More than 61,000 people died in Sudan’s Khartoum state during the first 14 months of the nation’s civil war; far surpassing previous estimates, according to a new study by researchers in the UK and Sudan.
Researchers found that approximately 61,202 people were likely killed in the capital of Khartoum between April 15, 2023—when the fighting between the army and a paramilitary group began—and June 4, 2024.
The vast majority of the deaths were attributed to preventable starvation and disease while around 26,024 of the deaths were “intentional” killings, the report found.
According to researchers, the deaths represent a “considerable increase” in the national average before the conflict between the army and paramilitary broke out.
Still, researchers in the study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed—noted that efforts to quantify deaths in Sudan have been severely hampered by what they described as a “fragmented” vital registration system.
Ongoing conflict in many areas of the country has also made it difficult for locals to report deaths at places such as hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries, while telecommunications issues and blackouts have further complicated the reporting of mortalities, researchers noted.
Due to the ongoing issues in Sudan, mortality estimates rely primarily on media and civil society reports of violent deaths, researchers said.
During their study, researchers relied on a sampling technique known as “capture-recapture;” compiling lists of dead individuals from a public survey circulated to respondents belonging to open social media groups online, a private survey circulated amongst key informants, and publicly available social media pages containing obituaries posted by first responders, community members, or burial sites.
The less overlap between the three separate lists, the more likely it is that deaths have gone unrecorded, information that can be used to estimate the full number of deaths, researchers said.
The study authors did note some limitations, including that their methodology assumes that every death has an equal chance of showing up in the data, for example.
Still, they stressed that the deaths of well-known individuals and those who were killed due to extreme violence were more likely to have been reported.
Researchers said their findings point to a significant rise in the death rate in Khartoum, and one that has also gone largely unrecorded.
“Indeed, the number of intentional injury deaths in the capital alone surpass those estimated for the entire country in the first 14 months of the war,” they wrote.
“Urgent diplomatic efforts to end the war, scaled-up and conflict-adapted humanitarian interventions, as well as continued efforts to document human rights violations, are urgently needed to mitigate a largely preventable death toll across the country and support post-conflict recovery and reconciliation.”
War broke out in Sudan in mid-April 2023 when violence erupted in the country’s capital following a power struggle between the government’s Sudanese Armed Forces and the rebel Rapid Support Forces.
The combat quickly spread to Darfur in western Sudan and other parts of the country.
Meanwhile, 25.6 million people—more than half of Sudan’s population—are expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity, the WHO director-general said.
“The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict, and respond to the suffering it is causing,” Ghebreyesus said.
