Sudan's Forgotten War: El Obeid Burns While the World Watches Ukraine
Kapila watched Darfur in 2003 and 2004 and said the words that nobody wanted to say.
There is a city in central Sudan that most people in Europe cannot locate on a map. El Obeid — capital of North Kordofan state, population somewhere above a million — is burning. The Rapid Support Forces have been pushing into it for weeks, and Mukesh Kapila, who served as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan during the Darfur genocide, is now saying publicly what aid workers have been whispering privately: that what is unfolding in El Obeid could be worse than El Fasher.
That sentence should stop people cold. El Fasher has been the subject of genocide warnings, Security Council statements, and anguished op-eds for the better part of two years. Kapila watched Darfur in 2003 and 2004 and said the words that nobody wanted to say. He is not a man who reaches for historical comparisons casually. When he says El Obeid could be worse, he means it in the way that people who have walked through mass atrocity mean things — quietly, precisely, without decoration.
The Sudan war is now in its fourth year. It began in April 2023 as a power struggle between two generals — the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF — and has since become one of the largest displacement crises in recorded history. More than twelve million people have been forced from their homes. Famine conditions exist across multiple states. And yet it occupies, on most days, roughly three column inches in the international press, somewhere below the weather.
Part of this is geography. Part of it is the absence of a clean narrative — no obvious Western alliance to root for, no NATO summit to anchor the coverage. Part of it is, simply, that the people suffering are Sudanese, and the mechanisms of global attention have always had a hierarchy that nobody admits but everyone understands.
Europe, meanwhile, is having a different kind of reckoning. Seven charts published this week show temperature records falling across the continent — the kind of data that climatologists present in the careful, measured language of science, and which nonetheless reads like a warning written in very large letters. *Hotter and hotter and hotter*, as one headline put it, without irony. The summers that once felt extreme are becoming the baseline. Children born this decade will grow up thinking this is simply what July feels like.
There is a sentence I keep returning to: *the world can only hold so much at once*. It is true, and it is also the most dangerous truth in geopolitics — because it is the sentence that Sudan's war has been hiding behind for three years. Attention is finite. But catastrophe, it turns out, is not.
El Obeid is burning. The charts are red. Somewhere, the diplomats are packing for Ankara.
