Sudan is being destroyed in plain sight. Three years after the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began in April 2023, cities lie in ruins, villages have been burned to the ground, and famine has been declared in two besieged towns. The scale of devastation is staggering. Sudanese people are paying the price of a war that foreign money keeps alive.

The Centre for Human Rights and the International Commission of Jurists – Kenyan Section refuse to treat this catastrophe as background noise. Sudanese people are paying the price of a war sustained not only by domestic power struggles, but also by foreign financing, illicit trade networks, and transnational economic interests that continue to fuel violence and instability. Arms continue to flow. Gold continues to leave the country through opaque supply chains. External actors continue to profit while civilians bear the unbearable cost of displacement, starvation, sexual violence, and mass atrocities.

What is unfolding in Sudan is not simply a humanitarian emergency. It is a crisis of accountability. The continued exploitation of Sudan’s resources, particularly gold, has created economic incentives that sustain armed actors and deepen impunity. As long as profits continue to outweigh political and moral responsibility, the cycle of violence will persist while millions of Sudanese remain trapped between war, hunger, and displacement.

The scale of the crisis defies easy summary. Roughly 12 million people have been forced from their homes, including more than 7 million inside Sudan and over 4 million across borders into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Uganda, and the Central African Republic. Famine has been confirmed in the towns of El Fasher and Kadugli, with a further risk of famine in twenty more localities across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan. More than 21 million people face acute food insecurity. Sudan fed itself before the war. Today, armed actors are blocking food, water, and medicine from reaching civilians whose only crime is living in contested territory. Starvation has become a weapon of war.

The reported fall of El Fasher in October 2025 marked a turning point that made the cruelty of this war impossible to ignore. The UN Fact Finding Mission recorded that more than 6,000 killings in the first seventy-two hours of the RSF assault, after an eighteen-month siege. The UN Human Rights Office has classified the killings as potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sexual violence continues to be used systematically against women and girls as a tactic of war, while humanitarian workers have been killed at levels not seen in any other contemporary conflict.

The widespread use of Drones have also transformed the battlefield. Between January and March 2026, at least 699 civilian deaths attributed to drone strikes were recorded, accounting for more than three-quarters of documented civilian killings in those months. Someone sold the drones. Someone shipped them. Someone delivered them. Each strike reflects a supply chain that extends far beyond Sudan’s borders, how they were manufactured, financed, transferred, and ultimately deployed.

Poignantly, gold the Sudanese economic pride now finances this war. Researchers at Chatham House have traced how a multi-billion-dollar trade in gold shapes and sustains the fighting, paying both sides through smuggling routes that run from mines in Darfur and Kordofan, across borders into regional hubs, and onward into global markets. Recent investigations reveals significant gold flows into regional and international markets, including through intermediaries and trading hubs where origin becomes increasingly obscured.

Weapons flow alongside this resource economy. The UN Fact Finding Mission continues to document sanctions violations, illicit arms transfers, and the regional networks that sustain the war despite formal embargoes, particularly in Darfur. The arms embargo on Darfur, one of the oldest in Africa, sits on paper while foreign suppliers ignore it. Foreign-linked private military and security actors are providing logistics, material, and combat support to armed groups, and the states harbouring these networks have shown little appetite for enforcement. Every drone that reaches a Sudanese battlefield passes through a supply chain that someone, somewhere, approved. The result is a conflict ecosystem in which both gold and weapons circulate through overlapping transnational supply chains linking extractive economies, financial centres, and battlefields, while civilians bear the consequences.

While the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights  mandate that business operating in or linked to a conflict zone avoid causing or contributing to abuses, States whose laws govern these companies equally bear a parallel duty to ensure that they do so. Both duties are being ignored. Refiners process gold they know is smuggled. Banks clear transactions they know are suspect. Governments that condemn the violence in their public statements license, in their export ministries, the weapons that produce it.

The world has not failed to notice this war. It has failed to interrupt it. The Sudanese people are also human. Their suffering demands the same urgency and accountability as any other crisis. They cannot afford another year of communiqués, working groups, and quiet diplomacy while their country is dismembered for parts. The governments that profit from Sudan's gold and arm Sudan's combatants hold the keys to ending the war, and they must be made to turn them.

ACCA and ICJ Kenya call on:

• The warring parties to cease hostilities, lift the sieges on El Fasher, Kadugli, Dilling, and other besieged areas, comply with international humanitarian law, and grant safe, unimpeded humanitarian access throughout the country.
• Foreign states arming or financing combatants to halt the transfer of weapons, drones, fuel, and mercenary services to the SAF, the RSF, and their allies, and to enforce the UN arms embargo on Darfur in practice and not only on paper.
• Gold refiners, banks, traders, and jewellery markets handling Sudanese metal, whether sourced directly or routed through Chad, Libya, Egypt, or the United Arab Emirates, to suspend purchases, audit their supply chains, and publicly disclose their refining sources to the public.
• The African Union and the United Nations to deepen investigations into the war economy, extend targeted sanctions to the financiers and traders profiting from the conflict, and support the Joint Fact-Finding Mission's work on accountability for atrocity crimes.
• Donor governments and international institutions to fund the humanitarian response at the scale this crisis demands, and to give Sudanese civic actors, displaced communities, and survivor networks a leading role in every peace and accountability process.

Sympathy has never saved anyone, and it will not start with Sudan. The financial, material, and political flows that keep the killing going must be interrupted from their source. Every condemnation issued from a capital that also clears the transactions, or licenses the weapons, deepens the harm it claims to deplore.

The Centre for Human Rights and the International Commission of Jurists – Kenyan Section stand in solidarity with the people of Sudan and demand that the economic machinery sustaining their suffering be dismantled.