By the time I reached the hilltop over Kadugli in June, the war in Sudan had been raging for 1 year, 2 months and 7 days — more time than the war in Gaza, less than the one in Ukraine. Yet despite having killed many thousands of people and displacing millions more, this brutal civil war has remained nearly unknown to most of the world. Many NGOs no longer operate in the country. The United States Embassy fled to Ethiopia shortly after the fighting erupted. I arrived in Sudan with the help of a rebel group that controlled parts of the south. Armed men ushered me in over a muddy border road two weeks before without even a stamp in my passport.

We had now climbed the hilltop to a position the rebels had seized, a stony outcrop where a city of more than 100,000 people spread out across a lush African plain. Through a pair of binoculars, I could make out Kadugli’s residents beginning their day in what was still territory held by the government. Kadugli once served as a staging ground for a slow ethnic slaughter as the Sudanese regime tried to wipe out the rebels in the surrounding mountains. Villagers paid the price instead, as entire settlements were destroyed by barrel bombs. Many families hid in caves. But the dictatorship fell in 2019, and last year, the two generals who seized power in its wake turned against each other. A new civil war began.

Now, in this valley, the tables had turned: As the generals fought each other elsewhere, the rebels were on the offensive.

Kadugli’s food stores had dwindled since the rebels took the main supply route to the city, a wide paved road I could make out through the binoculars. You might have expected the people of this place to have fled by now. But nowhere in Sudan is safe. Khartoum, the capital, has fallen along with other major cities as the generals continue their war. The de facto government has relocated to a port on the Red Sea. Instead, Kadugli seems to be awaiting the arrival of those who sent the fighters on the hilltop: The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, known here by its main initials, S.P.L.M., which has been fighting Sudan’s government on and off since 1983.