ICRC register of the missing in Sudan passes 11,000, up 40 percent in a year

More than 11,000 people are now registered as missing with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Sudan, a rise of more than 40 percent in a year. Farid Al Humaid, the ICRC spokesman in the country, gave the figure in early September. In the first half of 2026 the ICRC said it clarified the fate and whereabouts of 613 missing people. In all of 2025 it closed 846 such files. The caseload is growing faster than the closures.

The same office said it helped 38,512 families reconnect or stay in contact in the first six months of 2026 through a free telephone service. The ICRC and the Sudanese Red Crescent assisted 1,973 people with calls and field visits, including through a Restoring Family Links hotline. Inside Sudan the number is 60222. From inside the country the ICRC also lists +249 900 907 832 and the address kha_tracing_services@icrc.org, with hours Sunday to Thursday, 08:30 to 15:30 local time.

The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces is in its fourth year. The ICRC said more than 11 million people have been displaced, some more than once, and four million have left the country. Communication networks are down across large belts of territory. Families hunt names on social media lists of the detained and the dead. In 2025 the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement facilitated more than 560,000 phone calls in Sudan and from Egypt, South Sudan and Chad.

On the battlefield this week the SAF and allied Joint Forces said they had recaptured Hamrat al-Wiz in North Kordofan. That is one town on a shifting map. It does not shrink the tracing list. A UN fact-finding file before the Human Rights Council this month describes external weapons, fighters and logistics feeding both sides, and attacks on hospitals, schools, markets and displacement sites. Civilian infrastructure that would let a family place a call is part of what has been hit.

Eleven thousand is not a census of everyone who has vanished. It is the number of people whose relatives have managed to file a tracing request with the ICRC. Many families never reach an office. The 40 percent jump in a year tracks the spread of the fighting and the collapse of ordinary ways to send word. Closing 613 files in six months, against a register already above 11,000, is the arithmetic of a war that produces the missing faster than anyone can name them.

Al Humaid's practical advice was unchanged: contact the ICRC or the nearest Red Cross or Red Crescent society, or dial the Sudan hotline. The organisation warns that call volumes cause delays. The right it cites is simple. Relatives are entitled to know the fate of the people they have lost. The war parties and the states that arm them decide whether that right can be exercised. Hamrat al-Wiz changing hands does not, by itself, bring a name off the list.