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Live with BBC News. With the fighting in Gaza and the war in Ukraine taking much of the world's attention, there is one conflict that is being horribly ignored, and that is the Civil War in Sudan. Since April, when we focused so intensely on the evacuation of the expat community, things have gone from bad to worse. The fighting is led by two men, General Abdul Fatah Al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces, and in fact, the country's President, backed by the Sudanese Army. Then there is General Mohamed Hamdhan Daagalo, who was his deputy and is now the leader of a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. There had been some hope near the outset of this war that the two sides could be brought to the table. But since then, the fighting has intensified. It is estimated that more than 5,000 Sudanese people have been killed in the crossfire and many, many more have been injured. Over six million displaced are now in desperate need of help. But what is particularly concerning are the reports of sexual violence, including rape and sexual slavery. Joining me to discuss from Atbarra is Adele Kodour from UNICEF.

Adele, thank you very much for coming on the program. Can we start with that? We've seen some truly appalling reports of women taken into sex slavery, some of them very young. Have you investigated this and what do you know about it?

Thank you for having me. For the moment, we are hearing about those reports. The verification, of course, will take time, but it will happen for sure. But we are verified at the reports about sexual violence in Darfur. Unfortunately, this brings back the situation back to what it was more than 20 years ago when the 2002 war started in Darfur. So we are very worried about the situation of children. The grave child rights violations have the reported ones so far have represent 150 times more than the verified cases in 2022. I'm talking about reported cases because we are still doing the verification.

As you say, some of these reports resemble the atrocities perpetrated by the Janjui 20 years ago. Where has this hatred come from? The UN report that I read today says the situation in West Darfur is verging on pure evil.

These are recurrent conflicts that have been happening in Sudan, and I think we are seeing a replication of what happened in the year 2022. This is what we are witnessing today. The civilians, especially children, they always pay the biggest price for that.

We talked in April about the risk of the conflict spreading to other countries. Are we seeing that play out in the region?

Not yet, I would say, but definitely within Sudan itself. Every day there is increased fighting. Every day there is active fighting. Today we heard about the fighting in East Darfur, in Albain, which so far had not been heavily impacted. We are worried that it could move to other areas within Sudan itself. But this is a situation of active fighting.

Let's bring in David Chin, he's the former US Deputy Chief of mission in Khartoum and knows the country well. David, it's good to have you with us on the program. There's no embargo, no arms embargo, and there are reports that the United Arab Emirates are supplying arms to the RSF. Surely a start would be to call for a full embargo at the Security Council and enforce it.

Well, yes, sir, you're quite right. An arms embargo would be very useful at this point. Different countries have arms-to-war goes on Sudan. For example, the United States does. On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates has been supplying arms to the Rapid support forces for some time and presumably is continuing to do that. It's possible that Egypt may be supplying a much smaller quantity of arms to the Sudan armed forces.

Is there any way to hold these two warring parties to account? There's obviously a lot of focus on General de Gale and what his forces are committing. Is anyone investigating? Could there be anyone that could inform him what he would be facing unless he reins them in?

Well, certainly, there needs to be an effort by the international community more generally to try to convince parties like the United Arab Emirates to stop providing the delivery of arms to the rapid support forces. I'm sure that effort has been made, but it obviously has not resulted in any success so far, or at least as far as we know, it has not had any success. You would think it would even be in the interests of the UAE to scale down the fighting. And one way to do that is to reduce the quantity of arms going in.

Do you think the war-in-parties, David, are taking advantage of the wider scene, the war in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine?

Well, that's hard to judge. They've obviously been supplying these arms for a long period of time. This is nothing new. And there's no indication that it's a larger quantity than in the past. In fact, it's conceivable that it's even a smaller amount. But there are now so many arms floating around this part of Sudan that it doesn't really make that much difference what the quantity is. I don't see that they're necessarily trying to take advantage of the situation in Gaza. These countries have to ask themselves, what are they gaining out of this? By destroying Sudan, which is exactly what's happening, how do they gain from this?

Adele, let me just come back to you. There have been talks in JEDA between the various parties, at least to secure safe pathways for humanitarian access. What came of that?

There has been some improvement in terms of the passage of supplies from Chad into Darfur. Of course, the missions that we undertake for the procurement of those supplies and their transportation are really very high risk missions in terms of security. But we are still facing a lot of access issues elsewhere in Sudan. For example, to be able to get into South Darfur, to be able to get into Khartoum, things are much more complicated. But we continue to advocate with everyone on the ground, at the field level, in order to make sure that the necessity supplies reach those children who are in very acute need for them.

David, I just have a minute left. Our two countries focus a lot on migration. We don't so often focus on the causes of migration. And here we have a country that is imploding. And surely, into the future, we're going to get a lot of people leaving the country heading towards Europe. There is an incentive for all countries to be involved in this, isn't there?

Well, absolutely. The numbers that have already become among refugees and in Chad, particularly also in Egypt, are quite significant and growing. And as you suggest, some of these people ultimately may try to find their way all the way to Europe. It's not clear that's happened yet, but that will inevitably happen in the future.

David Shin, Adele Kudor, thank you very much for talking to us about a story that has dropped off the radar somewhat in recent weeks, but lots of implications in that war for what is going on in the wider region.