Sudan

The attack on a teaching hospital in Al Deain, the capital of East Darfur state, has rendered the facility non-functional.

An attack on a ⁠hospital in Sudan’s Darfur region has killed at least ‌64 people, including 13 children, according to the head of ⁠the World ⁠Health Organization (WHO).

In a social media post, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Saturday that multiple patients, two female nurses and one male doctor were also among those killed in the attack on Al Deain Teaching Hospital in Al Deain, the capital of East Darfur state, on Friday night.

Another 89 people, including eight health staff, were wounded, he added.

The attack damaged the hospital’s paediatric, maternity, and emergency departments, rendering the facility non-functional and cutting off ‌essential medical services in the ‌city.

“As a result of this tragedy, the total number of fatalities linked to attacks on health facilities during Sudan’s war has now surpassed 2,000,” said Tedros, adding that over the nearly three-year conflict between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the WHO had confirmed the killing of 2,036 people in 213 attacks on healthcare.

There was no immediate information about who was behind the attack.

The war between the army and the RSF erupted in mid-April 2023, unleashing a wave of violence that has led to one of the world’s fastest-growing man-made humanitarian crises, with tens of thousands of people killed and more than 12 million forced from their homes.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, while the RSF has been implicated in atrocities in Darfur that United Nations experts say bear the hallmarks of genocide.

“Enough blood has been spilled. Enough suffering has been inflicted,” Tedros said. “The time has come to de-escalate the conflict in Sudan and ensure the protection of civilians, health workers, and humanitarians.”

Local resident says casualties include mourners at funeral and children playing nearby.

A drone attack launched from Sudan has killed 17 people in Chad, according to the Chadian government, which has pledged to retaliate against any further strikes as the civil war in the neighbouring nation rages on.

A spokesman for the Chadian government announced the death toll on Thursday from the attack on the border town of Tine, which had been targeted despite “various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border”.

It occurred as mourners gathered at a house on Wednesday for a funeral, according to a local resident quoted by the Reuters news agency, who reported there were two explosions and casualties included mourners and children playing nearby.

Local government sources said it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, according to Reuters.

Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby called a meeting of the defence and security council on Wednesday night, ordering the army to “retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming from Sudan”, according to a presidency statement.

Early on Thursday, the government said Chad had strengthened its security presence at the border and could potentially carry out operations on Sudanese territory.

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) denied involvement in a post on Telegram, blaming the Sudanese army.

Porous border

The conflict in Sudan between its military and the RSF began in April 2023. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 12 million – nearly one million of them fleeing under fire to Chad, according to the United Nations.

The border between Chad and Sudan, which is nearly 1,400km (870 miles) long and located in a desert region, is porous and difficult to control.

Almost the entirety of Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan bordering Chad, has been captured by the RSF. The last major city there under the military’s control, el-Fasher, was seized by the RSF in October. The UN has accused the paramilitary group of carrying out massacres with “hallmarks of genocide”.

On February 21, the RSF claimed control of the border town of Tina, which is separated from Tine in Chad only by a narrow stream bed that is dry most of the time.

Chad closed its eastern border with Sudan last month after clashes linked to the war killed five Chadian soldiers. Its government said the move was aimed at preventing “any risk of the conflict spreading”.

Drones a key weapon of war

Drones have become a key weapon used by both Sudan’s military and the RSF.

The Sudanese army has received Iranian-made drones and Turkish and Russian military support.

The RSF, which has no air force of its own, has been equipped through a network of supply routes reportedly running through Chad and other transit states with reports pointing to the United Arab Emirates as a key supporter, an allegation that Abu Dhabi denies.

In the first two months of 2026, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project recorded 198 strikes by both sides, at least 52 of which caused civilian casualties. The attacks killed 478 people.

The United Nations is warning that rapidly escalating drone warfare in Sudan has killed more than 200 people in little over a week as schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure become targets.

Trump administration accuses the group of receiving support from the Iran and carrying out violence against civilians.

The United States has designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist” group, as the administration of President Donald Trump widens its crackdown on the organisation.

The State Department accused the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood on Monday of receiving support from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Washington labelled the group as a “specially designated global terrorist” (SDGT) and said that it will designate it as a “foreign terrorist organisation” (FTO) starting next week.

“The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood uses unrestrained violence against civilians to undermine efforts to resolve the conflict in Sudan and advance its violent Islamist ideology,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

The SDGT designation enables economic sanctions against the group, while the FTO label makes it illegal to provide material support to it.

The State Department accused Muslim Brotherhood fighters in Sudan – where the Sudanese military is fighting against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group – of conducting “mass executions of civilians”.

The RSF, which has been accused of major human rights violations, and its supporters often argue that they are fighting Muslim Brotherhood forces.

