Everyone knows at least one family who lost a child in Zamzam, a camp for hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Sudan’s Darfur region. Hunger and disease have become grim features of daily life, and according to the medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a child dies in the camp every two hours.
“There were many of them, I can’t remember them all. The last one died yesterday,” says Laila Ahmed, who lives in the camp with her nine children. Like much of Sudan, Zamzam has had no phone or internet connection for the past two weeks, but the Guardian was able to speak to the refugees via satellite link.
They described a desperate situation, with no clean drinking water and little access to treatment. Families share scarce food supplies. Almost 25% of children are severely malnourished.
Dengue fever and malaria are ravaging the camp. Behind its perimeters roam militiamen who kidnap or attack women who dare to collect wood or grass for their donkeys. Apart from a small distribution in June, no food aid has arrived since fighting broke out across Sudan on April 15.
“I think we are approaching general starvation,” says Abdullatif Ali, a father of six. “People are suffering from malnutrition, disease – a lot of problems.”
Zamzam was founded in the mid-2000s, following the genocide in Darfur, carried out by predominantly Arab militias called the Janjaweed. Before the current war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), which grew out of Janjaweed, Zamzam was aided by a number of international aid agencies, but they also withdrew abruptly when the fighting began.
Since then, the camp’s population has grown with new arrivals of people fleeing the fighting in the south. “This is a huge, overcrowded camp that needs a lot of support, but is completely left to its own devices,” says Emmanuel Berbain, an MSF doctor who visited it recently. “It’s a complete disaster, to be honest.”
MSF and Relief International are the only aid groups still operating in Zamzam and the nearby town of El Fasher, where some two million people need help. Strict internal security rules mean UN agencies cannot send staff to the region, while NGOs simply don’t have enough money to restart their operations.
“We are overcrowded,” says Kashif Shafique, Sudan director for Relief International. “It’s too much for just two organizations to cover.” Sudan has been brought to the brink of collapse by 10 months of fighting. Half of the 50 million people are in need of food assistance, while nearly 8 million people have been driven from their homes, the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.
According to the “most likely scenario”, famine will break out in most of Sudan by June, putting half a million people at direct risk of dying, according to research published by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank. In the worst-case scenario, a nationwide famine could kill a million people, it is predicted.
“The scale is simply terrifying,” says William Carter, local head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). “Zamzam is just one camp. There are hundreds of others in Sudan where we see babies who are not getting help.”
NRC worked in the Zamzam camp, but there is not enough money and he cannot afford to return yet. These cash constraints are shared by all agencies in Sudan, where the worsening humanitarian crisis has been overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and the Israeli offensive on Gaza. Last year, the UN received only 43% of the funding it needed to respond.
“The international community has simply not prioritized Sudan or given it resources,” Carter says. “To be honest, I think pure laziness got us here. They could have found a solution if they had been motivated to do so, but they didn’t.” In December, fighting spread to Gazira state, a logistics hub for aid agencies and the site of Sudan’s largest irrigation project, further disrupting the country’s damaged food system.
Some markets are out of food. The shutdown of communications, meanwhile, made it impossible for humanitarian groups without satellite equipment to carry out their operations. Mobile money transfer apps, a vital lifeline for people trapped behind the front lines, no longer work. On Monday, volunteers who run a network of 38 soup kitchens in Bahri, a satellite town of the capital Khartoum, said they were suspending their work because they could no longer procure and distribute food amid a power outage. They fed almost 200,000 people every day.
“I have no idea what they will eat now. There is nothing we can do,” says Mukhtar Atif, a spokesman for Emergency Aid, a volunteer network that operates across Sudan.
Toby Harward, the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, says the “frequent bureaucratic hurdles” the authorities place on aid groups are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. This makes it difficult to obtain visas, transport assistance across the country and import humanitarian supplies. Earlier this month, the UN’s World Food Program said 70 of its trucks, carrying enough food to feed half a million people
and, for two weeks they could not leave Port Sudan because they were waiting for permits. Another 31 trucks, “which were supposed to deliver regular aid”, were stuck in the town of El Obeid for more than three months.
Several trucks were held up and looted. Sudan’s military commander, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has suggested he will not allow aid into RSF-controlled areas, which would violate international humanitarian law but echoes tactics used by previous Sudanese leaders.
Several warehouses and aid offices were destroyed by looting at the beginning of the fighting. “That means we’re starting this response with zero supplies,” says Eatizaz Yousif, head of Sudan’s International Rescue Committee. “Everything that humanitarian groups put up before the war – food, blankets – everything has been swept away and removed,” said Yousif, who also highlighted the “failure of the international community to put any pressure” on the warring parties to respect humanitarian principles.
Despite the fighting in November, there is an uneasy truce in El Fasher, the only major town in Darfur not yet captured by the RSF. Elsewhere in the region, the RSF and its allies have launched a campaign of ethnically motivated violence against civilians, drawing parallels with the 2003-2005 genocide. Cash-strapped aid groups still can’t get there. “Unless there is a massive intervention to distribute food and cash, the country cannot survive,” Yousif says, The Guardian writes.
