Christos Christou, the international president of Doctors Without Borders, said Thursday that the war in Sudan has caused “one of the worst humanitarian crises” in the world in decades. Since April 2023, the conflict has pitted the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo. According to the UN, the conflict has already killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than nine million people.
“Sudan is marked by one of the worst crises the world has seen in decades (…) and the humanitarian response is deeply inadequate,” he said on the social network extremes of suffering across the country and the needs are growing day by day,” he added.
The threat of unprecedented famine
The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said hunger in Sudan could reach levels not seen since the Ethiopian famine in the early 1980s, which left 1.2 million dead. “We have seen mortality projections that more than 2.5 million people (15% population) in Darfur and Kordofan, the hardest hit regions, could die by the end of September,” she warned.
“This is the largest humanitarian crisis on the planet, and it threatens to get worse as the rainy season approaches,” added the diplomat. For its part, the UN estimates that around five million people are suffering from extreme hunger, while food is also lacking in neighboring countries where two million Sudanese have taken refuge.
Ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity
Several human rights groups and the United States have also accused the paramilitaries of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The United States, which will send emergency aid of 315 million dollars, called on both camps to allow access to humanitarian aid, warning that the country was threatened with a famine of magnitude historical.
At the UN, Sudanese Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, during a Council meeting, accused the United Arab Emirates of being responsible for the continuation of the war. The Emirati representative rejected this accusation. Sudan expelled UAE diplomats suspected of supporting the RSF, while Egypt, Turkey and Iran said they supported the army. Several foreign countries have provided support to the various belligerents.