Peter Power has worked through wars and humanitarian emergencies across the globe as head of UNICEF in Ireland. Even so, he says Sudan stands apart.
Nothing in his experience, he said, compares with what he encountered there.
Speaking to RTÉ News shortly after leaving Khartoum following a three-day visit last week, he said the brutality he witnessed and heard described was unlike anything he had faced before. “The levels of violence, the depravity,” he said, “is definitely more than I have ever, ever experienced – particularly sexual violence”.
He said the systematic use of sexual violence as a tactic of war was “beyond belief”.
Large areas of Khartoum have been reduced to ruins
Last October, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), successors to the Janjaweed, seized El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, after an 18-month siege.
About 10,000 men, women and children were slaughtered there, in what a later Guardian newspaper investigation called “the fastest and largest killing spree this century”.
That investigation also concluded that intelligence warnings from the US and UK, which had forecast a massacre, were not acted upon.
Pressed on the accounts he had heard during his visit, Mr Power stopped short of offering further detail.
He said the weight of those testimonies had been hard even to process.
“I’ve struggled with the evil that men can do this week – I have really struggled with it,” he said.
“How men can do what I’ve heard they have done? It’s beyond evil.”
A three-month-old baby receives treatment at Abolouk Hospital Stabilisation Centre in Khartoum
Sudan’s war has now stretched beyond three years, fuelling what is widely described as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.
UN figures show that 13 million people have been displaced.
Some 19 million people – roughly 40% of the population – do not have enough food, including 10m children.
Another 3.6m children are considered malnourished.
The conflict grew out of a power struggle between troops loyal to Sudanese Army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF, the feared paramilitary force led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.
Peter Power of UNICEF visits a health clinic in Khartoum
Yet the war is not being fought by domestic actors alone. Both sides have attracted outside support, with Sudan’s vast natural wealth – including major gold reserves – part of the draw.
Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia have broadly aligned themselves with the Sudanese Army, while the United Arab Emirates has been widely tied to the RSF, despite repeated denials from Abu Dhabi.
There have also been reports that Russian and Ukrainian forces are operating inside Sudan.
“Diplomacy is paralysed as both SAF and RSF leaders have little incentive to do a deal since they and their regional backers continue to profit from Sudan’s war,” according to a report by the International Rescue Committee.
“Large quantities of gold flow out of the country, while increasingly advanced weapons move in the opposite direction,” the report found.
Khawla Bint Alazwar Girls Primary and Intermediate School
As in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, drones have become one of the war’s most defining weapons.
“When I was in Khartoum, there were drones above and causing damage [on the ground,]” Mr Power said.
He said government forces had largely retaken the capital, but drones still circled overhead.
“Even our humanitarian convoys now see drones surveilling them all the time,” he said.
UNICEF says UN humanitarian convoys have been hit by drone attacks in four separate incidents since the start of 2026.
UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk said Sudan was experiencing a “sharp increase” in civilians killed by drone warfare, with 1,000 deaths recorded in the first five months of this year.
Sudan’s army chief, Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan (R) and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (L), who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)
Three years into the fighting, Mr Power said the destruction across Khartoum was on an almost unimaginable scale.
“There are virtually no buildings untouched, and so many destroyed, including the airport.
“The number of bombed-out aircraft as we were landing had to be seen to be believed.”
He described Khartoum as once being a large, thriving city marked by modern buildings and busy commercial life.
“It’s just been dragged back 20, 30 years,” he said, adding “it’s shocking”.
For many watching Sudan’s war, the scale of the devastation raises a persistent question: why has it failed to command greater international focus, or funding?
Humanitarian agencies say they have been squeezed by a steep fall in aid contributions from Europe, as EU states shifted toward heavier defence spending, and by the dismantling of the US government aid branch USAID.
UNICEF says a 71% funding gap has interrupted vital services, compounding the strain caused by insecurity on the ground.
That, it said, is “forcing difficult decisions about where UNICEF can operate and which children can be reached”.
Analysts say the conflict is often presented as an “intractable struggle” between two rival generals, while few governments or regional blocs appear willing to spend the political capital needed to push for a settlement, particularly at a time when several other wars are competing for attention.
United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, Denise Brown
“Attempts to generate more international attention for the Sudan war have often struggled due to competing global crises, including the Ukraine war, and more recently the US-Israeli attack on Iran,” said Magnus Taylor, Horn of Africa Deputy Director of the International Crisis Group, an advocacy group.
Still, he said that greater focus on the conflict – and especially on the suffering of Sudanese civilians – would not necessarily bring the war any closer to ending, given the extent of foreign involvement.
“The conflict is now bound up with complex regional and geopolitical dynamics, including intra-Gulf rivalries, that help sustain the fighting and risk tipping the Horn of Africa into a wider regional crisis,” he said.
For some, the failure to intervene sooner amounts to a profound abdication by the international community.
“Please don’t call this the forgotten crisis,” said Denise Brown, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, as the war moved into its fourth year in April.
“I’m referring to this as an abandoned crisis.”
