Sudan braces for up to 200,000 fleeing fighting

NAIROBI, Kenya — Up to 200,000 refugees could pour into Sudan while fleeing the deadly conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, officials said Wednesday, while the first details are emerging of largely cutoff civilians under growing strain. Already more than 7,000 people have crossed the border, including some wounded in the fighting, and the flow is growing quickly.

“The numbers are increasing rapidly. There are lots of children and women,” said AlSir Khalid, the head of the refugee agency in Sudan’s Kassala province. “They are arriving very tired and exhausted. They are hungry and thirsty since they have walked long distances on rugged terrain.”

Authorities are overwhelmed and the situation is deteriorating rapidly, he said.

Inside the Tigray region, long lines have appeared outside bread shops, and supplyladen trucks are stranded at its borders, the United Nations humanitarian chief in the country said.

“We want to have humanitarian access as soon as possible,” Sajjad Mohammad Sajid said. “Fuel and food are needed urgently.” Up to 2 million people in Tigray have a “very, very difficult time,” he said, including hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Fuel is already being rationed in the Tigray region, and the U. N. refugee agency said it and partners “will struggle to continue running their operations in the next two weeks.”

Communications remain almost completely severed with the Tigray region a week after Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prizewinning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced a military offensive in response to an alleged attack by regional forces. He insists there will be no negotiations with a regional government he considers illegal until its ruling “clique” is arrested and its wellstocked arsenal is destroyed.

Reports grew of the targeting of ethnic Tigrayans across Ethiopia, the Tigray Communication Affairs Bureau said in a Facebook post. Abiy has warned against ethnic profiling, but observers are alarmed by the development in a country already plagued by bouts of deadly ethnic violence.

The European Union, the African Union and others have urged Abiy for an immediate deescalation as the conflict threatens to destabilize the strategic but vulnerable Horn of Africa region.