In much of the West, compassion is rationed by the identity of the killer. The dead of Darfur, Syria, and Iran draw a fraction of the grief their numbers would command if a different hand had done the killing. The test of a conscience is whether it can mourn the dead it has no reason to mourn.
In brief
This article documents how compassion in much of Western public life is rationed by the identity of the perpetrator: atrocities draw sustained attention when the killer is a Western government or ally, and a fraction of it when the killer is an authoritarian regime or armed faction, even when the toll is far larger. It sets four cases beside the attention they drew. In Sudan's Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have killed some 150,000 and displaced twelve to fourteen million, with more than 6,000 killed in three days at El Fasher in late 2025. In Syria, the Assad regime killed more than 580,000 over fourteen years. In Iran, security forces killed thousands — by the UN's floor, at least 5,000 — during the January 2026 protests, concealed by an internet blackout. And Palestinians executed by Hamas draw little of the solidarity extended to Palestinians killed by Israel. The article tests the strongest defense of the imbalance — that people protest what their own governments enable — and finds it explains where people lobby, not whose deaths they are willing to see. The standard it asks for is one standard: more attention for the forgotten, and less for no one.
When the Rapid Support Forces took the Sudanese city of El Fasher in late October 2025, the killing was visible from space. Satellite images showed clusters of bodies and the stains of fresh graves; the United Nations later documented more than six thousand people killed in the first three days alone, after an eighteen-month siege. A UN fact-finding mission concluded the assault bore the "hallmarks of genocide" against the Zaghawa and Fur.1 It was among the gravest mass killings of the decade. It filled no squares in the West, prompted no boycotts, and moved through the news cycle in a day.
This is the pattern Selective Compassion exists to name. In much of Western public life, compassion is rationed by the identity of the perpetrator. When the party held responsible is a Western government or a Western ally, the victims fill the campuses, the marches, and the front pages. When the party responsible is an authoritarian regime, an armed faction, or a movement that enjoys political sympathy, the same suffering — often a far larger toll — draws a hedged paragraph, or nothing. The dead are weighed by who killed them rather than by the fact that they are dead.
This is not a ranking of victims, and it is not a claim that any group's suffering counts for less. It is the opposite: that a victim's worth does not depend on the identity of the killer, and that the measure of a conscience is whether it can mourn the dead it has no political reason to mourn. The cases that follow are offered in that spirit — not to subtract attention from anyone, but to ask why so much of it is withheld from the many.
Darfur
The war that resumed in Sudan in 2023 has killed, by credible estimates, more than 150,000 people — the true count is unknowable with the country's record-keeping in ruins, and some former officials believe it far higher. It has driven more than twelve million from their homes, the largest displacement crisis on record.2 The Rapid Support Forces, descendants of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the genocide of the early 2000s, have once again made non-Arab Darfuris — the Fur, the Masalit, the Zaghawa — the particular object of their violence. At El Fasher, by the assessment of mainstream analysts, the rate of killing ran for a time an order of magnitude above the worst stretches of the war in Gaza.3 The Western response was a fraction of one. There were no encampments, no divestment votes, no household-name campaign to name and shame the foreign powers arming the killers.
The numbers have faces the satellites cannot show. Amnesty International interviewed twenty-eight people who reached the town of Tawila after fleeing the city, some of the first eyewitness accounts of its fall.4 A nineteen-year-old who left with seven friends from his neighborhood watched all seven shot dead at the earthen berm the RSF had thrown up around El Fasher. One man, walking the sixty kilometers to Tawila, buried his wife and daughter, killed in the shelling, and then a young niece who could not survive the journey.5 Survivors described summary executions of unarmed men and widespread sexual violence against women and girls. When one group was stopped and protested that they were civilians, a survivor remembered the reply: in El Fasher, they were told, "everybody is a soldier." These are the testimonies of a single road out of a single city, in a war that has produced millions of such roads, and almost none of them have been heard.
