour in which families inside Sudan cannot access the funds that enable their survival.

The International Criminal Court has been actively engaged in Sudan since 2004, when the Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the court. The ICC's existing cases — including against Bashir, who died in custody awaiting trial — have produced no convictions against Sudanese nationals. The court's arrest warrants have been systematically ignored by governments that prioritised trade and political relationships over accountability norms.

The ICC opened a new investigation in July 2023, shortly after the current conflict began. On July 11, 2025, the court formally briefed the Security Council, confirming that war crimes and crimes against humanity are actively being committed in Darfur. The court has been collecting evidence through remote means — satellite imagery, survivor testimony gathered by diaspora networks, documentation from NGOs — given the impossibility of on-the-ground access in many areas. The long-term deterrent effect of ICC investigations on conflict parties remains contested in academic literature, but the documentation function — building the evidentiary record that may eventually support prosecutions — is invaluable.

What accountability for Sudan requires, in addition to the ICC process, is a robust transitional justice framework designed with Sudanese civil society rather than imposed from outside. The experience of countries that have emerged from mass atrocities — Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Colombia — suggests that sustainable peace requires acknowledgment, truth-telling, and meaningful reparation, not just the prosecution of a small number of commanders. Sudan's path to that kind of justice is, at present, vanishingly distant. But the work of documenting — which technology enables even in the most constrained environments — is the necessary precondition.

In any conflict, women and girls bear a disproportionate share of the suffering — through sexual violence, through the collapse of healthcare systems that serve maternal and reproductive health, through the displacement that falls hardest on those responsible for children and elderly family members. Sudan's war has been particularly savage in this dimension.

The RSF's systematic use of rape as a weapon of war has been documented extensively. The UN's July 2025 WhatsApp ban in Sudan — imposed by the TPRA, nominally for security reasons — was noted by AccessNow as having a particularly acute impact on women and girls, disrupting health information services and making it harder to report gender-based violence. The connectivity of displacement is not a luxury. For women trying to reach safe houses, access reproductive healthcare, or document violence for later accountability purposes, it is a matter of survival.

Among the most harrowing statistics: over 4.5 million of the 14 million displaced are women and children. The sexual violence inflicted in Darfur and Gezira echoes patterns documented in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the DRC — and it demands the same unequivocal condemnation and the same commitment to survivor support. Women-led civil society organisations, inside Sudan and in the diaspora, have been among the most effective advocates for peace and accountability. Their voices deserve amplification, not silence.

One dimension of the Sudan crisis that has received inadequate analysis is the growing role of artificial intelligence and satellite technology in conflict documentation — and the implications of that role for accountability, humanitarian response, and the future of conflict monitoring more broadly. As a technology-focused media organisation, Zack Technology LLC believes these developments deserve serious examination.

Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, led by Nathaniel Raymond, has used open-source satellite imagery and AI-assisted analysis to document burning patterns, mass grave sites, and infrastructure destruction across Darfur and Kordofan. This kind of remote sensing capability — civilian, academic, and increasingly powerful — represents one of the most significant shifts in conflict documentation since the smartphone. Where atrocities were once deniable for lack of evidence, AI analysis of satellite data can now establish patterns of organised destruction with a level of precision that serves both humanitarian documentation and legal accountability.

At the same time, the same technologies that enable documentation also enable surveillance and targeting. Drone technology — commercial and military — has transformed the battlefield in Sudan, lowering the barrier to aerial strikes and enabling both the SAF and the RSF to conduct operations in areas where neither has a significant ground presence. In the first three months of 2025, more civilians were killed in drone strikes in Sudan than at any previous point in the war. The democratisation of drone warfare is one of the most consequential and most under-discussed military technology trends of our era.

For technologists and policy-makers engaging with Sudan, the imperative is clear: invest in civilian open-source monitoring capabilities, push for meaningful arms control frameworks that address drone proliferation, and resist the temptation to treat connectivity as a politically neutral good disconnected from the conflicts that surround it.

