Famine has spread to two new regions in Sudan, including a major city in the Darfur region where a militia has reportedly carried out mass killings and sent tens of thousands fleeing in the last week.
El Fasher in western Darfur, and Kadugli in South Kordofan province, are now officially suffering from famine, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirmed on Monday. Twenty other areas in the regions of Kordofan and Darfur are also at risk, the international body added.
The two towns have been under siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of the northeastern African country for the last three years.
The RSF seized El Fasher last weekend after a bloody 18-month siege that had caused widespread hunger in the city. Witnesses who fled the city described scenes of sexual violence, massacres and executions of civilians by the militia as tens of thousands tried to flee. The city had been the SAF’s last stronghold in the region, and its fall could spread instability across the region.
The IPC said that 21.2 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity after 30 months of fighting, with 375,000 people in “catastrophe conditions.”
The IPC said that these famine conditions will likely continue until January 2026, but “favorable agroclimatic conditions” will likely improve the food security situation after the harvest, hopefully allowing for a decline in those in Phase 3 to Phase 5 of food insecurity by millions.
Beyond the active conflict, the IPC attributes the food insecurity to worsening terms of trade, soaring inflation, and currency depreciation in the area, as well as broken trade routes and supply chain disruptions.
A famine classification, meaning phase 5 in the IPC Acute Food Insecurity scale, is attributed when one in five households have “an extreme lack of food and face starvation and destitution, resulting in extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition and death,” at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two people for every 10,000 dying each day due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
The IPC has already declared famine in five locations in Sudan since the war began in April 2023 and has ravaged the country since. In April of this year, 10 other areas qualified for Phase 5 of famine, as the war drove 14 million people from their homes. As of September, the displaced population has declined to close to 10 million as millions have returned to their homes in some regions.
In its bulletin, the IPC recommended the delivery of massive amounts of humanitarian aid to Sudan, but says that humanitarian response and local support mechanisms in Sudan are “critically underfunded,” escalating hunger in the region, and reaching only 21%of those in need.
“Severely inadequate funding is undermining the urgent ramp-up of needed assistance in the country,” it said as far back as July. “Despite some gains in humanitarian access in the past months, ongoing fighting in Kordofan and Darfur hinders consistent outreach to those in need.”
The World Food Programme said that this month, they are reaching 4 million people in the hardest hit regions, specifically in Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum and Al Jazira, but added that it “urgently” needs $658 million over the next six months in order to further scale up assistance to 8 million people per month.
The U.N. said that tens of thousands of refugees have fled El Fasher in the last week following the fall of the city to the RSF amid reports of widespread massacres and sexual violence, but the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported that only 5,000 people have made it to sanctuary in the city of Tawila, 30 miles away across the desert.
One of the worst massacres is believed to have taken place at the Saudi Hospital, which was the last hospital still operating in the city during the siege. At least 460 people are believed to have been killed —including staff and patients—in several waves of attacks, according to the World Health Organization.
The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health utilized satellite images to corroborate the scene, as well as a previously unreported potential mass killing at an RSF detention site at the former Children’s Hospital.
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