The children died one after the other. Twelve acutely malnourished infants living in one corner of Sudan’s war-ravaged capital, Khartoum.
Abdo, an 18-month-old boy, had been rushed to a clinic by his mother as he was dying. His ribs protruded from his withered body. The next day, a doctor laid him out on a blanket with a teddy bear motif, his eyes closed.
Like the other 11 children, Abdo starved to death in the weeks after President Trump froze all U.S. foreign assistance, said local aid workers and a doctor. American-funded soup kitchens in Sudan, including the one near Abdo’s house, had been the only lifelines for tens of thousands of people besieged by fighting.
Bombs were falling. Gunfire was everywhere. Then, as the American money dried up, hundreds of soup kitchens closed in a matter of days.
“It was catastrophic,” said Duaa Tariq, an aid worker.
The stark consequences of Mr. Trump’s slashing of U.S. aid are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has set off a staggering humanitarian catastrophe and left 25 million people — more than half of the country’s population — acutely hungry.
Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades, aid groups say. Famine is spreading rapidly, with some resorting to eating leaves and grass. About 400,000 people were scattered and hundreds killed in Darfur in the past week alone, as paramilitary fighters overran the country’s largest camp for displaced people, the United Nations said.
Last year, the United States gave $830 million in emergency aid, helping 4.4 million Sudanese, the United Nations estimates. That was far more aid than any other country provided. But after Mr. Trump halted that lifeline in January by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, the effect in Khartoum was devastating.
Within days, over 300 soup kitchens run by Emergency Response Rooms, a network of democracy activists turned volunteer aid workers, were forced to close. In Jereif West, the neighborhood where Ms. Tariq works, hungry residents roved the streets in search of food amid shelling and drone strikes.
“People shared what they could,” she said. “But many went home empty-handed.”
Any cut in aid can be deadly: More than 600,000 Sudanese people are already living in famine, and another eight million are “on the cliff edge,” according to a consortium of major aid groups.
The Trump administration has said that lifesaving aid is exempt from the cuts. In an email, a State Department spokesman said that the United States was still helping four million people inside Sudan, as well as 3.8 million refugees in neighboring countries.
But on the ground, aid groups say the flow of American money stopped for almost two months and has resumed only in fits and starts, if at all.
The U.S.A.I.D. officials who once helped make the payments have been fired. A work force of about 10,000 is being reduced to about 15 positions, leaving the American chain of assistance mired in chaos, delays and uncertainty.
So while the Trump administration says the tap for Sudan is still on, aid groups trying to stave off starvation say the total amount has been reduced and the entire system has been paralyzed, cutting off food for weeks at a time in a place where few can afford to miss a single meal.
Other rich countries have not filled the gap. Despite new pledges from Britain and the European Union at a conference on Tuesday in London, the U.N. is still billions of dollars short of what it says it needs to save lives in Sudan this year.
“This is the darkest hour for Sudan,” said Jan Egeland, head of the aid agency Norwegian Refugee Council, who described the cuts as a “moral failure.”
In recent weeks, the United States has resumed payments to several large aid organizations that work in Sudan, several aid officials confirmed. But little of that money appears to have yet reached Emergency Response Rooms, and nearly half of the 746 kitchens in Khartoum remain closed, said Gihad Salahaldeen, the network’s financial coordinator for the capital.
Nor is American aid guaranteed to continue, the State Department said in its email. The United States continues to review its aid to Sudan “with the goal of restructuring assistance to be more effective, efficient and aligned with U.S. interests,” it added.
This month, the United Nations World Food Program announced that the Trump administration was terminating emergency food assistance for 14 fragile countries around the world.
“This could amount to a death sentence for millions of people,” the agency warned.
In Sudan, rates of acute child malnutrition in parts of the once-proud capital are 10 times above the emergency threshold, aid workers estimate.
Sudan’s military swept across the city in recent weeks, pushing out its paramilitary rivals, the Rapid Support Forces, in the civil war tearing the country apart. Neighborhoods that had been cut off for two years suddenly opened up, revealing a picture of hunger and suffering on a shocking scale.
