Sudan’s death toll in 2025 could be as high as 100,000: how we did the count

Estimates of the number of people directly killed in Sudan’s civil war vary widely, in part because counting casualties in active conflict zones is extremely difficult. In 2025, for instance, one conflict monitoring organisation reported around 19,000 direct deaths from political violence across Sudan. Other research teams put the toll at more than 70,000. Conflict researcher Paola Vesco and her team have developed a model that helps measure the uncertainty around such conflict death estimates. Their approach takes into account the tendency of conflict datasets to underestimate fatalities, and provides a more realistic range of possible death tolls. They explain how their model could improve estimates in conflicts like Sudan’s.