Sudan's war may have killed 80,000 people last year, researchers estimate
A new statistical model puts the likely 2025 toll far above the confirmed counts. It comes as a record number of countries vote to keep the UN's Sudan investigation running.
PANM — The war in Sudan most likely killed close to 80,000 people in 2025, and the true figure could be as high as 100,000, according to researchers who have tried to measure how much the confirmed counts leave out.
Writing for The Conversation Africa, a team led by Paola Vesco and including researchers from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program says its model gives a range of 73,000 to 90,000 deaths with 90 per cent confidence.
Why the counts differ
The numbers usually quoted are far apart. The monitoring group ACLED recorded about 19,000 direct deaths in 2025, a figure it describes as a conservative minimum. The Uppsala programme recorded more than 60,000 people killed in attacks on civilians and more than 10,000 in clashes between armed forces. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab estimated that at least 60,000 people were killed during the capture of El Fasher alone.
Communications were cut and aid agencies were shut out of much of the country during the year, so many deaths were never recorded. The researchers surveyed the people who code the Uppsala data and used their judgement of how much is typically missed to turn a single figure into a range.
El Fasher
The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting Sudan's army, took El Fasher in North Darfur in October 2025 after an 18-month siege in which it built earth walls around the city. A UN fact-finding mission concluded in February that the killings there bore the hallmarks of genocide.
The war began in April 2023. More than 34 million people now need humanitarian assistance and about 14 million have been displaced, the article says.
UN investigation renewed
Separately, Human Rights Watch reports that a record number of countries have voted to renew the mandate of the fact-finding mission for Sudan. Gambia, Malawi and Mauritius supported it for the first time, joining South Africa. The organisation's Geneva director, Hilary Power, criticised states for not giving the mission more capacity to preserve evidence for future prosecutions.
This report is based on an analysis in The Conversation Africa, via AllAfrica and a statement by Human Rights Watch, via AllAfrica.
