The Price of Life: Famine, Rape, and War in El Fasher, Sudan
SUDAN, AFRICA—The humanitarian crisis in Sudan, already catastrophic, has reached a horrifying extreme in El Fasher, North Darfur. After a devastating siege lasting more than 500 days, the city fell to militia forces in late October 2025. What followed was not an end to suffering, but a surge in targeted atrocities that have placed women and children at the epicenter of a crisis defined by starvation, displacement, rape, and bombardment.
The situation is a stark reminder of the unique, targeted brutality women endure in conflict zones.
The Deliberate Weaponization of Violence
The collapse of El Fasher has triggered a mass exodus, with nearly 90,000 people fleeing the city and surrounding villages through perilous, unsafe routes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). For women, every step of this journey, and every daily necessity, carries an immense, specific risk:
- Sexual Violence as a Strategy: There is mounting evidence, confirmed by UN Women and human rights agencies, that rape is being deliberately and systematically used as a weapon of war. Women’s bodies have, in the words of a UN Women official, “become a crime scene.” Simply attempting to fetch water, collect firewood, or stand in a food line carries a high, pervasive risk of sexual violence.
- Collapse of Essential Services: Pregnant women are being forced to give birth in the streets after maternity hospitals were looted, destroyed, and rendered non functional. The entire health infrastructure has crumbled, leaving survivors of sexual violence, the injured, and the ill with virtually no access to medical or psychosocial support.
The Impossible Choices of Dignity and Survival
Amidst the mass killings and displacement, a severe economic and humanitarian crisis makes basic dignity a luxury:
- The Cost of Dignity: The pricing of essential goods has soared to impossible heights. A single packet of sanitary towels costs approximately $27 USD in North Darfur. For families receiving humanitarian cash assistance—which amounts to slightly below $150 per month for a household of six—one basic necessity consumes nearly a fifth of their entire aid budget. Families are forced to make agonizing, life threatening choices between food, medicine, and fundamental dignity. Women’s needs inevitably fall to the bottom of this impossible hierarchy.
- Famine Conditions: Famine is confirmed in parts of Darfur and the conditions in and around El Fasher are devastating. The war has engineered extreme hunger. Women consistently eat least and last, often skipping meals entirely so that children can eat. Starving mothers are struggling or unable to breastfeed, and women are risking violence to forage for wild leaves and berries just to boil into a meager soup.
The UN’s migration agency has warned that humanitarian operations in North Darfur are “on the brink of collapse,” with warehouses nearly empty and aid convoys facing severe insecurity.
Bearing Witness: Why Our Awareness Matters
In our comfortable spaces, it is easy to feel guilt and helplessness in the face of such profound suffering. Yet, the women in Sudan are not asking us for pity; they are asking us to see them and not let the world forget.
Our struggles are valid, but perspective matters. Thinking about complaining about period cramps when a pack of pads costs $27 there and represents an impossible choice underscores the vast gap in human experience today. The least we can do is bear witness to the magnitude of their horror.
What We Can Do: Action and Solidarity
The crisis requires immediate and urgent action. Awareness is only the first step; commitment must follow:
- Share These Stories: Do not let this crisis fade from public view. Use your voice to continuously amplify the realities of women and girls in Sudan.
- Support Humanitarian Organizations: Donate directly to trusted groups that prioritize women and girls, including those providing gender based violence services, reproductive healthcare, and psychosocial support. Specifically, women led organizations on the ground are sustaining the response but receive only a fraction of global funding.
- Make Noise: Pressure your political representatives to call for an immediate ceasefire, demand safe, open corridors for humanitarian relief, and ensure accountability for war crimes and the systematic use of sexual violence.
- Create Safe Spaces Where You Are: Hold your girlfriends tighter. Check on the women in your life with genuine sincerity. The ultimate act of solidarity is creating and protecting safe spaces in your own community, because somewhere in Sudan, women have none.
Stay wild, stay aware, stay human.
