Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)

“Worse to come” in Sudan as famine spreads and war continues

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Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Monday gave an update to the Human Rights Council on the situation in El Fasher, Sudan. Photo: screenshot

As the war grinds on well past 1,000 days, famine grips more and more areas in what is already the country with high levels of hunger

“We can only expect worse to come” in Sudan if the war is not stopped, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned the Human Rights Council on February 9, as famine conditions expand in the country facing the highest levels of hunger in the world.

Apart from Gaza, which has been suffering Israel’s genocidal war since October 2023, there are only two officially declared ongoing famines in the world – both in this North African country, in the throes of a civil war raging for nearly three years.

One of them is in South Kordofan State’s capital, Kadugli, gripped by famine since last September, following a prolonged siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fighting its former ally, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), since April 2023.​

Also besieged further north was the state’s second largest city, Dilling, where hunger levels “are likely similar to Kadugli, but cannot be classified due to insufficient reliable data – a result of restricted humanitarian access and ongoing hostilities,” the UN had said.

Siege broken, but relief may be “temporary” 

Earlier, on February 3, the SAF announced it had broken the siege on Kadugli, days after making a similar advance, taking control of the supply routes to Dilling in late January, reconnecting the two cities to North Kordofan.​

With the markets re-supplied, prices of essential food items in Kadugli have dropped to a fraction of what they had surged to under siege, Sudan Tribune reported on February 8.​

However, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) had cautioned in its report on February 5 that the relief for its residents may only be “temporary”. It warned of the possibility “that Famine will persist through May in the absence of a ceasefire and sustained humanitarian access. It is expected that the towns will remain heavily contested, and the risk is high that renewed siege-like conditions will be re-established between February and May.”​

Drone attacks on food trucks amid famine

Türk also highlighted this volatility in his briefing to the Human Rights Council on February 9. Although the SAF and its allied armed groups have broken the siege on these cities, “drone strikes by both sides continue, resulting in dozens of civilian deaths and injuries,” he added.​

Two days before, on February 7, the RSF had killed at least 24 people (including eight children, among them infants) with a drone strike on a humanitarian convoy transporting residents fleeing the fighting in South Kordofan State’s Dubeiker area to North Kordofan in the city of Rahad.​

A day earlier, one was killed and many more wounded in the drone attack on a convoy of the World Food Program (WFP), en route to supplying aid to the displaced people sheltering in North Kordofan’s capital, El Obeid.​

Building earthen walls around El Obeid, the SAF is holding out against the RSF to defend this strategic city enroute to the national capital, Khartoum, from the Darfur region in western Sudan. The RSF has taken control over most of this region after overrunning North Darfur State’s capital, El Fasher, also in the throes of famine since last September.​

“Mass atrocities committed in Darfur may repeat Kordofan”: warns the UN

After laying a siege for over 500 days and starving the residents of this last major city in the five states of Darfur holding against the RSF, the paramilitary overran its defenses in late October. Barely two months later, satellite imagery analysis by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) had confirmed that the city had been depopulated by the RSF after likely killing tens of thousands of its residents.​

“My Office sounded the alarm about the risk of mass atrocities in the besieged city of El Fasher for more than a year,” Türk added in his briefing, regretting, “The threat was clear, but warnings were not heeded.” He went on to warn, “I am extremely concerned that these violations and abuses may be repeated in the Kordofan region,” which has become the center of fighting since the fall of El Fasher.​

Famine-conditions spread in Darfur

An estimated 127,000 people have managed to escape El Fasher and its surrounding areas, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). A large number of them fled toward the Chadian border, sheltering in northwestern reaches of Darfur in towns like Um Baru and Kernoi, and further west in the border town of El Tine, where militias allied with the SAF and local self-defense groups are still holding fort against the RSF.​

Read more: The war in Sudan is “between two wings of a comprador parasitic capitalist class”

With this influx increasing the strain on the limited resources of these remote towns, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) data released on February 6 confirmed that hunger levels, already classified as “catastrophic”, have exceeded the “famine” threshold. Over half of all children in Um Baru, and 34% in Kernoi, are suffering acute malnutrition.  

​”Many other conflict-affected or inaccessible areas may also be facing similarly catastrophic conditions; however, the full extent remains unknown due to limited access and uncertainty over how rapidly conditions are deteriorating,” the IPC report added.

​With millions suffering malnutrition across Sudan, especially in Darfur and Kordofan regions, Action Against Hunger has warned that “more than 375,000 people are at real risk of starvation.”

Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue Reading“Worse to come” in Sudan as famine spreads and war continues

Civilians in El Fasher, Sudan face “slow, deliberate death under the RSF siege”

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Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Destruction in El Fasher, Sudan. Photo: Resistance Committees

After running out of animal fodder, people are now consuming cow skin as a last resort against starvation in North Darfur state’s besieged capital, cut off from all food supply by a 57-km wall the paramilitary has built around the city.

