Those who refused to let Sudan disappear from view
“My homeland has become a hell.”
Words of Mohammed Amin, a Sudanese journalist who woke to the sound of bombing on the first day of a civil war that recently entered its fourth year. It has since become the world’s largest, fastest-growing displacement crisis ever recorded. Mohammed has been reporting on the conflict ever since. He is one of the few.
On June 17 he was named Journalist of the Year at the One World Media Awards, but could not accept his award in person due to being denied entry to the UK. The reason? The Home Office did not believe he would leave. This all unfolded during World Refugee week. It is a story of the barriers and discrimination Sudanese people continue to face, not only in their own country, but in being seen and heard beyond it.
“As a Sudanese journalist and part of the Global South, I deeply feel that I have a responsibility to bring the voice of the Sudanese people to the media from inside the country,” said Mohammed Amin. “despite the risks journalists face.”
For most news audiences in the UK and beyond, Sudan barely registers. Coverage remains a fraction of other global conflicts like Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran. When Sudan does appear, it is brief, and usually tied to a grim milestone. Headlines read “war that has displaced nearly twelve million people and killed tens of thousands enters second, third, fourth year.”
This is not simply a failure of the attention economy. There is no clear protagonist or antagonist, no straightforward heroes. Mohammed says that “For a long time, Sudan has not been covered by the international media. When it does, the reporting does not reflect the real situation on the ground, as most international reporters do not have a deep understanding of the root causes of the conflicts in Sudan.” The warring military factions, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, have both been accused of atrocities. The conflict resists the kind of simplified framing that travels easily across international news cycles. Ukraine has NATO allies and a front door to Europe. Gaza has decades of political history in Western consciousness and a diaspora that demands to be heard. Sudan has two warring generals and a narrative that is difficult to hold.
The structural barriers compound the editorial ones. Sudanese journalists and fixers have been killed or forced to flee, with 90% of media infrastructure destroyed according to the Sudan Media Forum. Internet and telecommunications have been deliberately disrupted by warring parties, pushing millions into digital isolation and making it extraordinarily difficult to file from inside the country. Physical access is severely restricted. When Western broadcast media did cover Sudan in those early weeks the focus was on the evacuation of foreign nationals. A study of nearly 80,000 news articles found Gaza averaged 58.5 articles per day in English-language media. Sudan did not rank among the most covered conflicts. Unlike in Gaza or Ukraine, where foreign correspondents have some access and institutional support, Sudanese journalists are largely reporting alone.
“The totalitarian regimes in Sudan have made things worse by imposing restrictions, and censoring and harassing the local media.”
And so the silence grows.
But some remain determined to break it.
This was evident at this year’s One World Media Awards where reporting on Sudan won four awards across fourteen categories. The awards recognise the most outstanding coverage of underreported stories from and about the Global South.
Inside Darfur: Siege and Massacres, winner of the 2026 Current Affairs Award, is a remarkable piece of journalism. Much of it was constructed through the eyes of citizen journalists using smuggled-in iPhones to document daily life during a bloody siege. It is testimony built from the inside out, in a place where outside access is almost impossible.
Mostafa, a resident of El Fasher, filmed his daily life for the BBC Eye investigation before having to flee the city.
Khartoum was awarded the 2026 Feature Documentary Award. It follows the destruction of a city and five Sudanese people living through it, shot at considerable personal risk by filmmakers who eventually had to flee. Rather than abandon the story, producers evacuated the four Sudanese directors and their subjects to Nairobi, where they completed the film using green screens, drawings and dream sequences. Creative director Phil Cox describes the lengths to which they went to complete the story:
“We worked for months to evacuate everyone, using our last production funds to bring the team and participants to safety in Kenya. Once in Nairobi, we all sat on mattresses in shared accommodation with no film and little funds. Losing everything created a bond where subjects and filmmakers eventually determined that in the face of war it was more important than ever to complete this film. We decided to find a new way to tell the story, to be bold, cinematic and creative. We didn’t know if it would work or fail but we had become a family born by circumstance and cinema was our weapon.”
The Ayin Network was awarded the 2026 Press Freedom Award for maintaining a journalistic presence inside Sudan against extraordinary odds, supporting a local network of reporters and ensuring that, even as war blazed around them, Sudanese audiences could still access reliable news.
These works make the conflict in Sudan feel proximate, and perform a function that democratic societies depend on. When atrocities go uncovered, they go unaddressed. Funding follows attention. Policy follows coverage. The aid response to Sudan has been chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the crisis, with UN appeals repeatedly falling short even as needs surge. At the same time, Sudan has received a fraction of the sustained international media attention given to conflicts such as Gaza, a disparity that is not unrelated to the weakness of political and donor response.
Mohammed Amin has written about what it feels like to bear witness to the destruction of his country as a journalist, not a general or a president or an ambassador, with no power to stop what he sees. The Home Office did not believe he would leave Sudan behind. He never has.