While the heartbreaking images of massacres in Sudan circulate easily on personal social media pages, mainstream media outlets rarely cover these tragedies. In the heart of Africa, Sudan has sunk into a heavy silence a silence that has smothered the voices of women, children, and the elderly amid fire, famine, and despair.

The fundamental question remains: Why is the blood of children in Darfur and Khartoum valued less?

Ethnic and religious violence in Sudan is not a new phenomenon. The country’s history has long been intertwined with massacres, slavery, and religious cleansing.

In the 19th Century, religious forces known as the Mahdists waged wars against non-Muslim tribes in southern Sudan. After the country’s independence in 1956, the divide between the Muslim-majority north and the mostly Christian and indigenous south led to decades of civil war that claimed more than two million lives.

In the 2000s, the Darfur massacres carried out by Arab militias known as the Janjaweed were recognised as a genocide targeting non-Arab and largely non-Muslim populations. The United Nations described it as one of the darkest chapters of modern history.

Today, those same forces, now under the name Rapid Support Forces (RSF), are repeating the same atrocities. Villages are being burned, women assaulted, children dying of hunger, and the elderly collapsing on the roads as they flee. Reports from Darfur and Kordofan show that deliberate attacks on ethnic and religious minorities continue without significant attention from the global media.

While every incident in Gaza is immediately placed at the top of world headlines often repeated endlessly, even before full verification, Sudan’s humanitarian catastrophe is relegated to the margins of international coverage.

Many of the world’s major media outlets, influenced by globalist institutions and left-leaning Western narratives, follow a selective approach in reporting human suffering. When a story aligns with Western regional politics, sympathy and attention surge; but when the victims are Africans, poor communities, or non-Muslims, silence replaces images and headlines.

This silence does not necessarily come from cruelty, but from an unjust structure in the global media system, which prioritises political and economic interests over humanity itself.

In Darfur, children die in their mothers’ arms from starvation, or are killed by militia gunfire. Why does no one see them? Perhaps because showing the deaths of Sudanese children offers no benefit to the agendas of these media powers.

Yet should they not reflect that human pain knows no borders, no religion, and no colour? A child is a child the only difference lies in the camera’s angle, which can shape or distort the truth.

Silence about Sudan is not only an injustice; it is a betrayal of human conscience. The modern world cannot claim to be humanitarian while remaining quiet before the suffering of its most defenceless people.

The media must learn that the true measure of a story’s worth is the human being, not political alignment. As long as our understanding of suffering remains selective and dependent on power and interest, real peace will never be achieved.

By Leila Naseri: Author | Composer | Social Cultural Activist