Syria
Across nearly fourteen years, the government of Bashar al-Assad — backed by Russia and Iran — killed Syrians on a scale that is difficult to hold in the mind: more than 580,000 dead by the long-running tally of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, with the UN documenting over 300,000 civilian deaths alone, and, by UN figures, some thirteen million driven from their homes — more than half the prewar population.6 When the regime fell in December 2024, mass graves were uncovered holding tens of thousands.7 The barrel bombs, the chemical attacks, the sieges that starved whole districts were documented in real time, for years. They produced no sustained protest movement in the West, no encampments, no boycott campaigns against the governments that armed and shielded the killers.
It is worth pausing on a detail, because it answers a common objection before it is raised. The Syrian death toll, like the figure from Gaza, counts combatants alongside civilians; no one demanded a separate civilian tally before deciding whether to march. The gulf in response cannot be explained by the quality of the data, because the data were no cleaner in the case that drew the crowds. The variable that changed was who did the killing.
Iran
When Iranians rose after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the state shot them in the streets; a UN fact-finding mission found her death unlawful and documented security forces firing on protesters. More than five hundred were killed and some twenty-two thousand detained, and in the two years that followed the regime executed at least eighteen hundred people — the highest rate in decades, falling heaviest on the Baluch minority.8
Then, in January 2026, it happened on a vastly larger scale. As protests spread across the country, security forces opened fire, and the government cut the internet to conceal it. The toll is contested precisely because of that blackout: the UN's special rapporteur put it at "at least 5,000," while other credible counts run into the tens of thousands. More than a hundred children were among the dead; tens of thousands were arrested.9 It was among the largest massacres in modern Iranian history, and it drew, in much of the West, a fraction of the sustained attention its scale would otherwise have commanded. Some of that silence was the blackout's own work — it is hard to cover what a regime has made invisible. But the response that needs no live footage, the editorials and the protests and the institutional pressure, never gathered either.
The regime understood the calculus exactly. As it killed, its officials and online proxies pointed Western audiences toward Gaza — using the suffering that does command attention to deflect from the suffering it was itself causing.10 That a perpetrator reaches so readily for this maneuver is itself evidence of the asymmetry the maneuver exploits.
Palestinians killed by Hamas
The last case is the hardest to hold in view, because it sits inside the one conflict the West watches closely. Across the Gaza war, Hamas rounded up and publicly executed Palestinians it accused of collaboration or dissent — among them a wave of more than thirty killings in the autumn of 2025, men shot before crowds in Gaza City. A UN commission documented 249 cases of execution and violent punishment between August 2024 and January 2026, at least 108 of them fatal, and called the killings war crimes; the same commission was careful to set them in context, describing Palestinians as victims "of all sides," trapped between Israeli forces and the fear-based rule of Hamas.11 The victims were Palestinian. But the hand that killed them was Palestinian, and so the marches that fill Western squares for Palestinian suffering had little to say. The same death drew mourning or silence depending on the identity of the killer — which is the whole of the matter.
Why the pattern holds
Selective compassion is rarely a conscious choice, which is part of what makes it so durable. A few ordinary mechanisms produce it.
The first is the pull of the legible villain. A cause travels when it can be told as a simple story with a clear perpetrator — and clearest of all is a perpetrator one's own society is tied to, by arms, by alliance, by history. Protesting one's own side carries a moral charge that protesting a distant warlord does not; it feels like accountability rather than mere lament. The Rapid Support Forces and the Iranian judiciary offer a Western audience no such charge, and so the story does not travel, however large the toll.
The second is identification, compounded by familiarity. Publics mobilize for victims they can already see themselves in, and decades of uneven coverage have made some conflicts intimate and others abstract. The more a cause is covered, the more it is covered; attention accrues to attention.
The third is the discomfort of the inconvenient case — the atrocity that complicates a settled story. Every political camp has them: the victims whose killers are the camp's own allies, or whose deaths muddy a preferred narrative. They are the first to be forgotten, because remembering them costs something. The cases in this article are not confined to one side of any spectrum; the habit of looking away is general.
