More than two years after it began in April 2023, the war in Sudan shows no sign of ending, with deadly consequences for the people of Africa’s third-largest country. On August 5th the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, said that residents of el-Fasher, in the western region of Darfur, faced starvation. It was a grim sign of the humanitarian toll of the war at a time when the locus of the conflict is shifting westwards, raising the prospect of a permanently fractured state.