The Wars We No Longer Watch
Sudan, Yemen, DRC, Myanmar, Haiti, the Sahel: six conflicts, over 30 million displaced, hundreds of thousands killed. And a media silence that has never been so deafening.
In 2024, the humanitarian crisis in Cameroon was mentioned in 28,800 articles in French, English, Spanish and Arabic across the world.
That same year, the war in Ukraine was mentioned in 451,000 articles.
A ratio of 1 to 15. And yet Cameroon has topped, for three years in a row, the list of “world's most neglected displacement crises” published annually by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). One million people there live in forced displacement. The UN's humanitarian plan for the country was funded at 45 % in 2024. Almost no one talked about it.
This asymmetry is no accident. It is a mechanism. A mechanism with a name — attention fatigue — and very concrete consequences: fewer articles, less funding, less political pressure, less aid. More dead.
Here is what is happening while no one is watching.
Sudan: the world's worst humanitarian crisis
Three years after the start of the civil war between General al-Burhane's army and the Rapid Support Forces of General Hemedti, on 15 April 2023, Sudan now holds a grim title: the world's biggest humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations.
The numbers stagger. 34 million Sudanese need humanitarian aid — close to two-thirds of the population. 21 million face acute food insecurity. Famine has been officially declared in ten regions of the country, including the displacement camp of Zamzam, almost emptied out after the fall of El-Fasher in late October 2025. More than 2,000 people have been killed in attacks on health facilities since the war began, according to the WHO. And more than 100 humanitarian workers have lost their lives.
For the period January–mid-March 2026 alone, the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded more than 500 civilians killed by drone strikes, mainly in the strategic Kordofan region. By mid-April 2026, the figure had risen to nearly 700 killed.
Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, speaks of a “failure of the international community.” For the Sudanese activist Hala Alkarib, addressing the UN Human Rights Council: “Sudan is no longer just a battlefield. It has become a hotspot of instability that could ignite the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.”
How many articles in the global press? A tiny fraction of the attention given to Gaza or Ukraine.
DRC: six million dead since 1996
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, war has never really stopped.
Since 1996, the two Congo Wars and the state of permanent conflict in the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces are estimated to have killed more than six million people, according to UN figures. In raw numbers, it is the deadliest conflict since the Second World War.
In January 2025, the March 23 Movement (M23), an armed group backed by Rwanda according to several UN reports, captured Goma, the capital of North Kivu. At least 2,900 people were killed in the fall of the city. More than 700,000 people were displaced between January and February 2025. By February, Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, had fallen too.
| Indicator | DRC, latest data |
|---|---|
| Internally displaced persons | 6.9 million (April 2026) |
| People in need of humanitarian aid | 14.9 million (2026 UN plan) |
| People targeted by aid | 7.3 million (due to underfunding) |
| Deaths since 1996 | over 6 million (UN estimate) |
| Projected displaced by end of 2026 | 9 million (UNHCR) |
| Humanitarian budget requested for 2026 | $1.4 billion |
According to the UN Population Fund, sexual violence rose by one-third in 2025 compared to 2024. Four women die every hour in childbirth in the DRC, or from pregnancy-related complications — one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. The World Food Programme estimates that one in four Congolese cannot meet their basic food needs.
The east of the country also holds the world's largest reserves of coltan, a strategic mineral essential to the smartphone, aerospace and defence industries. Almost no one, in practice, makes the connection — at least not in the French-language press.
Yemen: eleven years of war, 28 % funded
In March 2026, Yemen passed the eleven-year mark of its war.
The UN puts the cumulative toll of the conflict at more than 377,000 deaths, victims of fighting and its indirect consequences — famine, cholera, the collapse of health services. Even before the latest escalation, more than 80 % of the population lived below the poverty line.
Today, 18 million people face food insecurity in Yemen. The country is also enduring one of the worst water crises in the world. The rainy season of August 2025 brought devastating floods across the entire country, deepening already unaddressed needs.
French-language media coverage of Yemen, which peaked around 2018-2019, is now nearly nonexistent — except during attention cycles tied to Houthi attacks on the Red Sea. Yet France remains one of the main suppliers of weapons to the Saudi-Emirati coalition involved in the conflict since 2015 — more than €8 billion in military equipment delivered between 2015 and 2020.
