Johannesburg — It’s often called the forgotten conflict, but the civil war that has torn Sudan apart for 19 months is fueling the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. In just over a year and a half, 13 million people have been displaced from their homes. At least one overcrowded camp for displaced civilians is already dealing with famine, while other parts of the country are suffering though famine-like conditions.

Outbreaks of dengue fever, malaria, cholera and measles are hitting children the hardest, with the collapse of the education system also keeping roughly 90% of Sudan’s kids out of school.

Fighting broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The violence followed months of squabbling between the two top generals who’d been running the country — former allies who head the army and the RSF — during negotiations aimed at fully integrating the RSF into the army ahead of the formation of a new transitional government.

The talks broke down and the tension descended quickly into a full-scale war between the well-armed sides. The U.S. government, along with international partners, has tried to broker a peace agreement, but there’s been no progress. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has sanctioned individuals and companies affiliated with both sides in the war over alleged human rights abuses and war crimes.

Journalists and aid officials have largely been blocked from traveling to the country to report on the conflict first-hand, but independent researchers say the number of deaths from the war has been vastly unreported. According to a study published this week by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an estimated 61,000 people died in Khartoum State alone, home to the capital city of the same name, between April 2023 and June 2024. 

The study found that more than 90% of those deaths have gone unrecorded, but the estimated toll is considerably higher than previously believed. 

The study estimates that there have actually been more violent deaths just in Khartoum state than the current number of formally recorded deaths across the entire country.

“Our findings reveal the severe and largely invisible impact of the war on Sudanese lives, especially of preventable disease and starvation, said the report’s lead author Dr. Maysoon Dahab, adding that “the overwhelming level of killings” in the central Kordofan and western Darfur regions “indicate wars within a war.”

Fear of a bloody RSF assault on El Fasher as famine grips IDP camp

The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, in another report published this week, said RSF combatants were advancing on the city of El Fasher in Darfur from three directions. It’s expected that the RSF will launch an assault on the city anytime, which analysts fear will bring thousands more deaths.

If El Fasher falls to the RSF, there’s concern that the group will attack the nearby Zamzam camp, which is home to roughly 500,000 civilians displaced by the war. Siting satellite imagery, Yale’s HRL said the camp, which is still under the control of the Sudanese Army, had almost doubled in size in recent days, with new defensive positions visible, indicating preparations for an attack. 

Famine was formally declared in the Zamzam camp at the beginning of August, with aid workers warning that thousands of children would die in the coming weeks without access to proper nutrition.

Amnesty International says weapons from UAE and France in Sudan

The war in Sudan has been complicated by support and weapon supplies from external countries to both sides. A new report by Amnesty International alleges the RSF is using weapons supplied by the U.S.-allied United Arab Emirates, and equipped with military technology made in France. 

Amnesty experts have warned that those weapons could be used by the RSF to commit further alleged war crimes.

A July report by the rights group said there was a constant weapons supply from the UAE, China, Russia, Turkey and Yemen into Sudan, and often into Darfur, in breach of a long-standing United Nations arms embargo on the region.

The report said Amnesty had found evidence of RSF forces using newly-manufactured UAE armored personnel carriers called Nimr Ajban, equipped with French-made Galix weapons systems, in multiple areas of Sudan, including Darfur. 

Amnesty said it had verified photos shared on social media showing the APCs equipped with the Galix systems.

The rights group has called on the U.N. Security Council to expand the Darfur arms embargo, which has been in place for almost 20 years, to cover all of Sudan.

“Continued military support for the militia [RSF] due to the complexity of the situation in Sudan, and the involvement of several internal and external actors, is a key factor in the continuation of the war,” Sudan’s acting Charge DÁffairs in South Africa, Dr. Nawal Ahmed Mukhtar, told a group of journalists this week. “This must stop so that the massacres and crimes against humanity can come to an end.” 

A panel of experts sent by the U.N. Security Council arrived in Sudan earlier this week to investigate and document alleged war crimes by the RSF. 

It’s the first trip by such a U.N. fact-finding mission since the war broke out last year, despite months of reports suggesting that starvation and rape are both being weaponized against Sudanese civilians.

Three days after 24-year-old Alyssa Burkett was shot and then stabbed to death outside her office in Carrollton, Texas, Andrew Beard – with whom Burkett shared a 1-year-old daughter – was charged with her murder. The following day, Beard’s fiancée Holly Elkins voluntarily sat down with two detectives at the Carrollton Police Department.

“I wanted to use her as a witness in this. And if she had information that could put her in that witness column and not in the suspect column, I was gonna listen to her,” Det. Jeremy Chevallier told correspondent Peter Van Sant in “The Plot to Eliminate Alyssa Burkett,” an all-new “48 Hours” airing  Saturday, Nov. 16 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

Elkins told Chevallier and Sgt. Michael Harding she was convinced they had the wrong man. “I can’t believe my fiancé would do something like that to a woman, or to anybody …” she said.

And Elkins also said she was willing to help if she could: “I just feel bad to not help something that I think is very sad that happened … I feel conflicted morally because I want to help, but I don’t have anything …”

But there was one thing Elkins was adamant about – Beard was home with her the morning Burkett was killed. “… if I had any reasonable reason to believe that Andrew left that house and did it, I would give it to you. I would, I would, I promise,” Elkins told detectives.

