Nicholas Kristof Sept. 12, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET When world leaders gather in New York this month for the United Nations General Assembly, I expect them to studiously ignore the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the horror in Sudan that both the Biden and Trump administrations termed a genocide. President Trump has set the tone by cutting aid there. What does the crisis look like on the ground? Let me tell you about a very bright 13-year-old girl who asked not to be named, because then she might be killed along with her parents.

She has smooth skin, an oval face with a high forehead, and a red head scarf to cover her hair. Last year she was near the top of her fifth-grade class of 60 students in the city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region of Sudan. She dreamed of being a doctor when she grew up. “I wanted to support people and give first aid,” she told me.

But a brutal militia called the Rapid Support Forces besieged the city and cut off most food supplies. Aid workers and policy experts pleaded with world leaders — including first President Joe Biden and then Trump — to try to block the R. S.

F. from massacring the city’s people. Neither did much, so last October, as long predicted, the R. S.

F. overran El Fasher and massacred perhaps 60,000 people. The girl’s family tried to flee but was stopped at an R. S.

F. checkpoint, according to accounts of the girl and four other family members I interviewed by Zoom with the help of an aid worker I know. The men and boys were separated at gunpoint, and then the women and girls were held for four days in a kind of rape camp, they said. The girl, then 12, told me that her ordeal started when two men stripped her and assaulted her."Every day they came to rape me," she said in the smallest of voices, looking down at her lap. "Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, sometimes three of them.

I was crying." Her sister and mother were also gang-raped each day, they said, and an older aunt told me she tried to intervene and was beaten. The militia commander agreed to release the women and girls on the fifth day, but said the men and boys would be killed. "We begged them not to," the girl’s mother said, and finally the commander let the group walk away, men and boys included, after taking their possessions. Some in the group had all their clothes taken and resorted to taking clothing from bodies of people who had been killed at the checkpoint, they said.

Yet the girl had suffered one more terrible cruelty that she and the family talk about only with great difficulty. Her ethnic group does not practice female genital cutting, while many other groups in Sudan do, often the most extreme kind, called infibulation. The gunmen held the naked girl down and a gunman sliced off her genitals, according to the girl herself and the other female members of her family.

Her aunt, a midwife, made a traditional herbal remedy to stop the bleeding and then stitched the girl’s genitals with needle and thread, she said. The wound became infected and may be complicated by a sexually transmitted infection as well, her family members said. The family eventually reached a camp for displaced people called Tawila and settled there, along with some 700,000 other survivors of the conflict.

The girl’s sister gave birth this year to a baby resulting from the rapes; she nursed the baby as she spoke. The men won’t talk about what happened to them when they were held, but the women say they saw some boys and men raped as well. What drives such savagery? In part it is interethnic competition for land.

In part it is the desire of outside powers for control over Sudan and the Red Sea. And in part it is racism toward non-Arab Black Africans."They were saying very bad words and called us slaves and dogs," the girl’s mother recalled. "They said African people are their slaves." Comments like that have been routine during attacks on African ethnic groups. I can’t confirm details of this attack, but multiple members of the girl’s family corroborated her account.