Sudan

Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa bordered by the Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Egypt, the Red Sea, Eritrea, Ethiopia and South Sudan, Africa's third-largest country by area with a population of 51.8 million as of 2025 and Khartoum as its capital and most populous city. The territory was home to a succession of ancient cultures and the Kingdom of Kush before Nubian Christian kingdoms formed and Arab migration from the fourteenth century reshaped the region; the Funj sultanate dominated central and eastern Sudan from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries before Egyptian conquest under the Muhammad Ali dynasty, the Mahdist Uprising, and a British-Egyptian condominium beginning in 1899 that in effect governed Sudan as a British possession until independence on 1 January 1956. Islamist rule under the Gaafar Nimeiry regime deepened a rift between the Islamic north and the animist and Christian south, which had already fought a civil war from 1955 to 1972; a second civil war between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army led to South Sudan's independence in 2011. A military dictatorship under Omar al-Bashir ruled from 1989 to 2019, committing widespread human rights abuses including genocide in Darfur that killed an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people, until 2018 protests led to his 2019 removal; Sudan has been embroiled in a third civil war since 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and remains a least developed country reliant chiefly on agriculture.