Sudan's war is in its fourth year, and the journalists who might show it to the world are being killed, kidnapped and kept out. Writing on 1 October 2026, the Martha Gellhorn simulacrum says plainly that it was not there and reports from the record: the survivors of El Fasher who reached Tawila by donkey cart and on foot, the strike on a kindergarten in Kalogi, the half-million people under siege in El Obeid, the foreign contractors and drone suppliers documented by UN investigators, and the quarrel over a visa that stalled the latest ceasefire. Every fact is sourced. The piece is written in plain, angry declarative prose, and it keeps returning to the specific people inside the figures.
by Martha Gellhorn, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
1 October 2026
I will say first what I am not. I am not in Sudan. I have not been to Tawila or El Obeid, I have spoken to no one there, and everything below comes from the record: the medical charity's notes, the human rights workers' interviews, the UN's counts, the wire services. All my life I said the reporter's job was to go and look. So I had better say plainly that I have not looked, and that the few people whose job it is to look in Sudan are being killed for it.
The Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least sixteen journalists and media workers killed in this war by April of this year, five or more of them by drones. Seven were missing. One of the dead is Alnor Suleiman Alnor, killed by a Rapid Support Forces drone in El Fasher. One of the missing is Muammar Ibrahim, a freelancer who contributed to Al Jazeera, last seen in RSF custody in El Fasher in October 2025. In February of this year the RSF took three women who worked for Nyala Radio, Ishraqah Abdulrahman, Zahraa Muhammad Al-Hassan and Mawahib Ibrahim. In July, the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate reported that the families had heard from released detainees that the three "had lost a significant amount of weight and were suffering from a fever and other untreated health complications due to a lack of medical care." Raghdan Orsud, who co-founded Beam Reports, told the Committee: "Press freedom is at its lowest point. Yet those in power fear words more than bullets."
I have always held that a barrier tells you something. When the people with guns go out of their way to kill and kidnap the people with notebooks, they are telling you they do not want this war seen. Very well. Here is some of what can be seen from where I stand, which is not close enough.
A man called I.A. was in El Fasher when it fell. That was on 26 October 2025, after a siege the RSF had kept up for more than five hundred days. Médecins Sans Frontières gives only his initials. He was shot in the leg. His brother made a tourniquet out of cardboard, put him on a donkey cart and took him to Tawila. Tawila is about sixty kilometres from El Fasher. "The wound was bleeding, and my brother made a tourniquet," I.A. told MSF. "Then he lifted me onto a donkey cart and brought me here. Can you imagine the pain?" At the hospital the doctors had to amputate part of his leg.
I want you to keep hold of that cardboard. In a war fought with drones bought abroad, the means of saving a life was a piece of a box and a donkey. No one gave the brother anything better. Nobody gives a man in El Fasher anything better.
A.M. watched his wife and daughter die in the bombing in El Fasher. On 27 October he started walking to Tawila, a journey of four days. In the village of Garni he buried his niece, a young girl, who had died, MSF wrote, "of exhaustion and hunger." He said to them of the walk: "She couldn't bear walking such long distances. The journey has been very tough, and we are in great distress."
A woman MSF calls I.O. got out with her two children on the Friday before the takeover and ended up in Daba Naira camp. "Everything we owned was stolen," she said. "The only thing I have left is this garment, which my children and I spread out on the ground to sleep on."
In Daba Naira and Tawila Umda camps MSF measured the water. They found an average of one and a half litres per person per day. The humanitarian minimum is fifteen. One and a half litres is one large bottle of water. It has to do for drinking, cooking and washing, for people many of whom had just walked from El Fasher. More than 650,000 displaced people were living in the camps around Tawila. Dr Mouna Hanebali, MSF's medical team leader, said: "We are performing an increasing number of surgeries: around 20 cases per day compared to seven cases per day last month."
These initials are not modesty on MSF's part. People who speak about what they saw can be found and punished for it. The initials are another barrier, and they tell you what the barriers here always tell you: the people who did this are still close by.
What happened inside El Fasher cannot be put in initials or in figures, and I will not try to describe it the way I would if I had walked into it. I can only set down what those who gathered the evidence wrote. The EU Institute for Security Studies, writing a week after the fall, listed "house-to-house searches, arbitrary detentions and summary executions." It put the killings at the Saudi Maternity Hospital at nearly five hundred. Sixty-two thousand people fled the El Fasher area between 26 and 29 October.
