Deep in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, a forgotten people are being ground between war and famine. The World Food Programme calls it the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, and the numbers are staggering: nearly 34 million people need urgent help, 29 million are acutely food-insecure, and more than 400,000 may already be dead.
But this isn't just a crisis of statistics. It's a crisis of targeted annihilation. The mostly Christian Nuba people have endured decades of persecution from Sudan's Arab-Islamic government. Now, with the civil war entering its third year, they're being trapped inside their own cities, used as human shields, and systematically starved.
"The government is trapping the people within the city," said Caleb Maisonville, a frontline aid worker with the Free Burma Rangers. "They're not allowing the civilians to move out. They're using the civilians as human shields."
The Nuba Mountains have always been the heartland of Christianity in Sudan. Roughly 45 percent of the Nuba people are Christian—the largest such community in the country. Black, Christian, and historically marginalized, they were deliberately left stranded inside northern Sudan when South Sudan gained independence in 2011. The Khartoum government wanted control over the resource-rich Nuba lands, and it didn't care who suffered.
"Historically, to this day, Sudanese do subjugate and then even eliminate Christians and black people," Maisonville said, describing what the people on the ground told him.
The Nuba responded by forming their own resistance government, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), which made freedom of religion a foundational principle—a deliberate rejection of the Islamist ideology driving Khartoum's oppression. But the regional capital, Kadugli, remains under government control, and that city has become a death trap.
Sudan's civil war erupted in April 2023 when two former allies—General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, of the Rapid Support Forces—turned on each other. Neither would accept subordination. The fighting started in Khartoum and spread to every corner of the country.
The RSF is a mercenary force, motivated by resources and money. They've seized Darfur's gold mines, backed by the UAE and neighboring states. The SAF is supported by Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, the people caught in the middle are being ground to dust.
The siege of Kadugli is especially brutal. As of November 2025, the SAF sealed the city, preventing anyone from leaving. SPLM-N and RSF forces surround it from outside. Inside, famine is tightening its grip. People slip out at night, arriving at displacement camps in states of severe malnutrition.
At Thobo IDP camp alone, 69,000 people are crammed into a space with almost no electricity, where most farming is still done by hand. Maisonville's team met a young woman named Angelina, suffering from edema—a clinical sign of severe starvation—while caring for her three children. She had escaped Kadugli by sneaking out in the dark.
"Her case was not exceptional," Maisonville said. "You're seeing many people having to flee, being trapped in the city, and they're coming out starving."
The international response is almost nonexistent. No UN presence remains in Kadugli. Most international NGOs have suspended operations. Samaritan's Purse and a small local group called KODI are trying, but they're overwhelmed.
"There's very little support for what's a real humanitarian catastrophe," Maisonville said. "Almost no Western presence here."
Yet amid the horror, something remarkable is happening. Muslims who were fed anti-Christian ideology by the government for years are fleeing to the Nuba Mountains because it's the only safe place. And they're rapidly turning to Christianity.
"You're seeing Christians giving their last blanket, their last satchel of seed to IDPs to help them survive," Maisonville said. People who were taught to see Christians as enemies are being welcomed with open arms.
Nearly 3 million people have fled to one of the poorest corners of the earth. That tells you how catastrophic conditions are elsewhere in Sudan. That the Nuba Christians took them in tells you who they truly are.
