War in the Nuba Mountains began in 1985 but intensified significantly after the National Islamic Front (NIF) took power in 1989. Violence against civilians in the Nuba Mountains has been constant during conflicts in Sudan. The actual attacks of the Nuba Mountains began in 1992 which continue today; systematic targeting in the late 1990s of entire civilian groups who lived in areas where oil was discovered. The government used a range of forces to carry out the assaults: People’s Defense Forces (PDF), Missiriya Arab militias (Murahileen) and, eventually, the Khartoum government’s own Mujahideen (Holy Warriors). These forces intentionally targeted the local food supply chain, creating a stranglehold over traditional Nuba areas, forcing civilians to flee into the lowlands for survival or face starvation.

The Sudanese government established a pattern of assaults against civilians, killing, torturing, raping, and displacing millions. Assault tactics included:

• Mass starvation and forcible displacement.
• Blocking humanitarian aid.
• Harassment of internally displaced persons.
• Bombing of hospitals, clinics, schools, and other civilian sites.
• Use of rape as a weapon against targeted groups.
• Indiscriminate killing-atrocities that are well documented by the international community
• Employing a divide-to-destroy strategy to pit ethnic groups against each other, causing enormous loss of civilian life.
• Training and support for ethnic militias who commit atrocities.
• Destruction of indigenous cultures.
• Ethnic cleansing
• Enslavement of women and children by government-supported militias; and
• Impeding and failing to fully implement peace agreements.

As recently as 2016, the Sudanese government continued bombing campaigns in civilian areas and restricting humanitarian aid and access to areas of the country. Individually, each action has had devastating, often deadly consequences for its victims. Together, these actions have threatened to destroy entire groups of people. Among the most intense campaigns against civilians have been the assaults against the Nuba in South Kordofan.  

There has been a massive complex conflict over land and resources for decades among the Nuba communities, where the Sudanese government imposed unfair policies aimed at starving the defenseless citizens of Nuba mountains so that they can submit to tyrannical rules with no option. They pass passed the Unregistered Land Act, which gave the government ownership of all unregistered land to seize them. The government has also used other means to take land from the Nuba, including confiscating lands for large-scale agriculture ventures or local development plans, and forcing Nuba people to work on their own lands. These actions have created a stranglehold over traditional Nuba areas, forcing civilians to flee or face starvation.

The Sudanese state and its allies have also used other means to attack the Nuba, including targeting their food supply chain, declaring jihad, and issuing a fatwa in 1993 that declared some Nuba Muslims to be “not true Muslims”. Some estimates suggest that 100,000 Nuba people died as a result of government attacks in 1992-1993 alone.

Marginalized communities of Nuba Mountains, continue to experience severe health inequities. These inequities can be caused by a number of factors, including:

The health situation in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan is dire, with limited access to healthcare, medical resources, and testing and surveillance capacity. As of February 2024, about 65% of the population lacked access to healthcare, and 70–80% of health facilities were not functioning due to the ongoing conflict. Other challenges include:

• Expensive services: Some say health services are very expensive, and there is no transportation to hospitals. Patients may have to be carried on beds, donkeys, or bicycles.
• Lack of staff and supplies: The healthcare system is suffering from a lack of staff, funding, and medical supplies.
• Attacks on medical facilities: Health facilities are at breaking point, due to shortages of staff, life-saving medicine and critical equipment, exacerbating current outbreaks and causing unnecessary deaths. Repeated attacks on medical facilities and hospitals by looting and occupying the facilities with armed forces since the beginning of the conflict, including on personnel, patients and transportation of medical supplies, are also restricting the delivery of health services.
• Blocked humanitarian assistance: The April 2023 war has increased the suffering of local communities by blocking humanitarian assistance. The virtual collapse of Sudan’s health care system, among other critical services, threatens not only the lives of many Sudanese people in the present day, but it also threatens future generations.
• Displacement: The conflict in Sudan has decimated the country’s public infrastructure, including the health system. The health care system is suffering from an acute lack of staff, funding and medical supplies in addition to repeated attacks, looting and occupation of medical facilities and hospitals. More than 70 percentof health facilities in conflict-affected regions of Sudan are inoperable or closed. The displaced population from the area is living in a catastrophic humanitarian situation.

