Sudan’s Forgotten Front: Inside the Nuba Mountains Crisis

“The government is trapping the people within the city. They’re not allowing the civilians to move out. The reports we’re hearing is they’re using the civilians as human shields,” said Caleb Maisonville of the Free Burma Rangers, a faith-based, frontline aid organization, speaking from the ground in South Kordofan, Sudan.

Now in its third year, Sudan’s civil war has produced what the World Food Programme calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Nearly 34 million people, 65 percent of the population, need urgent humanitarian assistance. Nearly 29 million are acutely food-insecure, representing 61.7 percent of the population, with almost 10.2 million falling into the severe and extreme categories associated with malnutrition and death.

Nearly 14 million people have been displaced, and some estimates put the death toll above 400,000.

The crisis is worst in the regions furthest from international attention, among them the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, where the fighting has converged with a pre-existing blockade to produce famine. The mountains are the historic heartland of Christianity in Sudan, with roughly 45 percent of the Nuba people Christian, the largest such community in the country. It is this population, black, Christian, and historically marginalized by the Arab-Islamic government in Khartoum, that is now caught between famine, armed attacks, and near-total abandonment by the international aid system.

The region’s troubles long predate the current war. A comprehensive peace agreement in 2005 ended Sudan’s second civil war, but the Khartoum government insisted on a boundary that left Africans and Christians stranded inside the northern state when South Sudan achieved independence in 2011, retaining control over the resource-rich Nuba lands. Maisonville described that government as “very Arab and extremely Islamic” and said the people on the ground spoke plainly about what that has meant for them: “Historically, to this day, Sudanese do subjugate and then even eliminate Christians and black people.”

The population responded by forming its own resistance government, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), which grew out of the broader southern liberation struggle. The SPLM-N controls most of South Kordofan and has made freedom of religion a foundational principle of its governance, a deliberate rejection of the Islamist ideology that has driven Khartoum’s treatment of the region for decades.

The regional capital, Kadugli, however, remained under government occupation.

Sudan’s civil war erupted on April 15, 2023, out of a power struggle between two former allies: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The two had together removed long-ruling Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir in a 2019 coup, then jointly seized power again in October 2021 by overthrowing the civilian transitional government. But neither would accept subordination to the other.

“Between the two, neither would agree to lay down their arms and submit to the other,” Maisonville said. “The ability to create a power-sharing solution did not work.”

The country descended into civil war beginning in Khartoum, and the fighting soon spread to every corner of Sudan.

The RSF, Maisonville noted, is distinct from the ideologically driven Khartoum government. Its roots lie in the Janjaweed militias, Arab nomadic fighters and traditional camel herders from the Sahel and Darfur regions. “They’re motivated by resources and money,” he said, describing them as “really a mercenary force.”

The RSF has seized control of Darfur’s gold mines and, backed by the United Arab Emirates and several neighboring African states, has become wealthy enough to maintain a steady flow of weapons. The SAF, by contrast, is supported by Russia and Iran, the latter viewing Khartoum as an ideological ally in a relationship with deep roots.

Osama bin Laden based al-Qaeda operations in Khartoum for approximately five years during the early 1990s, using Sudan as a hub to build alliances and lay the groundwork for attacks against Western targets before being expelled in 1996.

According to FEWS NET, Emergency and Catastrophe outcomes are expected to deepen through September 2026, the peak of the lean season, across Dilling and Kadugli, the surrounding Western Nuba Mountains, and SPLM-N-controlled areas receiving high numbers of displaced persons. Markets in the region are among the least functional in Sudan, with food prices far above national averages.

The situation around Kadugli is particularly acute. As of November 2025, the SAF sealed the city, preventing civilians from leaving. SPLM-N and RSF forces have surrounded it from outside, while the government, according to Maisonville, is “using the civilians as human shields,” trapping people inside under famine conditions. People are slipping out at night and arriving at displacement camps in states of severe malnutrition.

Renewed fighting since late October 2025 displaced more than 88,000 additional people in Greater Kordofan alone, pushing total displacement in South Kordofan above one million, according to the International Organization for Migration.

The displacement routes themselves are harrowing. Civilians navigating active frontlines face journeys lasting days or weeks, marked by hunger, theft, intimidation, and abuse. No UN presence remains in Kadugli, and most international NGOs have suspended or drastically reduced operations.

In late March 2026, an airstrike struck a funeral gathering in the Nuba Mountains, killing seven people and injuring dozens, according to OCHA. The attack followed a March 20 drone strike on a teaching hospital in East Darfur’s capital that killed 70 people, including the hospital’s director and three medical staff members.

At Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel, one of the only functioning hospitals in the Nuba Mountains, patients routinely walk up to three days to reach care. Starlink, which had provided a communications lifeline, was later banned by authorities after the fighting escalated.

Maisonville’s team visited Thobo IDP camp, which alone holds 69,000 people. It is one of many camps absorbing the nearly 3 million displaced persons who have poured into the region since 2023, in a part of the country where most farming is still done by hand and there is almost no electricity.

Inside the camp, the team encountered a young woman named Angelina suffering from edema, a clinical sign of severe malnutrition, while caring for her three children. She had been trapped in Kadugli, starving, and managed to escape only by slipping out at night. Her case, Maisonville said, was not exceptional.

“You’re seeing many people having to flee, being trapped in the city, and they’re coming out starving.”

The international response has been almost absent. Samaritan’s Purse is operating in the area, along with a small local NGO called KODI and a handful of other groups, but Maisonville said the organizations are overwhelmed.

“There’s very little support for what’s a real humanitarian catastrophe. And there’s also very little word getting out about it. Almost no Western presence here.”

Both the SAF and RSF are accused of recruiting child soldiers, while other young people are forced to work in the gold mines financing the war. Save the Children estimates that 8 million children across Sudan are now out of school.

The Free Burma Rangers’ immediate goal is to document the crisis and demonstrate that the Nuba Mountains remain accessible to aid organizations willing to make the effort. The rainy season, running from June through September, will further isolate the region as roads become impassable, and IPC projections indicate the worst food insecurity is still ahead.

“You have Muslims coming to this region who have been fed an ideology that’s anti-Christian by the government for years,” Maisonville said. “And yet they flee here because it’s the only safe place, and they’re quickly, rapidly turning to Christianity.”

“You’re seeing Christians giving their last blanket, their last satchel of seed to IDPs to help them survive and thrive,” he said, describing people who had been taught for years to see those same Christians as enemies.

That nearly 3 million people fled to one of the poorest corners of the earth tells you how catastrophic conditions are elsewhere in Sudan. That the Nuba Christians took them in tells you who they are.

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