Why Some Wars Move the World and Others Go Unseen
(ANALYSIS) People starve and die in Gaza, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, yet we notice some more than others. Our pity follows the map drawn by politics.
What we know depends on what we are shown, and what we are shown depends on whose interest it serves to show it.
The wars that fill the news are those that serve the powerful and can be made to look moral. Their language soon reaches our tongues, and we mistake it for our own. The rest sink into the dark corners of the news, their stories too awkward for the slogans of the day.
Gaza
Take Gaza. The horror there has been relentless and seen as it happens. More than 67,000 people have been killed, 2,600 civilians have died searching for food, 168,000 have been wounded, and almost every home lies in ruins. Famine now hangs over 2.1 million displaced people. The images travel fast. The world watches, argues and sometimes protests because Gaza stands where power and ideology meet.
Gaza draws attention because it sits at the centre of one of the most polarising conflicts of our time. On one side is Israel, backed by the United States and several Western governments that call the war a fight for security, against terrorism, and in defense of an ally.
On the other side are countries and movements across the Arab world, Iran, Turkey, much of the Global South and parts of Europe that see Gaza as a symbol of Palestinian resistance to occupation, displacement and apartheid.
The ideas in play include Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, the West’s alignment with Israeli statehood, and anti-colonial and anti-imperial thought, especially in the Global South. Islamist movements cast Gaza as part of a wider religious and civilizational struggle, while Western progressives connect it to debates on racism, settler rule and state violence.
With so many governments, causes and identities bound up in what Gaza represents, every bomb, death and ceasefire becomes a message to the world.
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Sudan
Now consider Sudan. Its war began as a struggle for power between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The two men seized power together in 2021, then turned their guns on each other in 2023 to claim the state and its wealth. Peace talks have failed under the weight of foreign meddling and the steady trade in arms.
The war is vast, but hushed. More than 150,000 are dead, over 11 million driven from their homes, and whole regions starve beyond the reach of aid. Sudan’s pain reaches us only in fragments, a few satellite pictures of burned villages, brief reports buried in the news. There is no stream of images, no crowd in the streets. The world stays quiet because no great power stands to win or lose there.
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Syria
Syria tells another story of exhaustion.
The war began in 2011 as a peaceful revolt against President Bashar al-Assad during the Arab Spring. The government’s crackdown turned protest into war. In time, it drew in rebel groups, Islamist factions, Kurdish forces and foreign powers including Russia, Iran, the United States and Turkey, each pursuing its own ends.
What began as an uprising became a war of many sides, marked by repression, sectarian killing, proxy fights and foreign intervention. With Russian and Iranian support, Assad’s forces have clawed back most of the country through bombardment and siege. Yet the land remains broken and its institutions in ruins. The war’s tangle, and the world’s shifting attention, have pushed its cost out of sight.
More than 650,000 people are dead. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the toll at 656,493 as of March 2025, including both civilians and fighters. The Syrian Network for Human Rights recorded 1,562 deaths that March alone, among them 102 children and 99 women. Between December 2024 and March 2025, more than 1,500 civilians were killed or executed. Around 7.2 million remain displaced within Syria, 6.2 million have fled abroad, 9.1 million face hunger, and 14.5 million depend on food aid. The U.N. says 16.7 million need help of some kind. Yet this calamity barely stirs the public mind.
In Syria, the United States, Russia, Iran and Turkey all have their stakes in borders, military bases, counterterrorism and control of resources. These are matters of power, not principle. The war offers no clear story of right and wrong. Assad’s crimes are known, but his enemies are divided. The fighting dragged on until it lost meaning, and with it, attention. Syria shows how pity fades when a war lasts too long to fit the news.
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Yemen
Yemen, too, has slipped from sight despite its staggering losses.
The war began in 2014 when the Houthi movement, a group from the north linked to Iran, seized the capital, Sana’a, and drove out the recognized government. In 2015, a Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States, the United Kingdom and other allies began bombing to restore it.
Years of airstrikes, blockades and ground battles have wrecked the country’s roads, ports and hospitals, leaving civilians trapped in hunger and disease. The Houthis have struck back with missiles aimed at Saudi Arabia and ships in the Red Sea. The war is a contest for power between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but it is fought on Yemeni soil, and it is Yemenis who pay for it.
More than 160,000 have died, 4.5 million have been displaced, and half the country now lives on aid. It is one of the worst humanitarian disasters on record. Yet Yemen barely registers in the world’s talk. It is treated as a proxy war with no symbol and no urgency, only slow ruin and silence.
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Hierarchy of attention
This order of attention follows a pattern. Wars are seen through the lenses of power and politics. Western and some Muslim governments, along with their media, present certain conflicts as moral causes and others as distant troubles. Victims are described in different ways depending on who kills them. Words such as collateral damage and civilian casualties do more than report. They decide which deaths are mourned and which are forgotten.
It seems we care most about the suffering caused by those we already dislike. We choose our grief the way we choose our sides, speaking loudly about some horrors and ignoring others. Does the flag above the killing matter more than the bodies below it? Does it hurt more when a Jew kills a Muslim than when a Muslim kills another Muslim? Does hunger feel sharper when the guilty are our enemies? For people trapped inside these wars, such lines may matter. For those simply trying to live, pain is only pain.
If conscience is to mean more than allegiance, we must see how empathy has been bent. Power tells us where to look and whom to mourn, and when its lesson fits our own beliefs, we parade our pity in public. We count every bomb in Gaza but miss the graves in Darfur, we tally Syria’s dead yet do not read their names. A conscience that sees so selectively cannot call itself compassion.
However, the crux is that while it may be commendable, or at least unobjectionable, for people to speak against any form of suffering, whether out of religious affiliation or ideological conviction, they cannot, on moral grounds, condemn others for remaining silent about that suffering when they themselves have remained silent about other suffering larger in scale.
Compassion loses nothing by being partial, only when it turns self-righteous. Empathy must be guided by conscience, not by those who claim the right to decide whose pain counts.
Vishal Arora is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India, who covers Asia and beyond. He serves as editor of @Newsreel_Asia and is a board member of The Media Project. He’s written for many outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Diplomat and The Caravan.