The humanitarian response to Sudan has been, in the blunt assessment of the people delivering it, inadequate to the scale of the need. The UN and its partners provided $1.8 billion in support to nearly 16 million people in 2024 — a figure that sounds significant until measured against the 33.7 million who need assistance. The 2025 Regional Refugee Response Plan faces a funding shortfall that threatens food, shelter, healthcare, and education for refugees across Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

U.S. aid cuts — driven partly by a domestic political environment increasingly hostile to foreign assistance — have had material consequences. Organisations delivering essential services to Sudanese refugees in South Sudan have been forced to scale back operations precisely when the need is most acute. The United Kingdom, Germany, and the EU have maintained relatively higher levels of Sudan-related funding, but even their contributions fall short of what independent assessments identify as necessary.

What has worked, in the space of what has been possible: local emergency response committees (ERCs), staffed by Sudanese volunteers, have operated in contested areas where international organisations cannot safely deploy. The ICRC has maintained a presence in parts of Kordofan and Darfur through agreements with both warring parties, delivering medical supplies and conducting family tracing. Islamic relief organisations — Zakat funds and Gulf-based charities — have provided a supplementary layer of support that has sometimes reached communities where Western-led UN agencies cannot. These examples of local innovation and religious-institutional humanitarianism deserve recognition and support, not the bureaucratic marginalisation they too often face.

Peace in Sudan, if it comes, will not be the product of a single agreement or a dramatic negotiating breakthrough. It will be constructed — if at all — through the patient accumulation of small trust-building measures, the gradual reassertion of civilian political authority, the restoration of accountable economic institutions, and the slow, painful work of reconciliation among communities that have been set against one another with deliberate intent.

From a left-leaning analytical perspective — which is the one Zack Technology LLC occupies without apology — the conditions for a just peace include several non-negotiables. First, genuine accountability for the architects of mass atrocity. Neither al-Burhan nor Hemedti should be permitted to govern a post-war Sudan in exchange for a ceasefire agreement that allows them to escape justice. The precedent of impunity for mass atrocity is one that replicates itself across decades and conflicts. Second, the restoration of civilian governance through a process that genuinely reflects Sudanese civil society — the professional associations, women's groups, youth organisations, and community councils that have been the real architects of whatever democratic aspiration Sudan has managed to sustain across decades of authoritarian rule.

Third, sustained international investment — not just in humanitarian response but in economic recovery, technology infrastructure, mental health systems, and educational reconstruction. Sudan will need a Marshall Plan equivalent, built on the understanding that sustainable peace requires the material conditions within which ordinary people can imagine a future worth inhabiting. Fourth, an arms embargo that is actually enforced — specifically targeting the supply chains through which the UAE, Russia, China, and others have sustained both sides of this conflict in defiance of existing international norms.

None of these conditions are presently in place. All of them are achievable if the international community chooses to prioritise them. The choice, ultimately, is political — and politics, unlike geography, is within human control.

It may seem incongruous, in an article of this weight and gravity, to turn briefly to video games. Bear with me — because the connection is more serious than it first appears.

Gaming as a community medium has genuine therapeutic dimensions — and those of us who build gaming communities have a responsibility to acknowledge that. Research on prosocial gaming suggests that collaborative and immersive game environments reduce cortisol levels, provide emotional regulation scaffolding, and build the sense of connected competence that is itself a buffer against depression and anxiety. For the Sudanese diaspora scattered across the world — as for every dispersed community — online spaces, including gaming communities, provide a form of social continuity that physical displacement has disrupted. They are not a substitute for peace or for the return home. But they are not nothing.

The 1,200th livestream is also an occasion to say, simply and directly, to our growing community: thank you. Every hour you spend in conversation with us — in the English-language idiom of Coffee with Zack 🇺🇸 or the French-language intimacy of Coffee with Zaki 🇫🇷 — is an act of trust that we do not take lightly. We try to earn it by being honest, curious, and engaged with the world's hardest questions.

Electronic music — the genre and the culture that animates JETLAG RADIO — has always had a complicated relationship with political consciousness. Its roots in Black American and queer underground communities in Chicago, Detroit, and New York gave it a politics even when it refused to articulate one: the politics of the dancefloor as sanctuary, of sound as solidarity, of the body moving in unison as a form of collective refusal to be defined by the conditions that surround it.

