War in Sudan no longer kills people with shells alone. It kills them too on the long roads that start in burning cities and end at a merciless sea, or a desert with no witness, or a border gate in a country they thought was closer to safety. Between the bullets of the warring parties inside the country and the border wires outside it, Sudanese people are living through one of the most brutal and humiliating refugee journeys in modern memory: they flee death and find it waiting for them at sea; they escape hunger and the desert swallows them; they seek protection and are treated as a security liability or cheap fodder in a marketplace of hatred and political score-settling.
From War to the Killing Escape Routes
Since the outbreak of the April 2023 war, Sudan has become a country overflowing with its own people beyond its borders. While millions were displaced inside, millions more crossed into neighboring countries: Egypt, Chad, Libya, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and places farther away. According to UN and humanitarian organizations, the war has produced the largest displacement and refugee crisis in the world, a total of approximately 11.5 million people.But escaping Sudan has not meant leaving danger behind so much as moving from one form of violence to another. In Egypt, which for decades was a social extension of Sudanese life, many suddenly found themselves facing a complex system of visas and residency permits, arrest campaigns, and constant fears of deportation. In Libya, where the state is fractured between rival authorities, detention centres, and smuggling networks, Sudanese people fleeing their country have become trapped between the need to work, the risk of arrest, the markets of smuggling, and the graves of the desert.
In one incident that captures the tragedy in miniature, Sudanese people were found dead deep in the Libyan desert after their vehicle broke down on a route used by smugglers. Food and water ran out, and people waited for eleven days in the scorching sand. Some survived, including children, but others died or disappeared. This was not an isolated incident, but a concentrated image of a route now open to ruin: vehicles breaking down, children drying out from thirst, and bodies buried far from homes and mothers.
As for the Mediterranean, it has become another chapter in this book of suffering. From Libya and other North African countries, Sudanese people board rotting boats, fleeing a war they did not make, and neighboring countries that want them only silent, temporary, and grateful for being tolerated. They find themselves between smugglers who extort them, coast guards who turn them back, and European systems that parade their commitment to human rights while paying others to keep the borders sealed. Some reach Greece or Italy. Others are pushed back and others die without their deaths amounting to even a news item.
Policies of Expulsion and Hatred
In Egypt, fear is no longer confined to crossing the border. It now lives in the street, at transport stops, at workplaces, and even inside homes. Human rights reports have documented the arrest of Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the death of some inside detention cells. Although some of those arrested were registered with UNHCR, they have been deported or threatened with deportation back to a country still on fire . These measures cannot be described as ordinary administrative procedures. They are a clear violation of a basic principle of refugee protection: no person should be returned to a place where they may face serious harm.
The situation has grown more difficult with the approval of the executive regulations of Egypt’s Asylum Law No. 164 of 2024, which transfers a large part of asylum management from UNHCR to the Egyptian authorities. While the law is supposed to regulate the situation of refugees, rights organizations have warned of the broad powers granted to the authorities, especially under the justifications of “national security” and “public order.” For Sudanese people, who constitute the largest group of refugees in Egypt, this shift raises fears that the new procedures may be used to narrow protection rather than expand it, turning what is supposed to be a framework for organising asylum into an additional tool for screening, restriction, and removal.
In Libya, the crackdown on Sudanese people takes a more chaotic and violent form. Many find themselves inside a space where rival authorities, detention centres, smuggling networks, exploitative labour, and racist and sexual violence overlap.
Libya does not recognize the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and has no functioning national asylum system, meaning that anyone who enters without authorization is treated as an “illegal migrant” rather than a person seeking protection. In this environment, fear of reporting becomes part of the very architecture of abuse: victims of violence, especially women — fear that turning to the police or the authorities will result in their own detention rather than their protection.
Reports have documented testimonies of Sudanese women subjected to rape, beatings, extortion, and forced labor, while international organizations have spoken of the continued arbitrary arrest, torture, and abuse inside detention centers, and mass expulsions and forced returns of migrants including children across the desert.
What is even harsher is that Sudanese people do not only face restrictive policies; they are also subjected to rising online hate speech in Egypt, Libya, and other North African countries. Entire narratives are woven around them: they are the cause of the economic crisis, the reason rents are rising, the ones competing with citizens for work, education, and healthcare, a demographic threat, and “guests” who have overstayed their welcome. This language does not always remain trapped behind screens. It moves into the street, into the look, into racist remarks, into mockery of skin colour, accent, and clothing, into physical violence, and into the refugee’s feeling that they are constantly required to justify their presence and apologise for surviving.
Hate speech against Sudanese people does not emerge from a vacuum. It finds fertile ground when governments and their supporters use refugees to explain economic failures or internal political tensions. Instead of questioning the authorities about inflation, debt, and public policy, the finger is pointed at the refugee. Instead of asking political elites about failure, corruption, and mismanagement, it is said that foreigners have overburdened the country. In this way, the Sudanese person is transformed from a human being fleeing war into a scapegoat; from someone with a right to protection into material for the market of populism.
A Responsibility That Does Not End at Sudan's Borders
This degradation cannot be separated from the responsibility of the two warring parties inside Sudan. Those who set the country ablaze and turned it into maps of territorial control and corridors of death are the first who drove Sudanese people onto these routes. Every shell dropped on a neighborhood, every siege of a city, every act of looting, every arrest, every incendiary speech that extends the war, each one pushes another family toward the border. The parties to this war do not only kill those who stay inside; they pursue those who flee too. They take the home first, then force the person to beg for survival from a world that would rather not see them.