On Monday, the United Arab Emirates welcomed Washington’s move to blacklist the group in Sudan.

The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the “US measure reflects the sustained and systematic efforts undertaken by the administration of President Trump to halt excessive violence against civilians and the destabilizing activities carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan”.

In January, the Trump administration blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in Lebanon, Jordan and Sudan, a move the groups rejected.

Established in 1928 by Egyptian Muslim scholar Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood has offshoots and branches across the Middle East, including political parties and social organisations.

The group and its affiliates say they are committed to peaceful political participation.

In the US and other countries in the West, right-wing activists have for years tried to demonise Muslim immigrant communities and Israel’s critics with accusations of links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some of Trump’s hawkish allies in Congress have also for years been calling for the group to be blacklisted.

The international community has a structural problem in reading conflicts: it treats silence as neutrality, when in fact silence is a manufactured condition. When international monitors report the absence of civil protests or testimonies from conflict zones, they are not documenting consensus; they are documenting the success of propaganda operations. This article argues that conflicting parties are now actively exploiting the spiral of silence as a strategic weapon, and the international community’s failure to recognize this results in a structurally flawed diplomatic response even before analysis begins. This argument will be constructed in three layers: how the spiral is engineered, how Sudan proves it, and why the international interpretive framework must be updated immediately.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974), in her theory Spiral of Silence, describes how individuals suppress their minority opinions to avoid social isolation. This theory is built on the assumption of a free society, where silence is an organic social choice. In conflict zones, this assumption collapses completely. Silence is not chosen; it is engineered. Propaganda actors flood information channels with dominant narratives not to convince audiences that these narratives are true, but to signal which voices are safe and which are not. The result appears to be consensus. But it is not.

Social media has transformed this architecture of silence into something almost invisible. Platforms give users real-time visibility into how much public response a particular view receives. When opposing content is systematically silenced through algorithmic deprioritization and coordinated mass reporting campaigns, people conclude that speaking out is pointless, or worse, dangerous. Jowett and O’Donnell (2019) note that bandwagon propaganda does not require audiences to believe in the dominant narrative, only to believe that others already believe it. At that point, the spiral becomes self-sustaining: it no longer needs external enforcement because the target population has internalized it themselves.

The agenda-setting theory proposed by McCombs and Shaw (1972) adds another layer to this problem and makes it much more difficult to detect. The media and information channels do not merely reflect reality; they determine what is considered worthy of discussion from the outset. When warring parties dominate the information space, they not only shape international perceptions. They also determine which testimonies are considered safe for local residents to give and which silences are necessary for survival. This is not a side effect of conflict. It is a deliberate targeting of the information environment itself, and the international community has been consistently slow to recognize this as such.

Two technical mechanisms make all this work, and neither requires direct violence to be effective. First, bandwagon propaganda floods channels with coordinated content until dissent appears marginal and irrelevant. Second, fear appeals work without needing to be explicitly stated. In conflict environments, people have witnessed what happens to those who oppose the dominant narrative, so self-censorship becomes a rational choice, not a sign of weakness. The combination of the two is the most dangerous: the spiral no longer requires external enforcement because its targets are already silencing themselves. This is not the moral failure of individuals who choose to remain silent; it is a system designed to work exactly as intended.

The case of Sudan illustrates this most clearly. Both the SAF and the RSF launched coordinated information operations from the early days of the conflict. RSF channels spread a narrative of civilian protection, while the SAF network framed the war solely as a counter-terrorism operation. These two narratives, although contradictory, both served to narrow the space for independent civilian testimony. Civilians in Khartoum and Darfur faced an information environment that made disclosure a risk calculation rather than a right. The internet blackouts recorded at various periods of the conflict were not merely technical obstacles; they were a very clear signal of the price to be paid for speaking out.

Zeitzoff (2017) shows that users in environments close to conflict significantly alter their disclosure behavior under perceived surveillance, even without direct threats. In Sudan, the threat is anything but hypothetical. The diplomatic consequences are immediately apparent: the UN’s initial assessment of the Sudanese conflict has been repeatedly criticized by humanitarian organizations for underestimating civilian casualties and displacement figures. This is not a methodological failure. It is the intended result of a deliberate information architecture, a condition in which the most relevant data is already missing before the verification process even begins.

What makes this a diplomatic crisis, not merely an information crisis, is that the international response is built on what is reported. When open-source assessments treat civilian silence as a neutral baseline, they are not accessing the truth on the ground. They are accessing whatever has made it through the spiral. This pattern repeats itself in various conflicts because it consistently works in Syria, in Myanmar, and in Ethiopia. In each case, the international community finds itself working with records that have been curated by the parties most interested in concealing crimes.