Myanmar: 7,000 civilians killed, and silence
On 1 February 2021, the Myanmar army seized power in a coup, ending ten years of democratic transition. Five years on, Amnesty International records more than 7,000 civilians killed by the junta, 3.5 million people displaced, and more than 6,000 deaths documented by independent UN experts.
The methods leave little doubt as to their systematic nature. According to UN expert reports cited by the United Nations:
“Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in junta custody, 365 shot in the head, 215 burned alive. Beheadings, dismemberment and the disfiguring of bodies are scandalously frequent.”
In March 2025, a devastating earthquake struck the Sagaing region and central Myanmar, killing nearly 4,000 more people. The humanitarian ceasefire then announced by the junta was broken by its own army within days, according to NGOs on the ground. And the December 2025 elections organized by the military regime — without the elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, still detained — were recognized by almost no democratic state.
In the best months, French-language coverage shrinks to a handful of scattered articles.
Haiti: 90 % of the capital in the hands of gangs
Two and a half hours' flight from Miami, the Haitian state is ceasing to exist.
According to the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at least 5,500 people were killed in gang-related violence between March 2025 and mid-January 2026. 1.45 million people are internally displaced — a figure up by a third in less than a year. The criminal groups, allied within the “Viv Ansanm” coalition, now control around 90 % of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and have spread into three of the country's ten departments.
To grasp the material dimension of the collapse: only 10 % of hospital facilities are fully operational. 40 % of medical staff have left the country. In Port-au-Prince, two thirds of health facilities are partially operational or out of service after being attacked, looted or burned. Just one public hospital with surgical capacity remains in operation in the capital — constantly overwhelmed.
In October 2025, Hurricane Melissa flooded several regions of the country, killing 43 more people. In September 2025, the UN Security Council authorized the transformation of the multinational security support mission into a “Gang Suppression Force” (GSF) of up to 5,550 members, whose first contingents arrived in April 2026.
International humanitarian aid was funded at just a quarter of needs in 2025.
The Sahel: the war Europe walked away from
Since the withdrawal of French forces from Mali (2022), Burkina Faso (2023) and Niger (2023), the central Sahel has been spiralling into a dramatic security collapse — paralleled, on the French side, by an almost total breakdown of media coverage.
The Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), affiliated with al-Qaeda, is expanding its grip. The Islamic State in the Sahel is advancing in parallel. And according to the Global Terrorism Index 2026, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the three central Sahel countries now top the world list:
- Burkina Faso: 2nd country in the world most affected by terrorism (score 8.32)
- Niger: 3rd (7.82)
- Mali: 4th (7.59)
On 25 April 2026, a coordinated attack by JNIM and the Front for the Liberation of Azawad (FLA) struck Bamako, Kati, Mopti, Sévaré, Gao, Bourem and Kidal simultaneously. Kidal fell. Mali's Defence Minister, Sadio Camara, was killed. It was the most significant military event in the Sahel since the initial seizure of northern Mali in 2012. In the French press, it generated only a few short news items.
Meanwhile, neighbouring Benin saw its number of terrorism victims rise by 70 % between 2024 and 2025. The threat is now moving toward the coastal countries of the Gulf of Guinea, which could, in the years to come, translate into a new wave of migration toward Europe — and a new wave of media coverage when it is already too late to understand what has been at stake for the past five years.
The top ten of the forgotten
Each year, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) publishes its list of the ten most neglected displacement crises in the world, based on three measurable criteria: humanitarian funding, media attention, international political engagement. Here is the 2025 list.
| Rank | Country | Region of focus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cameroon | Anglophone regions, Far North, Central African refugees |
| 2 | Ethiopia | Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, climate shocks |
| 3 | Mozambique | Cabo Delgado, first time on the list |
| 4 | Burkina Faso | Jihadist insurgency, internal displacement |
| 5 | Mali | Jihadist insurgency, FLA conflict |
| 6 | Niger | Lake Chad border, central Sahel |
| 7 | Honduras | Gang violence, displacement |
| 8 | DRC | North and South Kivu |
| 9 | Chad | Sudanese refugees, Lake Chad |
| 10 | Sudan | Ongoing conflict since 2023 |
One comparative figure says it all:
A ratio of 1 to 15 between the most neglected crisis and the most heavily covered war. Even though the humanitarian needs are often comparable.
