As of 2026. Displacement in Darfur has continued to grow through 2025-26 with the fall of El Fasher and the emptying of the Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps, and no verified region-wide total has been published since.
Beginning in 2003, non-Arab Darfuri rebel groups took up arms against Sudan's central government over marginalization; Khartoum responded with a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign using regular forces and allied Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, targeting the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups. The United States government formally declared the campaign genocide in 2004, while a 2005 UN Commission of Inquiry found evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity but did not conclude genocide had occurred; the International Criminal Court later indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. The initial 2003-2005 phase displaced an estimated 2.7 million people and killed roughly 200,000-400,000, with death toll estimates varying considerably by source. Violence in Darfur, including large-scale killings in El Geneina and the 2024-25 siege of El Fasher, resurged dramatically after the outbreak of Sudan's broader civil war in April 2023.
Sudanese government forces and allied Janjaweed militias (later reorganized as the Rapid Support Forces) fought Darfuri rebel groups; the campaign against Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities was formally declared genocide by the United States
Sudan's 2008 census recorded roughly 7.5 million people in the Darfur states, implying about 6 million in 2003; the 2008 count was boycotted in parts of the region and is disputed by Darfuri groups, and no census has been held since. Estimates for Darfur's population today run from 9 to 11 million.
The figure of about 200,000 was the working UN estimate from 2006 and remains the most frequently cited; the US GAO's 2007 review of six competing estimates for February 2003 to August 2005 found figures reported by the State Department and others reaching about 400,000, the highest associated with the analyst Eric Reeves. Degomme and Guha-Sapir's 2010 Lancet study for CRED estimated roughly 298,000 excess deaths through 2008 and found that around 80 per cent were from disease rather than violence — a distinction routinely lost when the number is quoted as a count of people killed. Sudan's government under Omar al-Bashir rejected all of these, putting the toll at about 10,000 and accusing the UN of exaggeration. The range given here is an excess-mortality range and is not comparable with a direct-killing count.
Documented by the UN International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur (2005) — mass killing, torture, rape and forced displacement by government forces and allied militias — and charged by the ICC Prosecutor against Omar al-Bashir as murder, extermination, rape, torture and pillage; Sudan rejects both.
Sudan, Chad