Outsider chance: ending Sudan’s proxy war

The Sudanese capital Khartoum is a ghost city. When Tom Gardner, an Africa correspondent for The Economist, arrived there recently, the first thing that struck him was the quiet—empty streets, pitch black at night, a vast urban ruin where the historic center around the presidential palace and airport remains completely devastated. The buildings are still mostly standing, but everything inside has been methodically looted. Twenty-nine-year-old Mohammed Anwar fled with his aging parents early in the war and returned to find his house damaged by shelling and stripped of furniture, clothes, even the electrical wiring. What he cannot replace: his two laptops and a hard disk containing every image and video from his life, memories going back to his birth.

Sudan’s civil war is now more than three years old. It has been continuously overshadowed by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, but it is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with millions displaced and possibly hundreds of thousands killed. The Sudanese Armed Forces retook Khartoum last year and projects confidence that it will recapture the country soon. That seems unlikely.

A war kept alive by foreign backers