CAIRO (AP) — Famine has spread to two regions of war-torn Sudan, including a major city in Darfur where paramilitary fighters have been rampaging the past week, a global hunger monitoring group said Monday, marking the latest crisis in a war that has created the world’s largest humanitarian disaster.
The , or IPC, said famine has been detected in the Darfur city of el-Fasher and the city of Kadugli in South Kordofan province. Twenty other areas in Darfur and Kordofan, where fighting intensified in recent months, are also at risk of famine, according to the IPC report.
El-Fasher had been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for 18 months, cutting off much of the food and other supplies to tens of thousands of people inside. Last week, RSF fighters seized the city, reportedly unleashing a wave of killings and attacks on its population that killed hundreds, though the scope of the violence is still unclear, with communications to the region poor.
Kadugli, as well, has been under RSF siege for months with tens of thousands of people trapped inside, as the paramilitary group tries to seize further territory from its rival, the Sudanese military.
Sudan has been torn apart since April 2023 by the fight for power between the military and RSF. More than 40,000 people have been killed, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say that is an undercount and the true number could be many times higher. The war has driven more than 14 million people from their home, fueled disease outbreaks and pushed parts of the country into famine.
In its latest report, the second in less than a year, the IPC said famine – or IPC Phase 5 — has been announced in el-Fasher and Kadugli, which it said experienced “a total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition, and death.” The IPC is considered the leading international authority on hunger crises.
In total, about 375,000 people have been pushed into famine in Darfur and Kordofan as of September, the report said. Another 6.3 million people across the country are in IPC Phase 4, meaning they face extreme levels of hunger, it said.
Save the Children said in September that food supplies had run out in Kadugli, where it said fighting had escalated. It said tens of thousands have been driven from their homes, many fleeing to other parts of the city because of roadblocks blocking escape.
Famine, or IPC Phase 5, is determined in areas where at least one in five people or households severely lack food and face starvation and destitution, at least 30% of children under 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and deaths from malnutrition-related causes reach at least two people, or four children under 5, per 10,000.
The IPC has only confirmed famine a few times in the past, most recently in northern Gaza earlier this year amid Israel’s campaign against Hamas. The other locations have been in Somalia in 2011, and South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and last year in parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region.
Another Kordofan town, Dilling, has reportedly experienced the same conditions as Kadugli, but the IPC didn’t announce famine there for lack of data, the report said. Since the military retook the capital Khartoum earlier this year, the RSF has turned its focus to completing its hold on the Darfur region in the west and on taking Kordofan to secure supply lines toward the country’s center.
The report warned that other towns near el-Fasher in Darfur, including Tawila, Melit and Tawisha, are at risk of famine.
The three areas have received the largest share of people who were forced to flee el-Fasher since the RSF took over the city on Oct 27. Since the city fell, reports and videos have circulated of RSF atrocities against civilians including beatings, killings and sexual assaults, according to testimonies by civilians and aid workers. The dead included at least according to the World Health Organization.
Across the country, the IPC said more than 21 million people, or 45% of the population, faced acute food insecurity as of September, a 6% drop from the previous report which covered the period from December 2024 til May this year.
The drop was due to reduced conflict and improved humanitarian access in Khartoum, neighboring Gezira province and the eastern province of Sennar. The military retained control of Khartoum and Gezira earlier this year, allowing more than a million displaced people to return home.
However, the report warned that the improvements remained limited given that the war continues to “severely impact the economy, service delivery and productive infrastructure.”
The IPC called for a ceasefire as the sole measure that “can prevent further loss of life and help contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition.”
The IPC had previously declared famine in five locations in Sudan. Three of them were sprawling refugee camps near el-Fasher that have since been vacated as RSF troops advanced, with most of the residents fleeing into el-Fasher itself or Tawila and other nearby towns. The other locations were in parts of South and West Kordofan provinces that have since also fallen into RSF hands.
___
AP correspondent Sam Mednick in Rome contributed to this report.
The post Famine spreads to two more areas in Sudan, the top global hunger authority says appeared first on Associated Press.