The solution is not more monitoring infrastructure. What is needed is a different interpretative framework. Silence must be treated as a data point that requires explanation, not as a default condition that requires nothing. When there are no reports from conflict zones, it does not mean that nothing is happening; rather, it means that the conditions for speaking out have been destroyed first. Protected witness pathways, verification networks from the diaspora, and analysis of anomalies in information flows are all useful, but only after a fundamental recognition that the problem is not a lack of information, but rather that engineered silence is constantly misinterpreted as the absence of anything worth investigating.

The Spiral of Silence was originally a theory about how even free societies can slowly and unconsciously silence themselves. In the hands of modern propaganda architects, the theory has been repurposed as a method to ensure that the most credible witnesses to crimes never speak out and that their silence is interpreted by the international community as proof that there are no crimes to investigate. The arguments in this article, from the mechanisms of spiral engineering to the role of social media to the case of Sudan, all point to the same conclusion: as long as silence is interpreted as absence, the international community is not conducting independent analysis. They are confirming the narrative of those most interested in concealing the truth. The loudest voices are not the most honest; they are simply the ones allowed to speak.

Thousands of civilians have fled an opposition stronghold in eastern South Sudan after the army ordered evacuations to clear the way for a military offensive, the latest sign that the country’s fragile peace is unravelling, as fears of a return to all-out civil war haunt the world’s youngest nation.

The town of Akobo, near the Ethiopian border, was almost completely emptied by Sunday after the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces issued an ultimatum on Friday demanding that civilians, aid workers and United Nations peacekeepers leave ahead of a planned assault.

“The town is now almost empty,” said Nhial Lew, a local humanitarian official. “Women, children and the elderly have left and crossed into Ethiopia.” By Sunday evening, he could hear the conflict closing in. “We are hearing the sound of machine guns approaching,” he told the Associated Press news agency.

The army’s deadline was set to expire Monday afternoon.

The order extends a government counteroffensive, launched in January and dubbed Operation Enduring Peace, that has already displaced more than 280,000 people across Jonglei state since December, when opposition forces began seizing government positions.

The UN’s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan warned of a possible “return to full-scale war” if the country’s leadership didn’t take the challenges it faces more seriously.

“Preventing further mass atrocity crimes, institutional collapse, and the destruction of South Sudan’s fragile transition requires urgent coordinated national, regional and international re-engagement,” the report said.

Akobo, which had been considered a relatively safe haven and sheltered more than 82,000 displaced people, is one of the last remaining strongholds of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, or SPLM-IO, the armed movement loyal to South Sudan’s detained former vice president, Riek Machar.

Two UN flights evacuated most humanitarian staff on Sunday, though the International Committee of the Red Cross had not yet pulled its personnel from a surgical unit it runs at the local hospital, where wounded patients were still being treated.

“We are worried for our patients,” said Dual Diew, the county health director. “We tried to make a plan to take them to a safer location, but we don’t have enough fuel.”

The offensive comes amid a wider breakdown of the 2018 peace agreement that ended a civil war between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those backing Machar, a conflict that killed an estimated 400,000 people and forced millions from their homes.

Machar has been under house arrest in the capital, Juba, since March 2025, facing charges of treason and murder that his supporters say are politically motivated.

His detention coincided with a sharp rise in armed opposition activity, and a UN inquiry has since found that South Sudan’s leaders have been “systematically dismantling” the accord.

Conflicts have taken place across the country among groups associated with the two factions, said Jan Pospisil, a South Sudan researcher who spoke to Al Jazeera.

Dozens killed in the north

On Sunday, at least 169 people were killed, among them 90 civilians, including women and children, when armed men stormed a village in Abiemnom county in the country’s north.

The local administrator blamed the attack on elements of the White Army, a militia historically allied to Machar, alongside SPLM-IO-affiliated forces. The group denied any involvement. More than 1,000 people sought shelter at a UN base in the area.

“Such violence places civilians at grave risk and must stop immediately,” said Anita Kiki Gbeho of the UN mission in South Sudan.

Aid organisations operating in the conflict zone have also been targeted, with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials, MSF, saying on Monday that 26 of its staff remain unaccounted for, a month after a government air strike destroyed its hospital in the town of Lankien and a separate facility in Pieri was looted.

Staff who had been reached described “destruction, violence and extreme hardships”. It was the 10th attack on an MSF facility in 12 months.

“Medical workers must never be targets,” said Yashovardhan, the charity’s head of mission in South Sudan, who uses only one name.

Pospisil said the crisis had exposed the fragility of Kiir’s hold on power.

“The state is literally falling apart,” Pospisil said, referring to the convergence of conflict in the country and the elderly state of the president, whose condition has raised questions.

Pospisil added that the outcome of Machar’s ongoing trial would likely shape what comes next.