The United Nations has warned that ongoing fighting between rivaling forces in Sudan has plunged the humanitarian situation of the impoverished nation from critical to catastrophic.
Two senior UN officials, who just returned from Sudan, painted a sad picture of devastation and suffering in the country where a power struggle between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has left 24 million people in need of food and other assistance.
The humanitarian crisis in Sudan has plummeted to a catastrophic situation, according to reports by Eden Worsornu, director of operations for the UN humanitarian agency, and Ted Chaiban, deputy executive director of the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
“Before the war erupted on the 15th of April, Sudan was already grappling with a humanitarian crisis,” Chaiban said on Friday. “Now, more than 110 days of brutal fighting have turned the crisis into a catastrophe, threatening the lives and futures of a generation of children and young people who make up over 70 percent of the population.”
Chaiban said 24 million people need food and other humanitarian aid, including 14 million children, a number equivalent to every single child in Colombia, France, Germany and Thailand,
Worsornu said the lives of millions of people “have been shattered by relentless violence.”
She said people who have fled the fighting in the capital of Khartoum and the southern Kordofan and western Darfur regions face threats of attacks, sexual violence and death, amid scorching heat up to 48 degrees Celsius.
Now “it is worse than it was in 2004” when Arab militias used to stage attacks on people of Central or East African ethnicities, Worsornu said.
On Wednesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a warning that 6.3 million people in Sudan were now one step away from famine and over 20 million people were facing high levels of acute food insecurity.
Sudan’s catastrophic humanitarian situation began in mid-April over a power struggle between army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who commands the RSF.
More than 3,000 people have been killed and twice as many injured in the fighting, according to figures released by the Sudanese Health Ministry.
The international community, including the UN, the Arab League as well as many countries in the world has already urged the country’s two military leaders and their allies to stop the aggression and resolve their issues through dialog for the sake of the suffering Sudanese nation.