Famine looms in Sudan after year of war
IT’S been almost a year since a ruinous civil war flared in Sudan. Close to 25 million people – about half the country’s population – need humanitarian assistance, according to UN estimates. Close to a fifth of the country’s population has already been forced from their homes by the conflict, marking the largest population of internally displaced people in the world right now.
The war pits the country’s armed forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), headed by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally referred to as Hemedti.
Burhan and Hemedti worked handin-glove in 2021 when the two collapsed a civilian-led government that was presiding over the country’s fragile transition to democracy after years of dictatorship. But power-sharing disputes and turf wars fractured their alliance and led to an entrenched, sprawling series of battles across the nation – shaped, in part, by the competing interests of a number of outside powers.
Countless civilians are caught in the crossfire. Artillery bombardments and airstrikes pounded urban areas, while warring militias pursued tribal vendettas and carried out hideous ethnic massacres. There’s no clear overall death toll since the war began last April, though it’s believed to be in the tens of thousands. The slaughter of civilians in November by the RSF and allied factions in and around the city of El Geneina, in the war-ravaged region of Darfur, may have seen as many as 15 000 people killed.
A rights group used satellite imagery to track more than 100 towns and villages razed, mostly by rampaging RSF fighters. The outfit traces its origins to the notorious Janjaweed, the Sudanese Arab militia linked to a host of war crimes and atrocities committed in Darfur a generation ago.
Separately, a chilling recent report in Sky News Arabia detailed how in the capital, Khartoum, protracted, gruelling urban warfare has led to a spike in the migration of European vultures and a boom in the population of stray dogs, all drawn to the city’s carrion.
And then there’s the toll on the living. The officials behind the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the UN-backed global authority tracking food insecurity and hunger, warned on Friday that immediate action is needed to “prevent widespread death and total collapse of livelihoods and avert a catastrophic hunger crisis in Sudan”. Security conditions and lack of access meant the agency was unable to update its assessments from December, when it found about 18 million people in Sudan were facing acute food insecurity, while some 5 million may be on the brink of famine.
Some estimates forecast that almost as many as a quarter of a million children, pregnant women and newborn mothers could die of malnutrition in Sudan in the coming months. The chaos of the war has spawned a spiralling set of pressures driving hunger – food prices have rocketed, crops have been left unattended in a nation already coping with waves of drought, the health-care system is reeling in many areas and aid groups have struggled to reach needy communities.
“Sudan’s cereal production in 2023 was nearly halved, according to a report published last week by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),” noted Al Jazeera. “The sharpest reductions were reported where conflict was most intense, including the greater Kordofan state and regions in Darfur where FAO estimated production was 80% below average.”
“Aid alone will not fix this,” said Kholood Khair, a leading Sudanese analyst, speaking to Britain’s Channel 4.
“It’s much more about safeguarding the next agricultural season, which starts in two months time.”
She added that little was being done on this front, while the warring parties were playing partisan games with regards to the delivery of aid.
The country’s two feuding warlords have engaged in fitful but inconsequential rounds of talks; a series of cease-fires failed within moments of being agreed. The battles between their proxies have little end in sight.