LONDON — A new report released by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group suggests that the death toll from the ongoing conflict in Sudan is significantly higher than previously reported, possibly surpassing 60,000 fatalities in the Khartoum region alone during the first 14 months of warfare. This stark figure highlights the brutal human costs of a conflict marked by severe violence and escalating humanitarian crises.
According to the study, direct combat has led to approximately 26,000 deaths, with the remainder largely attributed to diseases and starvation, exacerbated by the war’s disruption to food supplies and healthcare systems. Abdulazim Awadalla, programme manager at the Sudanese American Physicians Association, finds the estimates to be plausible, noting that malnutrition has critically weakened many people’s immunity, rendering them highly susceptible to otherwise manageable diseases.
The conflict in Sudan, which erupted in April 2023 due to a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has entered what has been described by observers as a “new phase of brutality.” Anticipations of a transition to civilian governance have devolved into violent confrontations that observers from a UN fact-finding mission in September have indicated might rise to the level of war crimes.
The consequences of the conflict are profound, with 11 million people displaced and nearly half the country’s population requiring humanitarian aid. The UN has pointed to Sudan as the site of the world’s largest current hunger crisis.
In Khartoum, the epicenter of much of the violence, residents report the sudden appearance of numerous graves near homes, a somber testament to the escalating violence and the complexity of accounting for the dead amid the chaos. The ongoing conflict complicates efforts to track fatalities, an already challenging task in Sudan even during peacetime due to typically low death registration rates.
The researchers employed a method known as “capture-recapture,” historically used in ecological studies but now adapted for estimating human casualties in crises, to arrive at their figures. Maysoon Dahab, a co-director of the research group and an infectious disease epidemiologist, explained that the technique involves cross-referencing multiple independent casualty reports and looking for overlaps, with fewer overlaps indicating a high likelihood of unrecorded deaths.
Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, while not involved in the study, praised the methodology as a crucial effort to understand the full scale of the conflict’s toll, despite inherent challenges in such approaches.
Contrasting sharply with these findings, Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health reports significantly lower numbers, with an official count of 5,565 war-related deaths. The disparity in reported figures underscores the difficulties in obtaining accurate data in conflict zones.
Accusations about responsibility for the civilian deaths are rampant, with the Sudanese army and RSF each blaming the other for the atrocities. Army spokesperson Brigadier General Nabil Abdallah accused the RSF of targeting civilians from the outset, while the RSF alleges that the army’s use of heavy weaponry like air strikes and artillery has been the primary cause of civilian casualties in Khartoum.
As international focus on Sudan’s crisis intensifies, accurate death toll data is more crucial than ever to inform humanitarian interventions and potential negotiations for peace. Amidst the continuing devastation, global and local efforts to quantify and alleviate the effects of the conflict remain critical.