More than a million Sudanese children, more than a quarter of them in Darfur alone, will be displaced, the UN has warned. In this region, cut off from the rest of the world and on the brink of “a human disaster”, the conflict has been going on for two months, opposing the army of Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
Since April 15, fighting between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has plunged Sudan, already one of the poorest countries in the world, into deep distress. . On Friday, airstrikes targeted the Bayt Al-Mal neighborhood in Oumdurman, near the capital Khartoum. “Several houses were damaged” and at least three people lost their lives in the strikes, according to the local “resistance committee”, one of the militant cells that organize mutual aid among residents.
For their part, the paramilitaries claimed that the army had targeted “residential areas”, causing the death of “twenty people, some of them inside a mosque”. The FSR also accused the army of having targeted one of their bases where prisoners of war are being held, leaving twenty dead and wounded, without specifying the exact distribution among the victims.
Amid the fighting, the humanitarian situation is only getting worse: hospitals in the areas of clashes are only partially functioning, if not closed. Two months of war has also resulted in “the displacement of more than a million children, while 330 others have been killed and more than 1,900 have been injured”, said the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef ) Thursday in a statement.
UNICEF Representative in Sudan, Mandeep O’Brien, denounced “the relentless nightmare in which children are trapped”, who “bear the heaviest burden of this crisis”. Children make up more than half of Sudan’s 45 million people, and according to UNICEF, more than 13.6 million of them are in need of humanitarian aid. Among these children, 620,000 suffer from acute malnutrition and half could die if no help is provided.
In Darfur, where testimonies of widespread violence against civilians are increasing, “270,000 children have been displaced by the conflict”, reports UNICEF. Already devastated in the 2000s by a particularly bloody civil war, this vast region of western Sudan is heading for a new “humanitarian disaster” that the world must prevent, pleaded on Thursday the UN chief for humanitarian affairs. , Martin Griffiths.
On Friday, the World Food Program (WFP) announced that it had succeeded in distributing food there “to more than 375,000 people”. The head of the UN mission in Sudan, Volker Perthes, said on Tuesday he was “particularly alarmed” by the situation in Darfur where the violence could constitute “crimes against humanity”. The army chief on Thursday accused the RSF of having captured and killed the governor of West Darfur state, Khamis Abdullah Abakar, after an interview where he criticized the paramilitaries.
The RSF have denied responsibility, but according to the UN “convincing accounts from witnesses attribute this act to Arab militias and the RSF”. Since the fighting began, more than 149,000 people have fled to Chad, according to the UN. About “6,000” fled the fighting in the town of El-Geneina (West Darfur), “cut off from all communication”, to find refuge in the town of Adré in Chad, the NGO Doctors without borders (MSF). On Thursday, “250 injured people” were treated at Adré hospital, including “130 with serious injuries”.
The violence in Sudan has killed more than 2,000 people since its outbreak, according to the latest report from the NGO ACLED. More than 2.2 million people have fled the country, including more than a million from Khartoum, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). More than 528,000 refugees have found refuge in neighboring countries.
After two months of conflict, no scenario of a return to peace is on the horizon. In Khartoum, witnesses told AFP on Friday of “air strikes” by the army in the northern suburbs, to which “anti-aircraft batteries” of the RSF responded. Entire districts of the capital no longer have drinking water, and the electricity works there for a few hours a week. In South Kordofan, witnesses reported an attack by paramilitaries on a police station, while in El-Obeid, North Kordofan, fighting is taking place between the army and paramilitaries, according to witnesses.