The Nuba Mountains region of Sudan has faced a number of challenges to education, including conflict, instability, and a lack of investment:

• Conflict: The region has been in a state of conflict since 1989, and schools have been directly attacked. 
• The war in Sudan has damaged and converted many schools into shelters of displaced families. It has also led to school openings and closings, which have disrupted children’s education.
• Combatant groups have occupied, looted, and destroyed schools and all educational facilities.
• The quality of education become poor due to the scarcity of educational resources, and there is a significant need for trained teachers, books, better school infrastructure, and schools often lack the space to operate properly. Among the other needs to build the foundation for a sustainable education system.
• Teachers, graduates, educated cadres have been detained and other have been killed in accusation of supporting the opposition movements.
• Poor learning environment where schools may be forced to operate under trees or in makeshift structures, which can hinder the learning process.
• Notwithstanding to the high enrollment rates, children in the Nuba Mountains have low rates of literacy and numeracy, which UNESCO and the World Bank have called a “learning crisis”.
• Despite the international agreement that protect schools, attacks on schools continues.

Throughout the Hirsty of civil war in Sudan, large number of Nuba people subjected to massive displacement, escaping their villages to peace camps around the state capital and others migrated to far in Northern part of the country. Millions of families left their homes in search of a safe place, but they faced significant shortages inadequate shelter, medical treatment, and the availability of food and water, because of the damage to the agricultural, economic, and service sectors of the state caused by the war and its complications.

The number of internally displaced people in Sudan as a result of the recent war that broke out in mid-April 2023 has reached more than 6 million people, according to the latest update issued by the International Organization for Migration last January. This number is in addition to more than 3 million previously registered displaced persons as a result of conflicts and wars in Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan. Gedaref State hosts about 400,000 displaced people, distributed between more than 30 shelter centers in the state. United Nations reports indicate that about 25 million people in Sudan are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, including about 14 million children. Food insecurity is widespread, with 37 percent of the population, or about 17.7 million people, suffering from acute hunger.

Social injustice has far-reaching consequences, both for individuals and society. It creates barriers and limits opportunities for marginalized groups, perpetuating cycles of poverty, discrimination, and exclusion. The major form of social injustice is the substantial human rights violations against Nuba civilians in conflict settings continue to occur as victims face barriers to justice and accountability due to lack of effective mechanisms and legal immunities afforded to government authorities, fostering a climate of endemic impunity. Victims and/or survivors of sexual violence face even tougher barriers and often do not report incidents due to insecurity, stigma, the fear of reprisal and other obstacles. Among the obstacles are laws and policies that fail to ensure a safe environment for reporting sexual and gender-based violence incidents and a consistent failure to prosecute these crimes. Many forms of human rights violations against the Nuba people and many other forms that embodied in unfair distribution of resources, opportunities, and privileges within a society, which can lead to systemic barriers that perpetuate inequality. It can manifest in many ways and affect various aspects of people’s lives. Some common forms of social injustice include but not limited to:

• Discrimination: Racial and ethnic discrimination for being Nuba, gender, socioeconomic status, religious, and age discrimination. For example, racial equality is a universal social issue that violates human rights and hinders access to education, healthcare, employment, and food. 
• Economic inequality: This includes poverty, which involves depriving people of essential goods in the midst of abundance resource. All goods from natural resources and productions have been transferred to far north part of the county and fall on the hands of wealthy people who are in control of power.   
• Arbitrary arrest and detention: Illegitimate incarcerations on basis of perceived political affiliation with the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N).
• Gender-based violence: Physical violence such as sexual harassments by raping women and underage girls
• Unlawful killings: Indiscriminate attacks, extrajudicial executions, torture of killing people as collective group and throw them in mass graves as seven of them were found surrounding the state capital (Kadugli).
• Religious persecution: Imposition of Islamic Sharia law on all Sudanese regardless of their religion or belief. The ruling regime employed various approaches, especially against Christians, including burning and demolishing worship places (churches), arbitrary arrest and prosecuting religious leaders, confiscating religious properties, denying Christians some rights, including the right to own a place of worship by rejecting to build a new church.