Blood Visible From Space

Why Is Sudan Not the Biggest Story in the World?

Satellite imagery published by Yale University shows blood stains on the ground in El Fasher, Sudan. The patches of reddish-brown discolouration are consistent with mass killings. Researchers can see what they describe as objects measuring 1.3 to 2 metres (the dimensions of human bodies) surrounded by ground soaked in so much blood that it is visible from space.

Let me repeat that: there is so much blood on the ground in El Fasher that satellites can see it.

https://x.com/HRL_YaleSPH/status/1982959658878022013/photo/1

Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, told the BBC he initially “could not believe” what he was seeing. “The horror, scale, and velocity of killing happening now unlike anything I have ever seen in a quarter century of doing this work.”

Thomas van Linge, an independent analyst who has tracked conflict zones for twelve years, wrote on X: “Never before have I read about there being so much blood it could be spotted by satellite. But that is now the reality in El Fasher.”

So where are the emergency UN Security Council meetings? Where are the wall-to-wall cable news coverage, the special reports, the anguished op-eds in every major newspaper? Where is the global outrage?

What Is Happening in El Fasher

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary militia led by warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has captured El Fasher after besieging it for more than 500 days. Around 260,000 civilians were trapped in the city. When the RSF stormed in on Sunday, they did not take prisoners.

Videos (many filmed by RSF fighters themselves) show executions in the streets. One shows an RSF fighter firing a Kalashnikov at an unarmed elderly man on the ground. Refugees describe men being lined up and shot in front of their families. “They shot them in front of us, they shot them in the street,” one woman told Reuters.

The UN refugee agency reports “horrendous and horrific” accounts from the 26,000 people who have managed to flee to the nearby town of Tawila in the past week. People with disabilities were executed because they could not flee quickly enough. Those who tried to escape were caught and shot “for unknown reasons.” Starving, malnourished civilians who do escape are walking for seven days to reach the nearest aid.

Yale’s researchers describe “piles of bodies executed en masse, or shot by snipers attempting to breach” the city’s perimeter wall. They see evidence of “house-to-house clearance operations” with what appears to be piles of human remains.

The United States government formally declared in January that the RSF has committed genocide. The UN has accused both the RSF and the Sudanese army of war crimes. This is not speculation or allegation—it is documented fact.

Why Does Nobody Care?

Sudan’s civil war has been raging since April 2023. More than 13 million people have been displaced, the largest displacement crisis in the world. Half of the country’s 51 million people need food aid. Famine was declared in a displacement camp in El Fasher last year.

Yet, for most people in the West, Sudan is not even on the radar.

Why? The answers are uncomfortable, but we need to say them out loud.

First: racism. Let us not pretend otherwise. When atrocities happen to Black and Brown people in Africa, the Western media treats them as routine, expected, almost natural. Can you imagine the global response if satellite imagery showed blood-soaked ground in a European city? If 260,000 people were trapped whilst paramilitaries executed civilians in the streets? It would be the only story in the world for weeks.

Second: geopolitical inconvenience. The United Arab Emirates is the RSF’s primary patron, supplying weapons, funds, and mercenaries. A leaked UN report found “multiple” flights from the UAE to bases in Chad, where arms are smuggled across the border into Darfur, with transport planes making “apparently deliberate attempts to avoid detection.” Britain, it emerged this week, has exported military equipment that ended up in RSF hands. Western governments that lecture the world about human rights do not want to confront their Gulf allies about backing a militia committing genocide.

Third: there are no easy heroes. Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have been accused of war crimes. The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias that committed genocide in Darfur in 2003. But the Sudanese army is not much better. There is no plucky underdog for the West to champion, no simple narrative to package for consumption.

Fourth: compassion fatigue. Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, the list of ongoing catastrophes is long. Editors and audiences are tired. Sudan is one horror too many. And so it gets a few hundred words buried on page seven.

The Collapse of Our Moral Imagination

What does it say about us (about our media, our governments) that mass killings visible from space do not warrant sustained attention? That civilians shot whilst fleeing, that blood pooling in quantities detectable by satellite, that a city of hundreds of thousands under siege and facing famine, barely register as news?

The UN Secretary General António Guterres said on Monday that “it is high time for the international community to talk clearly, to all countries that are interfering in this war, and that are providing weapons to the parties to the war, to stop doing that.”

High time? It is well past time. It was past time 500 days ago when El Fasher came under siege. It was past time when famine was declared. It was past time when the RSF and allied militias were forcing women to have “Arab babies” according to a UN report. It was past time when the United States declared genocide had occurred.

But there will be no sustained pressure, no real consequences, because Sudan is not a priority. Because Sudanese lives do not count the same as other lives. Because we have collectively decided that some atrocities matter and others do not.

The blood in El Fasher is visible from space. Our indifference, apparently, is visible from nowhere at all.

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