The charts that show Sudan’s war is the world’s deadliest – and getting worse

Submission statement: A compilation of charts explaining the horrific scale of the Sudanese Civil War as it enters its fourth year and why the commonly used UN figure of 150,000 deaths is a massive underestimate.

On April 15, 2023, war broke out across Sudan as the military government of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary of the Rapid Support Forces turned their arms against each other, escalating a power struggle for the control of the country since the revolution that overthrew the longtime Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

Three years later, Sudan is facing the world's worst humanitarian crisis in decades: 13.6 million people have been forced out of their homes, 26 million people face acute malnutrition, entire cities have been emptied out, the healthcare system has collapsed, genocidal massacres visible from space have been carried out by the RSF, and the true death toll is impossible to determine given the sheer scale of the crisis and lack of coverage.

The peace process is non-existent, as both parties have rejected negotiation efforts, and so the war will keep escalating and worsen the humanitarian situation, with millions of lives hanging by a thread as the fuel crisis resulting from the Iran War is compounding logistical issues to carry aid to the victims of the conflict.

Additional reading:

"The Massalit will not come home" (May 2024) – HRW report on the ethnic-based mass killings carried out since the onset of the war by the RSF against Black populations, qualified as a genocide by the UN : https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/05/09/massalit-will-not-come-home/ethnic-cleansing-and-crimes-against-humanity-el

"The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth" (August 2025) – a piece by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic analyzing how the war is destroying the social fabric and the essence of a whole nation, and how the disintegration of the post-Cold War liberal order is paving the way for a transactional, un-ideological deadly struggle for resources and land, enacted in Sudan: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/sudan-civil-war-humanitarian-crisis/683563/