None of these mechanisms is wicked in itself. Together they produce a hierarchy of grief that tracks politics rather than suffering — and that hierarchy is precisely what a human-rights organization exists to refuse.
The objections we take seriously
There is a serious defense of this asymmetry, and it deserves to be met head-on rather than caricatured. People protest what their own governments fund or enable, the argument runs, because that is where their voice can change an outcome. A citizen in London has more purchase on British policy than on the Rapid Support Forces or the Iranian judiciary; the concentration of attention is not callousness but a rational allocation of moral energy toward the places one can actually affect.
There is something to this, and we do not dismiss it. But it does not account for the size of the gap, and it does not account for what happens at its edges, where silence curdles into justification — Western voices explaining away Hamas's executions, or unable to call a higher-rate killing what it is while naming a lower-rate one instantly. Leverage explains where people choose to lobby. It does not explain whose deaths they are willing to see. And it offers no cover at all to the journalist or the historian, who answer not to leverage but to the record.
A second objection runs deeper, and it is partly right: coverage tracks access. Sudan in late 2025 was a sealed war zone; Iran in January 2026 went dark by design; and Gaza, for all the restrictions on it, was documented from within by a large corps of Palestinian journalists who paid for it with their lives — more than two hundred killed, the deadliest war for the press on record, even as Israel barred foreign correspondents from entering.12 The images that reached the world were not evenly available, and some of the gap in attention follows from that.
But access governs the supply of images, not the response to them. The sustained part — the editorials, the encampments, the divestment votes, the boycotts — needs no live feed; it runs on what people already believe they know. And where the forgotten atrocities were documented, the response still did not come. El Fasher was photographed from orbit: the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab tracked the clusters of bodies and the disturbed earth of mass graves in near-real time, and the images were public.13 The world could see. It is the seeing-and-not-moving, rather than the not-seeing, that this program is about.
Where we stand
Libera Mondo is strictly non-partisan and apolitical, and this program is not a ranking of victims. It holds that a victim's worth does not depend on the identity of the perpetrator, and that no one's death should count for less because of who is responsible. We count every toll the same way — naming its source and its uncertainty, whether the killer is a regime that concealed it, a militia that outran every census, or a party to a war. The people killed in Gaza are owed that recognition. So are the people killed in Darfur, in Syria, in Iran, and by Hamas. We do not ask the world to mourn anyone less. We ask it to mourn the forgotten as much.
A principle that mourns the victim only when the killer is convenient is not a principle; it is a preference wearing the clothes of one. The test of a conscience is whether it can mourn the dead it has no reason to mourn. This is the record of those dead, and the case for meeting that test.
A voice for the forgotten.
Sources
- UN Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan / OHCHR, "Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher" (report to the Human Rights Council, February 2026): the RSF captured El Fasher on 26 October 2025 after an ~18-month (500+ day) siege; "three days of absolute horror"; genocidal intent against the Zaghawa and Fur the only reasonable inference. UN figure of 6,000+ killed in the first three days. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/02/sudan-evidence-el-fasher-reveals-genocidal-campaign-targeting-non-arab · https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166997 Back to note
- Sudan death toll an estimate, not a verified count: ~150,000+ cited by the former US special envoy (2024) and later assessments; the true figure is unknown and may be higher. Displacement of more than twelve million is the largest displacement crisis on record (UNHCR / IOM). Yale HRL and others estimate tens of thousands missing and presumed dead at El Fasher alone. Back to note
- Rate comparison at El Fasher: 6,000+ killed in three days (UN, see 1) against the Gaza war's peak monthly tolls implies a killing rate roughly an order of magnitude higher for that period. A derived comparison of rates, not of totals. Back to note
