When “Sudan says” becomes the news
By Paula Slier
Imagine a newsroom in Johannesburg late at night. A statement arrives from Sudan’s army-backed authorities. It says the army has pushed back an attack, that the enemy has committed an atrocity, or that an incident is under investigation. There is a deadline approaching, a story to publish and no correspondent anywhere near the alleged attack.
The statement becomes a news report, perhaps with a few changes, but little independent verification. And somewhere along the way, an allegation made by one side in a war acquires the authority of news.
Sudan has been at war since April 2023, with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both have been accused of serious atrocities, and both have an interest in influencing how their actions are understood.
But there’s an important difference in how their statements can reach the public. The SAF’s commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, also heads Sudan’s ruling Sovereignty Council. The army speaks through the institutions of a government. A statement that begins with the words “Sudan says” can therefore sound more authoritative than one attributed to an armed group, even though the government itself is directly involved in the fighting.
Consider what happened last week.
On Thursday, 8 October, a drone struck a municipal building sheltering displaced families in Al-Nuhud, West Kordofan. Twelve people were reportedly killed and eight wounded, most of them women and children. The following day, another drone struck civilians near the Abu Shandi displacement camp in Blue Nile state. Local officials initially reported at least 30 deaths, while the Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers later put the toll at 41.
The United Nations (UN) expressed alarm about the attacks.
But who carried them out?
The Kordofan Observatory, a local monitoring group, blamed the Sudanese army for the Al-Nuhud strike. In Abu Shandi, local officials and Emergency Lawyers accused the RSF, although an RSF-led alliance denied responsibility. A local governor also alleged that the drone responsible had been launched from Ethiopian territory, something that has not been independently established.
None of these competing claims should be accepted simply because someone has issued a statement.
For South African newsrooms, the difficulty is obvious. We are trying to explain one of the continent’s most devastating wars to our readers, often without journalists who can independently verify what is happening at the scene. That makes local doctors, human rights organisations, witnesses and independent monitors especially important. Their accounts may be incomplete or contradictory, but they cannot simply be dismissed because an official spokesperson offers a more convenient explanation.
I’ve covered enough wars to know that military statements are sometimes accurate, sometimes incomplete and sometimes deliberately misleading. Even when a spokesperson believes what they’re saying, that doesn’t mean the information is correct.
There are three questions I think every newsroom should ask.
Who is making the claim, and what interest do they have in how the event is reported?
What evidence is available beyond their statement?
And when an investigation is promised, what happened to the findings of the previous one?
That last question is particularly relevant to another incident in Sudan this week.
On Monday, 12 October, Burhan ordered an investigation into airstrikes that killed gold miners near the disputed border with Egypt two days earlier. Emergency Lawyers said at least 72 people had been killed and accused the Egyptian air force of carrying out the attacks. The Sudan Doctors Network initially reported at least 13 deaths. Neither toll has been independently confirmed.
Egypt’s military has not acknowledged carrying out the strikes, although it has confirmed an ongoing campaign against illegal gold mining within what it describes as Egyptian territory.
Announcing an investigation may sound reassuring. But Burhan had also promised an investigation after a similar attack near the Egyptian border in June. The findings of that inquiry have not been made public.
Surely the first question journalists should be asking now is what happened to that earlier report.
Meanwhile, civilians continue to pay an enormous price. The UN human rights office documented more than 1 000 civilians killed in drone strikes in Sudan between January and May this year. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that more than 400 children were killed or injured during the first nine months of 2026, with drones responsible for a significant proportion of those casualties.
The families killed while sheltering from the fighting will not be issuing press releases. Neither will the miners caught in the airstrikes. Their stories reach us through survivors, doctors and local organisations working in extraordinarily difficult conditions.
For South African readers, the issue is not simply whether one army is more believable than another. It is whether the information reaching us has been independently examined or merely passed along from people who have a vested interest in what we believe.
That distinction matters in every conflict I’ve covered, but particularly in Sudan, where access is difficult, independent reporting is limited and the pressure to publish has never been greater.
When a government promises an investigation, journalists should follow up. When an armed group claims a victory, they should ask for evidence. And when the only source is a military spokesperson, the report should make that clear.
In Sudan, the question isn’t only what happened. It’s who is telling us, and why.
Paula Slier is an international journalist, war correspondent and information warfare specialist, and the founder of Newshound Media International.