Sudan: a year ago the war began which has already caused 15 thousand deaths and 8 million refugees

ROMA – Rapes, murders, hunger, corpses piled up on the roadsides: on 15 April a year ago the war in Sudan began, with a dramatic outcome. At least 15 thousand dead, eight million refugees, 25 million people who need humanitarian assistance to survive, an imminent famine and war crimes committed by all parties in the conflict, namely the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. The crisis is worsening and funding for non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies is decreasing: “without more resources not only will we not be able to stop hunger, but we will no longer be able to help practically anyone”, comments Justin Brady, head ofOCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Most of the food rations that Sudanese remaining at home receive from organizations such as the World Food Program (WFP) have already been halved during this year, other cuts are not admissible because it would mean giving up on helping. Since mid-April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Forces (SAF) have launched air and ground attacks on Khartoum, and from there the violence has begun to expand outwards in a cycle that is difficult to break.

The famine. Nearly 18 million Sudanese face acute hunger, while the $2.7 billion response plan planned for 2024 is only 6 percent funded – OCHA warns. Living conditions in Sudan were already poor before the war, starting with the 2021 coup, with an economy sinking amid continuous waves of ethnic-based violence. Today, humanitarian supplies are also available, but the main challenge is managing to distribute them to the affected populations, amidst continuous looting of the warehouses where the aid is stored, bureaucratic obstacles and communications interruptions. While hunger spreads across the country, local news – the United Nations writes – report that every two hours a child dies of malnutrition in the Zamzam refugee camp, in North Darfur. 24 million children have been exposed to war this year and 730 thousand are the number of those who are severely malnourished, documents theUNICEF. More than 19 million children did not attend school this year and on the streets of Khartoum or Darfur even very young people can be seen carrying weapons, evidence of reports that children are systematically recruited by armed groups.

Women and displaced people. The first children of the war are being born: those carried by the women raped in the first months of fighting, UNICEF always explains. Some new mothers are too weak to breastfeed, because malnutrition is a plague to which they too are victims. “I lost everything I owned,” says Fatima, a woman from western Darfur forced to flee with her family, to UN News. “The militias ransacked our house and took everything, even the doors.” For 57 days Fatima remained trapped in her home in El Geneina as fighters targeted and killed people based on ethnicity. “There were so many bodies in the streets that it was difficult to walk,” says Fatima as she describes the flight to leave the city. The United Nations Security Council called for a ceasefire at least during the month of Ramadan, which ended last week, but today the clashes have resumed, bloodier than before.

Politics. Leaders of the European Union and other global and regional powers meet in Paris today to shed light on the war in Sudan, marking the first anniversary of the brutal conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF ) and to discuss the need to increase global funding for the humanitarian response, considering that the country is on the brink of famine, writes Human Rights Watch (HRW). In May 2023, both sides to the conflict committed, during talks hosted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to respect international humanitarian law and allow the delivery of aid across the country. With the news of a resumption of the aforementioned talks and with the Paris conference, the European Union, the United States and the African Union – writes HRW – should push for the establishment of a monitoring mechanism so that the SAF and the RSF no longer violate the law international humanitarian organization and are committed to protecting civilians.