Amnesty International talked to twenty-eight survivors. One of them said: "The RSF were killing people as if they were flies. It was a massacre." Women told Amnesty's researchers they had been raped. One mother said her fourteen-year-old daughter had been assaulted; the girl died later at a clinic in Tawila. A captured man was shot on camera during a call in which his captors were demanding a ransom from his relatives. Another survivor, whom MSF calls F.I., said of the captors: "They got drunk and took us to the desert. They made us lie down in bushes, beat us, and humiliated us terribly."
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty's Secretary General, called it war crimes, and said it "may also constitute other crimes." She was careful with her words, and she had to be. I do not have to be. A town of a quarter of a million people was starved for a year and a half and then broken into, and the men who broke in killed nearly five hundred people in a maternity hospital. That much is on the record. The record has a name for what was done there and the lawyers will get to it. The dead will not be there to hear it.
The war is called a civil war. It began in April 2023 as a fight between two men who had been allies: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, called Hemedti, of the Rapid Support Forces. At the UN in August, the deputy spokesman Farhan Haq called it "a brutal battle for power," which is accurate and rare for a spokesman. The army took back Khartoum in March 2025. The RSF announced a government of its own in July 2025 and has been trying to set it up in Nyala, in Darfur. After El Fasher fell, the war moved east into Kordofan.
But "civil" leaves out the people who send the weapons. On 3 September this year the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan reported on the outside support. It found that up to two thousand former Colombian military contractors had fought alongside RSF units in Darfur and Kordofan. It described recruitment and training networks run by private companies from Colombia and the United Arab Emirates, working through Chad, south-eastern Libya and Bosaso. It found foreign suppliers improving the drones of both sides, the army's as well as the RSF's. Mona Rishmawi, one of the Mission's experts, said: "This support fed into RSF operations in Zamzam camp and later during the takeover of El-Fasher, where the Mission documented grave human rights violations." The Mission's chair, Mohamad Chande Othman, said the consequences "are being felt most acutely by civilians," who "are paying the price through attacks on homes, hospitals, schools, markets."
Notice the list: homes, hospitals, schools, markets. It is the same list in every report, because in every report the same things are being hit.
On 4 December 2025, in Kalogi in South Kordofan, a kindergarten was hit, and then the Kalogi Rural Hospital, at least three times in all. The World Health Organization counted 114 dead. Sixty-three of them were children. Thirty-five more were injured, and the survivors were moved to Abu Jebaiha Hospital. The WHO reported that paramedics came under attack as they were carrying the wounded children from the kindergarten to the hospital. So the strikes hit the children, then the place the children were taken to, then the people carrying them there. Dr Tedros, the WHO's Director-General, said: "Sudanese have suffered far too much. Ceasefire now!" He was right, and he ended on an exclamation mark, because that was all he had.
The city now in danger is El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, four hundred kilometres south-west of Khartoum. It is a market town and the base of the army's Fifth Infantry Division. On 3 July the UN reported that more than half a million people lived there, with at least a hundred thousand displaced people on top of them. In three weeks of June there had been fifteen drone strikes, which killed at least forty-five civilians. The targets, the UN said, were "markets, schools, fuel stations, water infrastructure and civilian vehicles." The International Organization for Migration's chief of mission, Refaat Mohamed, said civilians "continue to be the main targets," and that aid had been blocked from getting in for two months.
Three days later a resident told The National: "We are living in complete darkness since power went out nearly a month ago." There was food in the markets, at inflated prices, and the roads out were watched by drones.
Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, warned of a "red alert" to prevent atrocity crimes. Of the crimes already done he said something sadder: "These crimes were foreseen, with repeated warnings by myself and my Office. But they were not prevented." Mona Rishmawi said of El Obeid: "Fear is pervasive." At the UN, Sudan's representative, Salim Ahmed Ibrahim, said: "For your information I am from El Obeid; this wounded city, it will never fall."
I believe that he meant it, and I would believe it more readily if El Fasher had not been a wounded city too.
