Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 1, 2025 /
12:58 pm
Graphic evidence emerged Friday of large-scale massacres of civilians in Sudan, including satellite imagery of bodies and blood-stained ground taken outside a hospital in Darfur.
More than 460 patients and their family members were reported shot and killed in the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, Tuesday, after the Sudanese army surrendered the city to paramilitary fighters on Sunday following an 18-month siege.
The government’s forces remain in control of the capital city of Khartoum, according to news reports.
The massacre is the latest tragedy in the conflict that has consumed the western Darfur region since full-scale civil war broke out in 2023.
The war between rival military factions, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has claimed the lives of an estimated 150,000 people and displaced as many as 14 million, according to the Council on Foreign Relation’s Global Conflict Tracker.
UN: It’s the world’s ‘most devastating’ humanitarian crisis
In January, the U.S. State Department declared that the RSF had committed genocide against non-Arab ethic groups in Sudan. The United Nations has described the situation in Sudan as “most devastating humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.”
Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, earlier this year, said that “men and boys ¾ even infants ¾ on an ethnic basis” had been killed and that the RSF fighters “deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” CNN reported.
The atrocities that have taken place in Sudan constitute ethnic cleansing, according to Human Rights Watch, which in its 2024 report said “crimes against humanity and widespread war crimes were committed in the context of an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Massalit and other non-Arab populations.”
The Republic of Sudan, in northeastern Africa, has a population of about 50 million people, 90.7% of whom are Muslim, with Christians forming the largest minority. In 2019, a revolution toppled President Omar al-Bashir, ending decades of authoritarian rule. Two years later, military leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ousted civilian leaders and seized power. Their forces turned on each other in April 2023, plunging the country into war.
In September, Pope Leo XIV called on Sudan’s warring leaders to end the violence in the country in order to get much-needed humanitarian assistance to the 260,000 people said to be trapped in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in el-Fasher.
“Dramatic news is coming from Sudan, particularly from Darfur,” Pope Leo said. “In el-Fasher many civilians are trapped in the city, victims of famine and violence. In Tarasin, a devastating landslide has caused numerous deaths, leaving behind pain and despair. And as if that weren’t enough, the spread of cholera is threatening hundreds of thousands of people who are already exhausted.”
“I make a heartfelt appeal to those in positions of responsibility and to the international community to ensure humanitarian corridors are open and to implement a coordinated response to stop this humanitarian catastrophe,” the Pope said.
“It is a forgotten war because the people are really forgotten,” Bishop Christian Carlassare of Bentiu in South Sudan told OSV News.
“Unfortunately, it’s a forgotten war for the international community, but it’s not forgotten for the weapon merchants, who are making a lot of profits out of this war,” he told the outlet.
According to the United Nations, Sudan is becoming “the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history.” As many as 24.6 million people ¾ more than half the population ¾ are “food insecure,” according to the U.N.
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In February of this year, Catholic Relief Services and Caritas agencies warned that the Trump administration’s freezing of assistance through U.S. Agency for International Development would exacerbate an already dangerous situation.
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register.
Zelda Caldwell is senior writer at the National Catholic Register based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked as news editor at Catholic News Agency.
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