Plea for help as hunger stalks Khartoum

In a war-devastated district of Sudan’s capital, Abbas Mohammed Babiker says he and his family have only been able to eat once a day. Now even that is in doubt, but on Sunday a citizens’ support group issued an urgent appeal for donations to help people like him.

“We only have enough for two more days,” Babiker said from Khartoum North, where residents said at least one person, a local musician, has already died from hunger.

Since April 15, battles between Sudan’s army led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces or RSF, headed by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have killed more than 3,900 people, according to the latest toll from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project or ACLED.

More than 2.6 million people have been internally displaced, mostly from Khartoum, the International Organization for Migration said.

Thousands who remain in the capital, particularly in Khartoum North, are trapped at home without water since the local water station was damaged at the start of the war.

Residents say there is only intermittent electricity and food has nearly run out.

Across the country, about one-third of the population already faced hunger even before the war began, said the UN’s World Food Programme.

Despite the security challenges, the agency says it has reached more than 1.4 million people with emergency food aid as needs intensify.

“With the fighting, there is no market any more and anyway we have no money,” said another resident of Khartoum North, Essam Abbas.

To help them, the local “resistance committee,” a pro-democracy neighborhood group, issued its emergency appeal.

“We have to support each other, give food and money and distribute to those around us,” the committee wrote on Facebook.

In adjacent Omdurman, Khartoum’s other battle-scarred sister city, locally known violinist Khaled Senhouri “died from hunger” last week, his friends wrote on Facebook.

In his own online posts, Senhouri had said he was unable to leave home because of the fighting and had tried to hang on with the supplies that he had. It wasn’t enough.

Lawyers and medics said on Saturday that at least 20 Sudanese civilians had been killed by rocket fire on residential areas of one of Darfur’s main cities and by shelling near hospitals in North Kordofan state.

The doctors’ union said that since Friday morning shells had struck near four hospitals in the North Kordofan state capital El-Obeid, killing four civilians and wounding 45.

In the South Darfur state capital Nyala, the local lawyers’ union said that rocket fire had killed 16 civilians.

The Darfur region, already ravaged by brutal conflict in the early 2000s, has seen some of the worst of the violence since fighting erupted in mid-April between Sudanese rival generals vying for power.

“During an exchange of rocket fire between the army and the RSF, 16 civilians were killed on Friday, according to a preliminary toll,” the lawyers’ union said.

And at least one man was killed by a sniper, it added.

In the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina, near Chad, snipers have reportedly been targeting residents from rooftops since fighting began, and tens of thousands have fled across the border.

The war, which broke out in the capital Khartoum on April 15 and spread to Darfur later that month, has left at least 3,000 dead across Sudan, according to a conservative estimate.

Fighting in Darfur, an RSF stronghold, has recently concentrated around Nyala, after brutal clashes in El-Geneina where the UN had reported atrocities.

Battles have also continued in and around Khartoum.

Residents reported on Saturday the first army air strikes on villages in the Al-Jazirah state, just south of the capital.

The fertile land between the White Nile and Blue Nile rivers now hosts several hundred thousands of the estimated 3.3 million people the war has displaced. If fighting expands into Al-Jazirah, they may be forced to flee again.

The humanitarian workers who support them would have to move as well, but fear the many bureaucratic challenges in relocating their operations.

Analysts say both warring sides would like to see the battlefield expand.

“The RSF has held the upper hand in Khartoum since the early days of the war, but that advantage is only growing more apparent,” the International Crisis Group think tank said.

The army on July 15 launched a major offensive in North Khartoum, flattening entire suburban neighborhoods with air raids, “but it failed spectacularly,” the ICG said.

The RSF, meanwhile, are trying to seize the main Darfur-Khartoum road to ensure a constant supply of fighters and weapons.