Sudan, with its 1.8 million square kilometers, is the third largest country in Africa. For years, 50 million people have been suffering largely unnoticed by the world in a conflict, from displacement, hunger, and from diseases such as malaria and cholera.
At the end of October 2025, in the city of Al Fasher, tens of thousands of people, including children, were killed and women raped within just a few days in an unprecedented massacre. There has been hardly any media coverage of this.
The conflict is so complex that it is almost impossible to fully explain. But the impact on the lives of the people is catastrophic.
A team of the Austrian Red Cross was in Atbara, a city 600 km west of Port Sudan and 300 km east of Khartoum, together with colleagues from the Sudanese Red Crescent Society and journalists from the Austrian newspapers Kronen Zeitung, Kurier and Die Presse. They visited a camp for internally displaced people where 16,300 people have found refuge. The video our colleagues brought back from this trip shows powerful, shocking, and above all, unfiltered images of their visit. It serves as both a striking example of what is arguably the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our time and a powerful appeal for continued international solidarity and humanitarian aid.
First press trip of a Red Cross society to Sudan
As it has been virtually impossible for journalists to travel to war-torn Sudan for years now, making independent on-the-ground reporting difficult, this material takes on particular significance.
In fact, this press trip was the first press trip conducted by a Red Cross or Red Crescent society to Sudan since the outbreak of the conflict in April 2023.
Media outlets have been complaining about restricted access to the country to report on the situation on the ground. As a result, many stories of those affected are in danger of remaining unseen. Our colleagues experienced this first-hand during their press trip: despite intensive efforts, it proved impossible to obtain regular accreditation for an ORF TV crew and bring them into the country with professional television equipment. This makes the media coverage provided by the journalists travelling with us from the three major daily newspapers – Kronen Zeitung, Kurier and Die Presse – all the more gratifying. Their articles, as well as TV broadcasts of the Red Cross video on Puls24 and krone.tv, reached more than 6,2 million people in Austria.
Over the past three years, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has reached more than 10 million people in Sudan with healthcare, relief supplies, and sanitation and water infrastructure, among other things—but this aid will be needed for a long time to come.
Please donate to support life-saving aid on the ground: wir.roteskreuz.at/spl-sudan