CAIRO — On a clear night one year ago, more than a dozen heavily armed militants burst into Omaima Farouk's home in an upscale neighborhood in Sudan's capital, Khartoum. He whipped and slapped women at gunpoint and terrorized children. Then they kicked them out of the fenced two-story house.
“Since then, our lives have been ruined,” said the 45-year-old school teacher. “Everything changed this year.”
Farouk, a widow, and her four children now live in a small village on the outskirts of the central city of Wad Madani, 136 kilometers (85 miles) southeast of Khartoum. Because international aid organizations cannot reach the villages, they rely on aid from villagers and philanthropists.
Sudan has been torn by war for a year since smoldering tensions between the Sudanese military and the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces exploded into street clashes in the capital Khartoum in mid-April 2023. Fighting quickly spread throughout the country.
The conflict has been overshadowed by the war between Israel and Hamas, which has caused a massive humanitarian crisis for Palestinians and the threat of famine in the region since October.
But relief workers warn that Sudan is heading towards an even bigger famine disaster, with mass deaths possible in the coming months. Food production and distribution networks have collapsed, and aid agencies are unable to reach the hardest-hit areas. At the same time, the conflict has resulted in widespread reports of atrocities, including killings, displacement, and rape, particularly in the capital and western Darfur region.
Justin Brady, head of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination Office in Sudan, warned that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people could die from malnutrition-related causes in the coming months.
“Unless we can overcome both the resource challenges and the access challenges, this situation is going to get very ugly very quickly,” Brady said. He said the world needed to take swift action to pressure both countries to cease fighting and raise funds for UN humanitarian efforts.
However, the international community has paid little attention. United Nations humanitarian operations will need about $2.7 billion this year to deliver food, medical care and other supplies to Sudan's 24 million people, nearly half of its 51 million population. So far, donors have contributed only about 5%, or $145 million, according to the Office of Humanitarian Assistance, known as OCHA.
“The level of international neglect is shocking,” Christos Cristo, president of the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said in a recent statement.
The situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. The forces led by General Abdul Fattah Burhan and the RSF, commanded by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, are cutting through Khartoum, exchanging indiscriminate shelling with each other. While RSF forces took control of much of Darfur, Burhan moved his government and headquarters to the Red Sea city of Port Sudan.
Sudan's Violence Against Women Force, a government agency, recorded at least 159 cases of rape and gang rape last year, most of them in Khartoum and Darfur. The group's president, Sulima Ishaq Sharif, said the numbers were the tip of the iceberg as many victims do not speak out due to fear of retaliation and the stigma associated with rape.
In 2021, Burhan and Dagalo were uneasy allies who led a military coup. They overthrew the internationally recognized civilian government that was supposed to lead Sudan's democratic transition after longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was militarily overthrown in 2019 amid a popular uprising. did. After that, Burhan and Dagalo had a falling out due to a power struggle.
The situation in the Darfur region is dire, with RSF and its allies accused of rampant sexual violence and ethnic attacks in Africa's tribal areas. The International Criminal Court has announced that it is investigating new allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region, which was the scene of a genocidal war in the 2000s.
A series of attacks by the RSF and its allied militias on Masalit Africans killed 10,000 people in Juneina, the capital of West Darfur state near the Chad border, according to a report by United Nations experts to the Security Council earlier this year. It is said that 15,000 people died. . The newspaper said Darfur was experiencing “the worst violence since 2005”.
Adam Rihal, spokesman for Darfur's Displaced Persons and Refugees Coordination Agency, said eight out of 10 families in Darfur's displaced persons camps are receiving only one meal a day because aid organizations are unable to reach them. Ta.
In South Darfur state's Kerma camp, an average of nearly three children die every 12 hours, mostly from diseases related to malnutrition, he said. He said the camp's medical center receives 14 to 18 malnourished patients every day, most of them children and pregnant women.
Excluding the killings in Juneina, the war has killed at least 14,600 people across Sudan and created the world's largest displacement crisis, according to the United Nations. More than 8 million people have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in safe areas within Sudan or in neighboring countries.
As the war escalates, many flee repeatedly.
When the fighting reached the streets of his home in Khartoum, Taj El Ser headed west with his wife and four children to visit relatives in Darfur's al-Damata town.
The RSF and its allies then overran Aldamata in November and rampaged through the town for six days. Ercel said they killed many Masalit and relatives of military soldiers.
“Some people were shot dead or burned inside their homes,” he said by phone from another town in Darfur. “My family and I were able to survive because I was Arab.”
Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, said both the military and RSF committed serious violations of international law, including killing civilians and destroying critical infrastructure.
Food production has collapsed, imports have been held up, fighting has disrupted the movement of food within the country and prices of staple foods have soared 45% in less than a year, OCHA said. According to MSF, the war has devastated the country's health system, with only 20 to 30 percent of functioning medical facilities remaining nationwide.
According to OCHA, at least 37% of the population is at or above crisis level of hunger. Save the Children has warned that around 230,000 children, pregnant women and mothers of newborns could die from malnutrition in the coming months.
“We are witnessing mass hunger, suffering and death. Yet the world is turning a blind eye,” said Arif Nour, director of Save the Children in Sudan.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 3.5 million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, of which more than 710,000 are severely acutely malnourished.
About 5 million people were on the brink of starvation, according to a December assessment by the Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC), the world's leading authority on determining the severity of hunger crises. Overall, 17.7 million people were found to face severe food insecurity.
Aid workers say the world needs to act.
“Sudan has been described as the forgotten crisis. I begin to wonder how many people knew about this in the first place and forgot about it,” OCHA's Brady said. “There are other countries that are getting more attention than Sudan. I don't like comparing crises. It's like comparing two cancer patients. …They both need treatment. Is required.”
