Maggie Michael

In 2023, the world focused on two wars – one in Israel and Gaza, the other in Ukraine. But war was also raging in Sudan – a war as brutal and bloody, and as devastating in its toll. Many have referred to the conflict, now in its tenth month, as “the forgotten war.” Reuters did not forget.

Within days of the fighting’s outbreak in Khartoum in April, a Reuters reporter and videographer were in Sudan, documenting the flow of refugees north to the Egyptian border. Days later, with the war spreading to Darfur, we were on the Chad border with Sudan, chronicling the refugees fleeing an ethnically-targeted killing campaign in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur.

In total, Maggie Michael, alongside visuals journalists El Tayeb Siddig and Zohra Bensemra, spent almost two months on the Chad-Sudan border interviewing, filming and photographing over 300 survivors of the ethnic bloodletting spearheaded by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an Arab-dominated paramilitary, and its allied Arab militias in Darfur.

The result of this multi-front reporting effort: the most revelatory and shocking account of how the fighting that erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese army and the RSF turned into a campaign of ethnic slaughter waged against the Masalit people of West Darfur.