But the anger cannot stop at Sudan’s borders. There is a heavy responsibility on the countries that welcomed Sudanese people with warm words and then grew impatient when the war dragged on; on the countries that signed international agreements and spoke of brotherhood and neighborliness and humanity, then permitted deportation, detention, and incitement.
The contradiction reaches its peak when some of the very countries that now restrict Sudanese people, leave them at border gates, or allow them to be humiliated and deported are themselves part of the network of interests and interventions that helped fuel the war in the first place, facilitated its continuation, or dealt with its parties as instruments of influence rather than sources of devastation. These countries do not stand outside the tragedy managing a sudden “refugee crisis.” They stand at its heart: in arms deals, in calculations over ports, gold, and borders, in political, military, or logistical support to its parties, and in the deliberate silence over crimes that have turned millions of Sudanese people into terrified crossers of deserts and seas.
And so a Sudanese person pays twice, for a war they did not choose: once when their city is destroyed, their home looted, and their family killed; and again when they arrive at the border of a state that helped, directly or indirectly, manufacture this hell, only to be received not as a victim of policies in which that state took part, but as an infiltrator, a burden, or a bargaining chip in the marketplace of domestic and foreign politics.
Selective Protection: When the World Decides Who Deserves Refuge
The catastrophe of Sudanese people has unfolded at an international moment in which the world is becoming narrower for refugees. In Europe, which has long presented itself as a guardian of asylum values and human rights, policies are moving steadily toward deterrence, return, and containment outside its borders.
In June 2026, EU institutions reached a preliminary agreement on new rules that as part of a broader drive to harden migration policy, would allow rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants to be sent to “return centers” in countries outside the EU, even where those individuals have no personal connection to those countries whatsoever. Human rights organizations condemned it widely and warned of arbitrary detention, danger, and abuse.
This shift belongs to Europe but is not Europe’s alone. It is part of a wider global atmosphere in which the language of protection retreats before the language of borders, hate speech against refugees grows louder, and migration is weaponized for political profit, the manufacture of fear, and the mobilization of voters. Perhaps it is Sudanese people’s misfortune that their war exploded at precisely this moment: a moment when the refugee, in much of the world’s rhetoric and policy, is treated as guilty before heard, as a burden before protected, as a number in security and electoral equations before being seen as a human being running from death.
Canada stands as perhaps the clearest exception, having announced an official government pathway to receive those affected by Sudan’s war, though one of its most prominent tracks remains conditional on having a qualifying relative already inside Canada. According to the Canadian government, 18,575 individuals had been approved for permanent residence and 6,135 for temporary residence under its Sudan-specific measures through March 2026. This matters. But it remains a small number against the scale of Sudanese displacement and the breadth of the need for safe, organized protection.
This gap reveals that protection is not only a matter of capacity, but also of political will. The world that today invokes limited resources and complex procedures knows, when it wants to, how to create fast-track pathways, provide temporary residence, and open schools, labour markets, and services to people fleeing war. This has happened in different experiences to varying degrees, and it should have happened, because civilians escaping violence do not need pity as much as they need a system that protects them from falling again. But what the situation of Sudanese people exposes is that this system does not work equally for everyone.
Today, three years since the outbreak of the war, Sudanese people appear trapped in a double void: a devastating war that does not receive enough attention, mass displacement that is not met with sufficient protection mechanisms, humanitarian funding far below what is needed, and borders that deal with those fleeing not as survivors of a catastrophe, but as a problem to be controlled or pushed away.
What Sudanese people need is not an exception or a privilege at the expense of others, but the minimum standard that should apply equally to all those fleeing wars: that they are not returned to danger, not detained because their papers are incomplete, not left to smugglers, deserts, and seas, and not turned into a scapegoat for crises they did not create. The dignity of a refugee should not vary according to the colour of their skin, the position of their country on maps of influence, or the proximity of their tragedy to the world’s screens and interests.
The Right to Survive Without Humiliation
In the end, Sudanese people standing in a UNHCR queue, or hiding from a security sweep, or crossing the desert in a battered vehicle, or boarding a boat in the dark of night, carry no invasion project and no demographic conspiracy. They carry the photograph of a home they lost, a key that may no longer open anything, a child who wants a school, a mother who needs treatment, the names of relatives and friends who died or disappeared, phone numbers still saved on their phone that never answer no matter how long they call, and one simple wish: to be able to sleep without hearing the sounds of bullets and shells.
The Sudanese war has not only robbed people of their homeland; it has forced them into a world that bargains with them even over their right to survive. What Sudanese people are facing today at borders, at sea, and across asylum streets is not merely a refugee crisis, but a harsh moral test: for the warring parties that created this tragedy; for neighbouring states that know the depth of their ties with Sudan and yet turn away from them; and for wealthy countries that want to keep death out of sight and away from their cameras, even when it unfolds in a desert with no witness, or at sea with no grave.
Sudanese people are not asking for pity. They are asking to be treated as human beings. And in a time of war, borders, and racism, that demand has become angry enough, and sorrowful enough.