Down a dusty street in Jereif West, Fatima Bahlawi, 20 months old, lay wailing in her mother’s arms, waving limbs that were thin as sticks. The U.S.A.I.D. suspension in late January had come at the worst possible time, said Fatima’s mother, Khadija Musa.
The army was advancing on Jereif West. Fighters with the Rapid Support Forces lashed out as they retreated, looting and killing civilians. Bombs fell steps away from Ms. Musa’s tin-roof home. A nearby bridge on the Nile was shut, choking the area’s food supply.
When the American money stopped flowing, the local soup kitchen closed and Ms. Musa went out searching for food. “It was a terrible time,” she said.
When I reached her neighborhood with my colleague Ivor Prickett in late March, visibly malnourished residents poured onto the streets. For many, the soup kitchens had been their only sources of food for months.
On the other side of the Nile, which runs through the capital, Babakir Khalid, 2 months old, gasped for breath. A tube protruded from his nose. Almost apologetically, his mother, herself malnourished, said she could not produce enough milk to feed him.
The U.N. has accused both warring sides of using starvation as a weapon of war. Sudan’s government even denies that a famine is underway. In many parts of the country, security threats and deliberate obstructions mean that the United Nations and many international aid groups have no presence.
That has left volunteer groups like Emergency Response Rooms to fill the void. Its work is so essential that it was widely considered one of the favorites for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Until January, the group received U.S.A.I.D. money through international aid organizations that managed the onerous paperwork. Its volunteers had little time for spreadsheets — they were just trying to stay alive and feed as many people as they could.
Dozens of them have died in the war, at least 45 in Khartoum alone, the group says. Some were hit by bombs; others were detained by fighters who looted food, demanded money or attacked them. Both sides in the war have accused volunteers of spying.
Mr. Salahaldeen, his arm in a sling after months in R.S.F. detention, wept as he recounted how a fellow volunteer was beaten to death while they were being held. “They accused him of working for military intelligence,” he said.
Many volunteers made enormous personal sacrifices to respond to the crisis.
When the war broke out, Ms. Tariq, the aid worker in Jereif West, was four months pregnant and waiting for her husband to arrive at Khartoum Airport from Istanbul. His flight never came, and the airport was bombed. Instead of fleeing the city, like most residents, Ms. Tariq stayed on to set up soup kitchens.
It was dangerous work. Fighters looted her family home weeks after she gave birth, she said. She watched as fighters shot a fellow volunteer in the stomach “right in front of me,” she said while nursing her infant son.
After securing new donations from Europe and Sudanese people abroad, her eight soup kitchens have reopened, albeit at a reduced capacity, she said. Volunteers stirred giant pots of steaming lentils one recent afternoon as people formed a line to receive their portions.
“This is their only meal in the day,” Ms. Tariq said. “It’s not enough.”
As we drove out of Khartoum, dozens of passenger buses streamed into the city, part of an influx of returning residents that is expected to grow now that the R.S.F. has left.
Local volunteer groups across Sudan, like Emergency Response Rooms, need $12 million a month to feed starving people, but are receiving just over $500,000, said two senior aid officials.
In Bahri, in northern Khartoum, Wasfi Nizameldin said that four of the nine kitchens he operated have remained closed since the U.S. funding cuts. In an interview, he both railed against Mr. Trump’s aid pullback and pleaded for him to change course.
“People are dying from it,” Mr. Nizameldin said.
Out in the yard, Musa Salim, a street vendor turned volunteer, prepared food for needy residents. Lifting his shirt, he showed where he had been wounded in a drone strike, then told of how R.S.F. fighters had barged into his daughter’s home and tried to rape her.
It has been an unimaginable few years, he said. By some estimates, three-quarters of Khartoum’s prewar population of eight million has fled. He would have fled, too. “But to leave, you need money,” he said. “Where would I get that?”
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.
Ivor Prickett is a photographer based in Istanbul. He covered the rise and fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria while on assignment for The Times. More recently he has been working on stories related to the war in Ukraine.
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