Disaster by the Numbers: The Crisis in Sudan

A civil war in Sudan that has killed 150,000 people and forced more than 11 million others from their homes, by some estimates, prompted the U.S.government on Tuesday to declare that a genocide had been perpetrated by one of the war’s main antagonists, the ethnic Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces.The war, which has drawn in foreign countries and a host of armed groups, now threatens to spill over Sudan’s borders.

After 21 months of fighting, thousands have been killed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, countless women and girls have been subjected to sexual violence, and millions are hungry, in the world’s first officially declared famine since 2020.So many people have been uprooted that the United Nations says Sudan is now home to the world’s largest displacement crisis — a “living nightmare,” in the words of Amy Pope, director general of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.Genocide Old and NewThe Sudanese army chief, Gen.Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, Lt.

Gen.Mohamed Hamdan, were once allies.

In 2021, they worked together to stage a military coup.But they later split after failing to merge their forces.In April 2023, they went to war, with gun battles raging in the capital, Khartoum.The R.S.F., as the Rapid Support Forces is known, is composed of the remnants of another militia, the Janjaweed, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people two decades ago in the western Darfur region of Sudan.

Those killings led to genocide charges at the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019.On Tuesday, the American secretary of state, Antony J.Blinken, said that the R.S.F., and allied militias had committed new acts of genocide in Darfur in 2023.

The target, officials said, was the Masalit people, a non-Arab ethnic minority in Sudan, where the population and the armed forces are predominan...