The mechanics of forgetting
How is such an asymmetry possible?
It comes down to three structural factors working in tandem.
1. Geographic proximity. Media tend to cover conflicts close to their own societies. This is true of Western media, but also of Asian or Arab media. The war in Ukraine, in the heart of Europe, speaks to Europeans. The war in the Sahel — twice as deadly — feels far away.
2. Attention fatigue. According to the Digital News Report 2025 by the Reuters Institute, 40 % of the public worldwide now actively avoids the news. An all-time high. The most cited reasons: “too much bad news,” “a sense of powerlessness,” “emotionally exhausting topics.” The longer a crisis lasts, the less attention it attracts. Yemen, eleven years in, is the perfect example.
3. Geopolitical interest. As Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the NRC, sums it up:
To these three factors, an unprecedented information competition has been added since 2022. The war in Ukraine, then the war in Gaza from October 2023, have absorbed an enormous share of global media attention. According to a study cited by the NRC, Gaza and Ukraine received in 2024 some 58 and 19 articles per day in major English-language media, compared to 1.5 articles per day for the DRC and 0.06 for Chad.
What the silence costs
Forgetting is not neutral. It has consequences.
On funding. UN humanitarian plans have been systematically underfunded since 2023. In 2024, the Global Humanitarian Overview by OCHA recorded a shortfall of $25.3 billion — equivalent to barely 3.7 days of global military spending. To put it in perspective: Yemen at 28 %, Cameroon at 45 %, Haiti at 25 %, the DRC at roughly half of what it requested.
On the protection of civilians. When a crisis goes uncovered, diplomatic pressure to halt the violence evaporates. Armed actors operate with impunity, as the NRC report points out:
On memory. A war that no one tells does not exist, in the political sense of the word. It generates no mobilization, no outrage, no precedent. It can repeat itself ten times in the same region without a single lesson being drawn.
On democratic health. A press that only covers what its audience likes eventually stops being a press. It becomes an emotional entertainment service.
What this means for you
This article does not aim to rank suffering. A victim in Gaza is no more — or less — important than a victim in Sudan. All wars deserve coverage. The problem is not that Gaza or Ukraine receive too much attention. It is that the others receive too little.
A few concrete steps for a reader who wants to push back against attention fatigue:
- Subscribe to at least one outlet that covers these regions. Le Monde has a strong Africa desk, Mediapart covers the Sahel and DRC, The Continent is an excellent pan-African magazine, as is Africa Is a Country. For Yemen, Myanmar, Haiti: Al Jazeera English, The Guardian, Reuters.
- Diversify sources. Following local journalists or permanent correspondents on social media is often worth more than the lengthy bulletins of major French outlets.
- Support the NGOs that operate in these regions. Médecins Sans Frontières, Action contre la Faim, International Committee of the Red Cross, Norwegian Refugee Council work in nearly all the conflicts cited above.
- Refuse emotional triage. The sense of powerlessness in the face of a flood of bad news is understandable. But the answer is not to look away — it is to respond with more organized, more sustained attention.
The real question
In the end, the question is not whether the media cover Gaza or Ukraine enough. It is whether we, as readers, are capable of holding equal attention to suffering that does not look alike, that unfolds simultaneously, that has neither the same setting nor the same rhythm.
That capacity has become rare. It takes work. It is cultivated. It is chosen, every morning, in front of a smartphone.
This is what Kero Média is doing by publishing this article. This is what you have done by reading it through to the end.
Attention, like giving, is a political act.
Main sources
- UN News — Crisis in Sudan: the world's worst humanitarian crisis
- Norwegian Refugee Council — List of the world's most neglected displacement crises 2025
- UNHCR — Annual displacement report
- OCHA — Global Humanitarian Overview 2026
- Reuters Institute — Digital News Report 2025
- Amnesty International — Annual reports 2026 by country
- Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026
- International Crisis Group — Sahel reports
- Médecins Sans Frontières — Haiti, 5 key facts in 2026
- Africa Center for Strategic Studies — The Sahel
- Africanews, France 24, Le Monde Afrique (continuous coverage)
This article is part of a series on the transformations of humanitarian information and the blind spots of international journalism. If you work in any of these regions — local journalist, aid worker, researcher — and would like to share testimony or data with us, please write to hello@kero.media.
