Sudan is at “breaking point”, a United Nations agency said on Monday (12), as growing numbers of people need food, water, shelter and medical care in a country ravaged by intensifying war.
More than eight million people have been displaced since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last year, plunging the country into what the UN has called “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory”.
“Without an immediate, massive and coordinated global response, we risk witnessing tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the coming months,” Othman Belbeisi, Middle East and Africa director at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a statement. “We are at breaking point, a catastrophic and cataclysmic breaking point,” he added.
At least half of those displaced are children in a war that has seen “horrific levels of rights violations, ethnic attacks, massacres of civilian populations and gender-based violence,” the statement said.
Earlier this month, the UN-backed Famine Review Committee said at least one refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region was in a state of famine, something the agency has only declared twice in Sudan’s history. In May, the World Food Programme said people in the region were being forced to eat grass and peanut shells to survive.
“Over the next three months, an estimated 25.6 million people will face acute food insecurity as the conflict spreads and response mechanisms are stretched thin,” the UN agency said in a statement. “Many other places” in Sudan are also at risk of famine, it added.
The military is also blocking urgent aid deliveries to Sudan, and the IOM has said it needs additional funding to reach those in need. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said a key bridge used by aid workers to reach the Darfur region collapsed last week after severe flooding.
“This was the only safe route for humanitarian aid to reach central and (southern) Darfur,” MSF said Monday in a post on X. “This adds another major obstacle to our efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Sudan.”
The warning comes as a new round of cease-fire negotiations led by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are set to begin this week in Switzerland, the AP reported Monday. The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed militia that led the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, has agreed to participate in the talks, but Sudan’s military has not.
A Sudanese government delegation met with U.S. officials in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah over the weekend in an attempt to convince the military to attend on Wednesday, but no progress was made, according to the AP.
“We have had extensive engagement with the SAF,” Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy for Sudan, told reporters on Monday, according to the news agency. “They have not yet given us an affirmation, which would be necessary today for us to move forward.”
“We have not lost hope that the SAF will participate in the talks,” he added.
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