- Amnesty International, "Sudan: El Fasher survivors tell of deliberate RSF killings and sexual violence — new testimony" (November 2025): 28 survivors interviewed after reaching Tawila and Tina; summary executions of unarmed men, including a young man whose seven companions were shot at the city's berm, and widespread sexual violence against women and girls. (Survivor names in the source are pseudonyms.) https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/sudan-el-fasher-survivors-tell-of-deliberate-rsf-killings-and-sexual-violence-new-testimony/ Back to note
- Médecins Sans Frontières, "People who escaped El Fasher are struggling to survive one month after RSF takeover" (November 2025): a survivor who buried his wife, daughter, and niece on the ~60 km walk to Tawila; survivors walked three to five days, hiding by day. https://www.msf.org/people-who-escaped-el-fasher-are-struggling-survive-one-month-after-rsf-takeover Back to note
- Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: more than 580,000 killed across nearly 14 years (a tally including combatants); UN OHCHR separately documented 300,000+ civilian deaths (2011–2021). Displacement of ~13 million (UNHCR), more than half the prewar population. The Assad regime was backed by Russia and Iran. Back to note
- Mass graves uncovered after the fall of the Assad regime (8 December 2024). Reuters investigation (October 2025) on the al-Qutayfah site and its concealment; former US war-crimes ambassador Stephen Rapp estimated 100,000+ tortured and murdered since 2013; the International Commission on Missing Persons cites up to 66 possible sites and 157,000+ reported missing. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-10-14/exclusive-assad-government-secretly-moved-mass-grave-to-cover-up-killings-reuters-investigation-finds Back to note
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (2024): Mahsa Amini's death unlawful; security forces fired on protesters; 500+ killed and ~22,000 detained in 2022. Amnesty International: at least ~1,825 executions across 2023–2024 (853 + 972), the highest in decades, with the Baluch minority grossly overrepresented; executions surged past 2,159 in 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/iran-executes-853-people-in-eight-year-high-amid-relentless-repression-and-renewed-war-on-drugs/ · https://www.iranhr.net/en/reports/42/ Back to note
- 2026 Iran massacres: protests began 28 December 2025; security forces killed protesters primarily on 8–9 January 2026 amid a near-total internet blackout. Toll contested — UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato (16 January 2026): "at least 5,000," possibly up to 20,000 per medical sources; the Iranian government acknowledged 3,117; named tallies (HRANA) reached 7,000+. Tens of thousands arrested, including children. Amnesty: the deadliest period of repression in decades of its research. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/01/what-happened-at-the-protests-in-iran/ · https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorities-unleash-heavily-militarized-clampdown-to-hide-protest-massacres/ Back to note
- Institute for Strategic Dialogue, "Axis of amplification" (covering 28 December 2025 – 17 January 2026): Iranian state messengers framed the protests as US/Israeli-instigated and accused the West of hypocrisy over Gaza to deflect scrutiny from the crackdown. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/axis-of-amplification-regime-media-proxies-and-western-supporters-respond-to-iranian-protests/ Back to note
- UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory / OHCHR (report, 9 June 2026): 249 cases of execution and severe physical violence by Hamas-affiliated and other forces (August 2024 – January 2026), at least 108 deaths and 384 injured, including a wave of 30+ public executions in autumn 2025; the acts amount to the war crime of murder. The Commission framed Palestinians as victims "of all sides," trapped between Israeli forces and the rule of Hamas. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/report-coi-opt-9jun26/ Back to note
- Committee to Protect Journalists (2025–2026): Israel barred international journalists from independently entering Gaza from October 2023; 200+ Palestinian journalists and media workers killed, the deadliest conflict for the press on record (corroborated by RSF and a Brown University study). Cited here to establish that documentation capacity differed across the conflicts — not to characterize the conduct of the Gaza war. https://cpj.org/2025/10/cpj-challenges-israels-ban-on-international-media-access-to-gaza-in-israeli-supreme-court/ Back to note
- Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab: 65+ reports during the siege; satellite imagery showing discolouration consistent with blood and disturbed earth at El Fasher, central to the UN genocide finding. https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/un-concludes-rsf-conducted-genocide-in-el-fasher-yale-lab-provided-key-evidence/ Back to note
Version history
v1.0 — 14 June 2026. First published. Establishes the case against selective compassion across Darfur, Syria, Iran, and Palestinians killed by Hamas, with source-linked figures and live maintenance points current as of June 2026.