“At first it seemed like an open-and-shut case,” Chevallier told “48 Hours.” He would later discover “Andrew Beard was only half of the story.” 

On the morning of Oct. 2, 2020, Burkett parked outside the Greentree Apartments leasing office when a man in a black Ford Expedition pulled into the spot next to her. He got out of his SUV and shot Burkett through the driver’s side window.

Assuming she was dead, the shooter began driving away, but Burkett was still alive. As she got out of her car and ran towards her office, the assailant — who several eyewitnesses described as a Black man — got back out of his car and chased Burkett with a hunting knife. He stabbed and slashed her 44 times before he fled for good. When Burkett’s mother, Teresa Collard, arrived at the scene, she immediately gave investigators a name: Andrew Beard.

In the months leading up to her death, Burkett and Beard, who was 33 at the time, had been involved in a bitter custody battle over their daughter, Willow. After Willow was born in July 2019, Beard filed for primary custody of the baby. “Andrew, he made more money than [Alyssa] … She was afraid that … he wanted Willow, and he was gonna get her,” Burkett’s younger sister Madison Grimes told Van Sant.

Finally, in the spring of 2020, things between Burkett and Beard seemed to calm down after they came to an agreement on visitation with Willow and child support. Beard had also started dating Holly Elkins, and Burkett’s family said she was happy that Beard had found someone new.

But the peace between Beard and Burkett would be disrupted when he started demanding primary custody of Willow again. Burkett also couldn’t shake this uneasy feeling that she was being watched, and she told her family that Beard always seemed to know where she was. “Every day you feel like you’re having to watch over your shoulder … That’s how I felt she lived,” Collard told “48 Hours.”  

Within hours of Burkett’s murder, police pulled Beard over in his F-150 pickup truck with Elkins and Willow inside. Police seized his truck and told Beard and Elkins that they could leave, but they couldn’t return home. Later that night, police searched Beard’s home and found GPS tracker batteries and charging stations that matched a tracking device detectives discovered under Burkett’s car earlier that day.

The next day, police searched Beard’s F-150 pickup and uncovered two bottles of dark foundation — makeup investigators believed Beard used to disguise himself as a Black man on the morning of the murder. Later that night, police located that black Ford SUV the assailant drove to the scene. It was found abandoned less than a mile from Beard’s house.

On Oct. 5, 2020, Beard surrendered at the Carrollton Police Department and was charged with murder. He spent two weeks behind bars before he was released on bond. Chevallier said he was worried about baby Willow’s safety, so he reached out to the federal government to take the case under federal firearm laws.

Because an unregistered silencer was found during the search of Beard’s home, the federal government agreed to take the case. Eight days after he bonded out, Beard was rearrested and ultimately charged with cyberstalking using a dangerous weapon resulting in death.  

In June 2022, Beard pleaded guilty. One month later, he spoke with the FBI as part of a plea deal, and he had a lot to say — especially when it came to Elkins’ role in the plot to kill Burkett. “… It was …’this is how you’re gonna do this,’ it was, ‘… you’re gonna wear this dark makeup …’ That was her plan … that’s how it’s gonna be done,” Beard told the FBI.  

Investigators soon realized that the Holly Elkins who told detectives, “I want to help, I really do. But I don’t have any answers …” just four days after Burkett’s murder, had given the performance of her life. “She was the one running the show … she was telling him what he was gonna do …” Chevallier told “48 Hours.”

Investigators dug back into text messages between Elkins and Beard, which revealed Elkins’ true feelings about Burkett. “She hated Alyssa with a burning passion,” Harding told Van Sant.

One week before the murder, Elkins texted Beard while she was away on a trip in Mexico and wrote, “I hope you handle it I’m not coming home to b***s***.” Beard responded, “That’s my goal.”

During his interview, Beard explained to investigators: “I just basically said, ‘OK’ and became submissive to whatever she wanted me to do, that’s the task I did.”

After speaking with Beard, the FBI spent about a year building a compelling case against Elkins. And in the eyes of the investigators, Elkins was just as culpable for Burkett’s death as Beard. “I 100% believe that if Holly and Andrew had never met that Alyssa Burkett would be alive today,” Harding told “48 Hours.”

In May 2023, Beard was sentenced to 43 years in federal prison. Investigators believed Elkins thought the case was over. “I think she believed that the further she got away from this, the less involved she was gonna be,” Chevallier said. “But it didn’t work out for her.”

Two months after Beard was sentenced, Elkins was arrested by federal agents at the Miami airport after returning from a trip to the Dominican Republic. She was charged with conspiracy to stalk and stalking using a dangerous weapon resulting in death. Elkins pleaded not guilty.

In April 2024, Elkins went on trial as a co-conspirator where one of the federal prosecutors put it like this: “Andrew Beard was a monster, but he was Holly Elkins’ monster,” Harding told “48 Hours.” After a one-week trial, the case went to the jury. Jurors deliberated for about 90 minutes and returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. Three months later, she was sentenced to two life terms — much longer than Beard’s sentence.