#sudan

These people need your help to purchase even the most basic necessities.

اللهم ارزقنا سكينةً عند القلق حين تضيق الصدور. وذكّر فإن الذكرى تنفع المؤمنين. اجعل هذا التذكير محطة قصيرة للسكينة، والاستغفار، وحسن الظن بالله. لمن أراد متابعة مواقيت الصلاة واتجاه القبلة، الرابط هنا: https://prayer-times.app2mob.com/ar/sudan/omdurman

The Urgent Crises in Sudan and DR Congo

Description:

As the world’s attention shifts, millions of families are fighting for survival in two of the most severe humanitarian crises of our time. This video, featuring on-the-ground footage and photos captured by Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) staff between 2024 and 2026, brings you face-to-face with the reality of displacement in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo).

🇸🇩 SUDAN: The World's Largest Displacement Crisis

Now entering its third year, the war in Sudan has forced over 9 million people to flee within the country, while over 3.5 million have crossed borders into South Sudan, Chad, Egypt, and Libya.

• Universal Hunger: Over 90% of families in South Sudan, 80% in Sudan, and 70% in Chad are regularly skipping meals.

• Economic Collapse: 74% of displaced families have no income whatsoever.

• El Obeid Under Siege: In North Kordofan, families are trapped under drone strikes, with fuel costing more than a teacher’s monthly salary, forcing parents to mix flour with dirty water just to fill their children's stomachs.

• Dignity Denied: 20% of displaced women have no access to a toilet, and family separation has tripled the risk of child marriage in camps.

🇨🇩 DR CONGO: Conflict and Epidemic in a Neglected Crisis

DR Congo has featured on the NRC’s list of the world’s most neglected displacement crises for ten consecutive years, yet the situation continues to deteriorate.

• Staggering Displacement: In 2025 alone, relentless violence drove a massive 9.7 million internal displacements across the country.

• Ebola Outbreak: A Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak is rapidly spreading through crowded, temporary IDP camps in Ituri and the Kivu provinces—where poor sanitation makes containing the virus a monumental challenge.

• An Abandoned Response: Despite the double threat of war and disease, the international humanitarian response plan for DR Congo remains only 53.9% funded.

📍 Footage Locations & Credits:

• Darfur, Sudan: Ahmed Ahmed / NRC

• South Kordofan, Sudan: Karl Schembri / NRC

• White Nile, Sudan: Elias Abu Ata & Ahmed Elsir / NRC

• Renk, South Sudan: Richard Ashton / NRC

• Wadi Fira, Chad: Enayatullah Azad / NRC

Fahmy is not interested in producing yet another admiring portrait of Mehmed Ali as founder, genius, modernizer, or father of the nation. He shifts the angle of vision downward, toward the men who were dragged into the army and made to sustain it. That move changed the field.

The army here is not treated as a triumphant national institution, and the soldiers are not presented as willing recruits awakening to patriotic duty. They are mostly peasants seized by force, disciplined with great violence, watched relentlessly, and driven into campaigns that had little to do with any notion of a shared national project. This is one of Fahmy’s most important interventions. He breaks with the old nationalist image of the nineteenth-century army as a school of citizenship and instead shows it as a machine for extracting labor, reorganizing bodies, and extending state power. [...]

The invasion of Sudan was not peripheral to the formation of the new army. It was central to it. Mehmed Ali wanted soldiers, and in the beginning, he did not want to get them by conscripting Egyptian peasants. That would have drained the countryside of labor and threatened the agricultural base on which his revenues depended. So he looked south. [...] In another [letter], he stated even more starkly that slaves fit for military use were more precious than jewels. That sentence alone should settle a great deal of romantic nonsense.

The conquest of Sudan, in this account, begins not with administration, nor with civilizing claims, nor with frontier management. It begins with the treatment of Sudanese people as military raw material. [...]

And then there was the transport of the enslaved. Fahmy shows that enormous numbers of Sudanese captives died on the way north, first on the journey toward Aswan, then again on the march from Aswan to Cairo. At one point, only 1,245 out of 2,400 who had reached Aswan made it to Cairo. Elsewhere, he notes that of 20,000 slaves gathered between 1820 and 1824, only 3,000 were still alive in 1824. There is no way to describe this except as a system of mass death built into the machinery of conquest. [...] Fahmy also notes the racist language used by the regime when it sought American doctors because of their supposed familiarity with “this race.” That detail matters. The violence was not only military and administrative. It was also racialized in its assumptions and vocabulary.

[...]

Another reason I admire this book so much is that Fahmy never lets the reader separate military history from administrative history. The army was not simply a fighting force. It was a school for the state itself. Once conscription of Egyptian peasants began, the regime needed new ways to identify, count, pursue, and recover bodies. That meant registers, names, village affiliations, certificates, surveillance networks, and punitive regulations.

The state learned to know society by seizing it. It developed bureaucratic capacities because it needed to track draft-age men, catch deserters, punish resisters, and return fugitives to service. Village shaykhs, police agents, provincial officials, and urban intermediaries all became woven into this system.