The war in Sudan is a tragic afterthought in global politics, forgotten amid the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. But 19 months of fighting between rival warlords and affiliated militias have ravaged one of Africa’s largest countries and provoked a rolling humanitarian disaster. Some 26 million people — about half of Sudan’s population — need food assistance in a country that’s home to the world’s largest displacement crisis. Close to 10 million people have been classified by the United Nations as “critically food insecure,” that is, on the cusp of famine or already in the grips of it. “Both in terms of spread and the acuteness of hunger, this is the worst humanitarian hunger catastrophe that we have on the planet today,” Alex Marianelli, acting country director for Sudan at the U.N.’s World Food Program, told me. The war has collapsed local economies, disrupted harvests and impeded the flows of goods through the country. Food prices have skyrocketed, making basic staples unaffordable to many ordinary Sudanese. The numbers of deaths by malnutrition are rising in camps for refugees and the displaced. U.N. officials and aid organizations have food to feed the hungry, but the complexity of delivering and distributing aid in a vast country overrun by a mosaic of competing militias has been overwhelming.  | | |
On top of the logistical challenges, Sudan is coping with the apathy of a failing international system. “Twenty years ago, we had presidents and prime ministers engaged to stop atrocities in Darfur,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a recent statement after visiting Sudan, referring to the western region of the country that had been the site of a state-led genocide a generation ago. “There are today many times as many lives at stake — this is the world’s worst crisis — but we are met with deafening silence. We must wake up the world before famine engulfs a generation of children.” Tragically, there’s no prospect of an imminent peace. The civil war is being fought between the Sudanese armed forces and a paramilitary organization known as the Rapid Support Forces. Violence flared in April 2023 after enmities between the leaders of both factions collapsed the country’s interim government. The two sides have received support from a web of outside powers: Sudan’s military boasts the backing of Egypt and flies Iranian drones; the RSF has drones from the United Arab Emirates and appears to have supplemented its ranks with a detachment of Colombian mercenaries. At different moments, Russia has supported both sides. The RSF, in particular, has been linked to a spate of atrocities, including massacres of civilians and reports of mass rapes and widespread sexual violence. Airstrikes carried out by the Sudanese military on various cities controlled by the RSF have led to countless civilian deaths. The battles raging across the country led to the mobilization of a patchwork of local militias and armed ethnic groups, which entered the fray either to back one of the principal factions or to defend their towns and communities. The confusion of the battlefield has “severely impeded” WFP’s ability to rush supplies to communities in need, Marianelli told me. In the best of times, the road journey from Sudan’s east to west can take weeks. During the rainy season, regular routes can be flooded and impassable. But the civil war has created myriad new problems, with aid organizations struggling to secure safe passage for their trucks from the hodgepodge of armed groups and hungry communities manning checkpoints across thousands of kilometers of Sudanese territory. “The most we reached in October was 2 million” people, Marianelli said. “It’s a good achievement, but we are not anywhere near the ballpark figures we need to be.” All the while, Sudanese suffering mounts. On Sunday and Monday, RSF forces reportedly shelled the Zamzam displacement camp in war-stricken northern Darfur, where aid officials have already declared famine is rife. “Not only have people been starving, but they are also now being bombarded and forced to flee again,” Michel-Olivier Lacharité, head of emergency operations for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement that described a “beyond chaotic” situation with “casualties, panic, and mass displacement.” The ongoing hunger crisis has led to grim superlatives. “Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today,” a panel of U.N. experts warned in October. “In order for the starvation and famine in Sudan to end,” they added, the warring parties need “to stop immediately obstructing aid delivery,” attacking local aid workers, and foreign governments also need “to halt financial and military support of the [Sudanese military] and RSF.” But these statements of concern have failed to motivate a genuine international effort to force a ceasefire. The U.N.’s new relief chief, Tom Fletcher, recently toured parts of western Sudan ravaged by the fighting. “It was utterly chilling to drive through these smoked-out ruins and ghost towns,” Fletcher told the BBC this week, warning of a “crisis of protection, including an epidemic of sexual violence, as well as the specter of famine.” The war “feels forgotten, at least from our side here,” Marianelli told me, speaking from WFP’s base of operations in Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea. “I would like that in 2024 that the world really realizes what is happening.” | 
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