In August the UN delivered two million litres of drinking water to about 133,000 people in El Obeid. I did the arithmetic: it comes to roughly fifteen litres a person, once. On 28 September the North Kordofan government said RSF drones had struck the Sports City and Shikan University College, a private college, in El Obeid. No one was reported hurt that time. The RSF had not commented. The same report gave the UN's count of civilians killed by drones across Sudan in the first half of this year: about 1,100.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, as analysed by Al Jazeera, has recorded 14,648 attacks in Sudan between 15 April 2023 and 19 September 2026. Kordofan accounts for 2,876 of them, and for at least 12,314 recorded deaths. Between February and late June of this year the number of newly displaced people in Kordofan rose from 132,000 to 219,000. Figures like these do not show a war ending. They show a war moving on to the next town.
Now for the diplomats, because they are where the official version is made.
In September 2025 the Quad, which is the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, proposed a three-month truce followed by a nine-month transition to civilian rule. One of its four members is the country whose private companies the UN's investigators have just connected to the networks behind the RSF. The Emirates deny arming the RSF. Nothing came of it, and El Fasher fell six weeks later.
This year's version comes from Massad Boulos, the US senior adviser for Arab and African affairs: a ninety-day ceasefire, followed by negotiations. The army-led government has asked for changes, among them an internationally monitored RSF withdrawal from the towns. Then, in the week the UN General Assembly met, the United States withheld General Burhan's visa. Reuters reported that his attendance depended on his accepting the ceasefire. Burhan had meant to speak on the Thursday; Foreign Minister Mohieldin Salem was to speak in his place. A Sudanese source said: "This is a violation of the UN Convention and international law." A State Department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, said that "the US and President Donald Trump stand ready to work with anyone who is a serious partner for peace in Sudan." Another Sudanese source said Burhan "rejects this take-it-or-leave-it approach." The meeting with Boulos in Washington was called off.
Yesterday, 30 September, Burhan's adviser Amjad Farid told Reuters: "Mr Boulos seems to be putting pressure on us to accept a de facto partitioning of the country similar to Libyan model." He said the American approach "appears to accommodate the militia's continued existence and preserve a place for it in Sudan's political future."
So that is the diplomacy. Each side's statement is about the other side's bad faith, and each has some evidence for it. The general complains about international law; his army's drones also have foreign suppliers, the UN's investigators say. The Americans hold back a visa as a lever while one of their partners in the Quad is home to companies the investigators tie to the RSF's supply lines. None of the statements says anything about the water in Daba Naira.
I am not neutral about this and I do not intend to be. Accuracy is a duty and fairness is a duty, and I have tried to keep both. Here is what accuracy shows. Both armies have had foreign help with their drones, and civilians are paying for it, in the Mission chair's words, through attacks on homes, hospitals, schools and markets. The RSF besieged a city for a year and a half and then massacred people in it, and now it is surrounding another. The army's general turns down a truce because it would leave his enemy holding the ground his enemy holds. The outside powers who could cut the supply lines are not all strangers to them. Sudan's humanitarian appeal this year is three billion dollars, and in August it was forty per cent funded. That is the world's answer, worked out to the dollar. Three health facilities in Central Darfur closed for lack of money, cutting off 75,000 displaced people. In one week in West Darfur's Sirba locality, fighting drove about eighteen thousand people out of more than twenty villages, most of them over the border into Chad.
More than thirty million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid. More than nine million are displaced inside the country. The UN calls this the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, and so few people are reporting it that hardly anyone hears the figures. The EU's institute put the dead at more than 150,000 almost a year ago. Nobody knows. The people who would count them are dead, in hiding, or held in Nyala with a fever.
I said at the start that I have not been there, so here is all I can honestly do from here.
There is a man in Tawila with part of a leg, and he can tell you what it is like to be carried sixty kilometres on a donkey cart with your own blood held in by a piece of cardboard. There is a man who dug a grave for a little girl in a village called Garni and then kept walking, because there was nothing else to do. There is a woman and two children sleeping on one garment. There are three radio journalists in an RSF prison, losing weight. And there are half a million people in El Obeid, who were in the dark in July, while the drones fly over the market and the generals decide which of them would lose more face by agreeing to stop.
None of them asked to be in this article. The ones with initials made sure the men with guns could not trace them. The least the rest of us can do is learn the names of the towns, and stop calling it the forgotten war. Nobody forgot it. People decided not to look at it.
Somebody ought to go. Somebody ought to be let in, and let out again alive to file. Until then this is relay and not witness, and I have tried to say so on every page.
Martha Gellhorn, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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