Walled in by war-torn Sudan’s paramilitary, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), over two hundred thousand civilians in North Darfur state’s besieged capital El Fasher “have nothing left but resistance and a collective death,” warned the city’s Resistance Committees (RC)*.

Traders report having completely run out of food supplies as famine closes in on the malnourished population, cut off from food aid since the RSF laid siege on the city in April 2024 to oust the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) from its last foothold in the Darfur region.

There were “only some secret points to enter and exit the city”, through which small quantities of food supplies were being smuggled through the siege, reportedly with the collaboration of some RSF troops, said Saleh Osman, President of the Darfur Bar Association.

However, severe shortages and hoarding meant that grains were sold at prices multiple times higher than before the war started in April 2023. Unable to afford, most people were surviving on small portions of porridge made from kora ambaz – a type of animal fodder left behind after extracting oil from peanuts.

Unsafe for long-term human consumption, it had nevertheless become a staple of last resort for the survival of El Fasher’s residents. Now, however, the “ambaz is gone too”, the RC said in a statement on October 14.

Total siege

The earthen wall that the RSF started building around the city this May to totalize its siege is reportedly complete, 57 km long, leaving little or no opening for food or any other essentials to be smuggled in.

“El Fasher is now effectively under siege from all directions,” Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said in a briefing on Wednesday, October 15. With the “earthen barriers around the city… preventing movement of both people and supplies”, the city’s markets, which have been repeatedly bombed by the RSF, “are largely empty”.

The little amount of grain left in the city is priced beyond reach. “A kilo of rice costs 450,000 Sudanese pounds” – over USD 748 – said Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees. Early this month, even the cost of a 50-kilo sack of ambaz had reached 2 million Sudanese pounds, over USD 3,300.

The last of the community kitchens, which Dujarric described as the “last line of support”, closed down on October 11. “People are now eating cow skin to survive”, the RC said, posting a video of a resident roasting the animal hide over an open fire. “This is not just hunger. It’s a slow, deliberate death under the RSF siege.”

Famine – which first broke out in August 2024 in displaced people’s camps on the outskirts of El Fasher – is fast closing in on the city where about 260,000 residents, including 130,000 children, remain trapped, awaiting death by starvation, if they are not killed by the RSF first.

The smell of death now fills the streets

Composed of the Janjaweed militias organized by the SAF to commit mass atrocities during the civil war in Darfur in the 2000s, the RSF has ethnically cleansed several areas in the other four states of Darfur that it has taken over.

In over 250 attacks on El Fasher, the RSF has already killed hundreds in shelling. “The shells pour down like rain, not distinguishing between a sleeping child or a mother pleading to the heavens to protect her children,” the RC said after the intense bombardment of the city on October 3.

“The smell of death now fills the streets, blood washes over the pavements, homes are destroyed on top of their inhabitants, markets have been reduced to ashes, and bodies are being pulled from beneath the rubble – without names, without faces, only numbers in a long record of massacres.” Hundreds of bodies remain in the rubble of residential neighborhoods struck by drones.

Chemical weapons used?

The following day, on October 4, RSF drones dropped projectiles emitting a “strange and strong” smelling gas, after inhaling which several were rushed to hospitals, vomiting, convulsing, and hallucinating. “All signs point to the use of internationally banned gases or chemical agents,” the RC said.

Later on the night of October 7, RSF shelled the hospital multiple times, killing at least 13 and wounding sixteen others, including medics. The shelling destroyed several wards in one of the last remaining hospitals in El Fasher.

“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action”

“After over 500 days of unremitting siege by the RSF and incessant fighting, El Fasher is on the precipice of an even greater catastrophe if urgent measures are not taken to loosen the armed vice upon the city and to protect civilians,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned earlier this month.

“The international community – led by the United Nations – continues to speak in the language of proposals without action. The UN proposal to deliver humanitarian aid by air to Al-Fasher has been awaited far too long, at a time when waiting is no longer an option – because people are dying of hunger now,” the RC complained.

“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action, no ground movement to lift the siege,” it lamented. “We cry for help and no one answers… We see our city being erased and we die resisting, because we have nothing left but resistance and a collective death in the silence of the world.”

*Organized in localities across Sudan’s cities, the Resistance Committees comprise a decentralized network of youth activists. It spearheaded the mass pro-democracy protests against the military junta before its components – the SAF and the RSF – turned on each other, hurling Sudan into a civil war in April 2023. Since the war, the Committees have been at the forefront of coordinating and organizing relief, rescue and defense of stranded civilians.

Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingCivilians in El Fasher, Sudan face “slow, deliberate death under the RSF siege”

Now in its third year, war in Sudan is “is far from over”

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Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The violence in Sudan has pushed North Darfur’s Zamzam camp, home to over 500,000 people, into famine. Photo: WHO

“The world has completely forgotten the crisis in Sudan” where “a slow death” has become the plight of millions, decried Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees.

As the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensifies in North Darfur state and the Kordofan region, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned on Friday, June 20 of a “further aggravation in an already brutal and deadly conflict.”

The war, which began in April 2023, has created the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, displacing nearly 13 million, leaving Sudan with the highest number of displaced people globally. 30 million, almost two-thirds of the population, need humanitarian aid, including food assistance.

The worst affected are children, amounting to half of the hungry and displaced population, the UN said last week, decrying a severe fund shortage, leaving it unable to assist over 80% of the children in need.

Children under the age of five are the largest group of victims of the measles outbreak, amounting to over 60% of the 2,200 suspected cases since the start of this year. Another 230 children have been killed and 7,300 suspected to have been infected by cholera, which broke out last July, killing over 2,000 and suspectedly infecting over 80,000 people.

The number of cholera cases sharply spiked earlier this year in Sudan’s capital region of Khartoum where over 34,000 displaced people returned mainly since March after the SAF retook control from the RSF.

Damaged in the fighting, most of the homes to which they returned lacked water or sanitation. In May, the RSF launched a series of drone strikes on water purification units and power plants, further curtailing water supply, and forcing residents to resort to unsafe sources, which caused over a nine-fold rise in cholera cases in the second half of that month.

Read more: Cholera ravages Sudan’s war-torn capital 

Last week, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) raised the alarm that the cholera wave had now reached the western semi-arid region of Darfur for the first time since the war began.

In a press statement on Sunday, June 22, the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees warned that diseases may spread rapidly as monsoon season has begun in Darfur, with rains lashing over the displaced sheltering only under plastic sheets with no sanitation facilities.

Particularly vulnerable to the deadly diseases are the children and the pregnant and breast-feeding women who are already suffering from malnutrition, its spokesperson Adam Rojal told Peoples Dispatch, “The world has completely forgotten the crisis in Sudan” where “a slow death” has become the plight of millions, he decried.

The Darfur region consists of five states, of which North Darfur remains the only state where the SAF has retained a foothold in its capital El Fasher. The RSF, which controls the rest of the region, has laid a siege on the city for over a year now, cutting off its supply of food and other essentials, and frequently bombarding the famine-stricken displaced peoples camp on its outskirts. Activists have warned that El Fasher itself is on the verge of famine.

Now in its third year, the war that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe on such a scale “is far from over”, a UN fact-finding mission warned last week.

After seizing the border triangle region between Sudan, Libya, and Egypt on June 14, the RSF also announced on June 16 that it captured the strategic oasis town of Karb al-Toum in the north-western desert region. This effectively severs the supply route to the SAF in North Darfur while paving the way for the RSF to advance in the Northern State.

The RSF – which the SAF claims to have killed 28,613 and wounded 43,575 since the start of the war – is also making advances in the Kordofan region in the center and southern region of Sudan. Civilians in South Kordofan’s city of El-Dibeibat – a crucial crossroad linking the state with North Kordofan and West Darfur – have been caught up in the crossfire for over two years.

Fleeing this city, thousands sought refuge in North Kordofan’s capital El-Obeid, under SAF’s control. However, the RSF has surrounded El-Obeid, “and may attack it in the coming days, as announced by the RSF commander,” the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said on June 20. 

Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingNow in its third year, war in Sudan is “is far from over”

Hundreds killed in the “deadliest single bombing” of the war in Sudan

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Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The market is near the city of El-Fasher, which is controlled by the army. Photo: Darfur Network for Human Rights

The airstrike on one of the last major markets left with stocks in the North Darfur will likely accelerate the famine spreading in the state since last August.

An airstrike by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) on a busy market in the North Darfur state killed hundreds on March 24, in what has been described as the “deadliest single bombing since the beginning of the war” in April 2023. 

Initial reports indicated about 60 deaths, but the death count has now “exceeded 350, with hundreds more injured and missing”, Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees told Peoples Dispatch. The SAF, he alleged, had deliberately chosen the weekly market day to inflict maximum damage.

“My Office has learned that 13 of those killed belonged to a single family, and that some of the injured are also reportedly dying as a result of the extremely limited access to healthcare,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement on March 26.

“The market was bustling with life, mothers carrying their children, elderly men selling vegetables, and people going about their daily business. Then, without warning, we heard the deafening roar of a plane overhead. Within seconds, everything went dark. The air was thick with dust and the cries of the wounded. Bodies lay scattered across the ground,” 37-year-old Aisha, a survivor with injuries to an arm and leg, told the Darfur Network for Human Rights. “We are not fighters. We are just ordinary people struggling to live. Why are they bombing us?”