That political unconscious matters when one considers what electronic music — and music therapy more broadly — can offer to communities in crisis. The Sudanese Camirata troupe's work in Cairo draws on traditional instruments, but the underlying principle is universal: rhythm, melody, and communal listening create neurological and emotional states that counteract trauma's tendency toward isolation, numbness, and the flattening of affect. Whether the frequency is generated by a tanbour in an Egyptian community hall or a synthesiser in a Sacramento studio, the mechanism is similar. Sound reaches the body before it reaches the mind. It bypasses the defences that trauma builds. It creates, in the shared experience of listening, a momentary but real sense of not being alone.

JETLAG RADIO is built around this conviction. The name itself — jet lag as a form of temporal displacement, of being between time zones, between identities, between the place you left and the place you have arrived — resonates with the experience of the diaspora in ways that are not accidental. We play for people in motion. We play for people who carry more than one home inside them. We play for the Sudanese engineer in Sacramento who misses Khartoum. We play for the French-American kid who grew up between Paris and wherever next. We play because music is one of the few languages that requires no translation.

Sudan did not choose to be located at the crossroads of competing geopolitical ambitions. It did not choose to have gold beneath its soil that other countries' economies depend upon. It did not choose to have a Red Sea coastline that Russia covets or a Nile that Egypt regards as existential. It did not choose to be the largest country in Africa before South Sudan's independence, or the repository of some of the oldest continuous human civilisations on the continent — Nubian kingdoms whose pyramids predate Giza's, whose mathematical and astronomical traditions shaped the ancient world.

What Sudan chose — or rather, what its civilian population chose, in the courage of the 2019 revolution — was democracy, accountability, and civilian rule. That choice was stolen from them by two generals who preferred power to peace. The international community's failure to sustain and protect that democratic aspiration is a moral debt that has accrued enormous interest over the past three years.

Paying that debt does not require military intervention. It requires political will: the will to enforce arms embargos, to sanction networks of war finance, to fund humanitarian response at a level commensurate with need, to include Sudanese civil society in peace processes, and to hold the external actors — the UAE, Russia, Egypt — accountable for their contributions to the catastrophe. It requires media organisations to treat Sudan with the same sustained attention they have given to other conflicts. It requires advocacy organisations to resist crisis fatigue and maintain pressure on governments that have preferred convenient ignorance to uncomfortable action.

It requires, in short, the kind of solidarity that Hoot's dialogue gestures toward — not the solidarity of the battlefield, but the solidarity of those who choose, from a position of relative safety, to stand with those who are not safe, and to refuse the comfort of not knowing.

The Blue Nile and the White Nile still meet at Khartoum. The city has been scarred, hollowed, and partially emptied — but it exists. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Sudanese have begun returning to the capital as the SAF has reasserted control, threading through streets that bear the marks of artillery and looting. The airport has reopened. Government institutions have returned from Port Sudan. Life, impossibly, insistently, resumes.

That resilience — which is not the same as recovery, and should not be used to justify the withdrawal of international attention — is the most important thing to understand about Sudan. The Sudanese Professionals Association, which organised the 2019 revolution with such discipline, has not disbanded. The women's civil society groups that have documented atrocities and sustained communities through the worst of the fighting have not been silenced. The artists, the musicians, the doctors performing surgery by torchlight, the engineers maintaining satellite links against impossible odds — they are the future of Sudan, if that future is given space to breathe.

From Sacramento, California, in the spring of 2026, Zack Technology LLC commits to continuing to cover this story — not as a distant tragedy to be processed and moved past, but as an ongoing human emergency that demands ongoing human response. We will cover the diplomacy, the technology, the music, the mental health implications, and the voices of Sudanese people themselves. We will do it in English and in French. We will do it on YouTube and on every platform that reaches the people who need to hear it. We will do it because, as journalists and as human beings, we believe that bearing witness is the minimum threshold of solidarity — and that minimum is where we begin, not where we stop.

🇸🇩 Sudan. The place where the two Niles meet. May they flow freely again.