The market is located in the village of Tora, about 35 km north of the state capital El-Fasher, the last SAF foothold in the Darfur region. Its former ruling partner in the military junta turned enemy, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – which has taken over the other four states in the Darfur region – has besieged El-Fasher since mid-last year, cutting off the supply routes for food aid and causing a famine.

The famine is spreading to increasing regions of the state as both the warring parties, in an attempt to undermine the other’s position, have been indiscriminately bombing civilian spaces, including in markets – the SAF from the air and the RSF with artillery. Those markets spared of bombing, have largely run out of stock.

Tora had the only major market left with supplies for the people in and around El-Fasher to buy food and other essentials, Rojal said. On March 24, thousands had journeyed from different areas of the state to this weekly Monday market to stock up ahead of the ending of Ramadan, when an SAF warplane dropped a barrel bomb.

Pictures of the aftermath show charred bodies lying in the smoldering debris of the stalls in this market. 

Two million already suffering extreme food insecurity in the state 

The destruction of the last major market in the state is bound to worsen hunger and hasten the spread of famine in North Darfur, where two million people are already facing extreme food insecurity. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on March 26 that over 457,000 children in the state are suffering acute malnourishment. Almost 146,000 of them are in the deadly stage of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM). 

IDP camps worst affected by famine

The worst affected are the camps for Internally Displaced People (IDP). Hundreds of thousands displaced during the Darfur Civil War in the 2000s when the SAF and the RSF’s precursor, the Janjaweed militias, committed mass atrocities together, were already living here in precarious conditions, dependent on food aid even before this war began in 2023. 

Displacing 12 million more, this war has caused the world’s worst displacement crisis. In North Darfur alone, almost 1.7 million people have been displaced, including 60,000 in the last six weeks. Increasing numbers of the newly displaced have sought shelter in Zamzam, one of Sudan’s largest and oldest IDP camps, located on the outskirts of El Fasher. 

Its population doubled from 350,000 before this war to up to 800,000, increasing pressure on the limited food availability. Cut-off from supply after the RSF’s siege of El-Fasher last year, a famine was declared here in August 2024.      

Read: Besieged and bombed amid famine, hundreds of thousands of IDPs struggle to survive in Darfur 

Since then, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) has only been able to transport one convoy of aid to the camp amid the fighting. Late last month, the WFP complained that it was forced to halt “the distribution of life-saving food and nutrition assistance” because the “escalating violence left WFP’s partners with no choice but to evacuate staff for safety.

Over four weeks have passed since its Regional Director for Eastern Africa and acting Country Director for Sudan, Laurent Bukera, warned that “without immediate assistance, thousands of desperate families in Zamzam could starve in the coming weeks.” Nearly half a million more IDPs are also on the brink in the Abu Shouk camp, where famine was declared last December, along with El Salam camp in the state.

By May, the UN projects that five more areas in North Darfur, including the state capital El Fasher, may be in the throes of famine.  

Read: RSF shelling kills dozens in famine-stricken Abu Shouk Camp amid siege of North Darfur 

Water shortages worsen the plight of the starving

Water shortages have also become life-threatening, especially in Zamzam and Abu Shouk, added Rojal. “There are no means of transporting water from distant locations, nor are there spare parts and fuel to operate boilers” to purify the available water for drinking.  

“Women and children stand in line from 4 am to 3 pm waiting for their turn to collect whatever little water there is,” he added. Unable to bathe and wash their clothes and cooking pots, many are becoming increasingly vulnerable to diseases, which are life-threatening when victims are already suffering malnutrition. 

“We must resume the delivery of life-saving aid,” emphasized Bukera. “For that, the fighting must stop, and humanitarian organizations must be granted security guarantees.”

No end in sight after nearly two years of war

However, there are few signs of the guns stopping anytime soon. Earlier, following 48 hours of fighting on March 20 and 21, the RSF captured the town of Al-Malha, killing dozens of civilians and displacing another 15,000 households.

200 km to the northeast of El-Fasher, Al-Malha is the northernmost urban area before the desert stretching to Libya, from where Khalifa Haftar has been reportedly supplying the RSF with arms and fuel. The capture of this town therefore reinforces the RSF’s strategic advantage against the SAF in North Darfur.

The SAF, on the other hand, has also scored an important victory, retaking Sudan’s capital Khartoum on March 26, expelling the RSF after intense battles.

“Both sides are killing citizens because they were essentially one entity, killing citizens together. They are devoid of morality and humanity,” laments Rojal.

Original article by Pavan Kulkarni republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingHundreds killed in the “deadliest single bombing” of the war in Sudan