Amid ongoing massacres by the RSF in Sudan’s Darfur region, a UN-backed hunger watchdog has declared famine in El-Fasher, the city where the paramilitaries are feared to have killed several thousand.
Amid ongoing massacres by paramilitary group RSF in Sudan’s El-Fasher, a United Nations (UN)-backed hunger watchdog on Monday declared famine in the city.
The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in El-Fasher — the city already littered with piles of bodies and pools of blood so vast that they are visible in satellite images.
The IPC also declared famine in another city, Kadugli, in southern Sudan. The city has been besieged by an RSF ally.
Late last month, RSF captured El-Fasher, the final holdout of the Sudanese military in the country’s western region of Darfur, after 18 months of siege. Evidence of systematic mass-killings has since continued to emerge that has put the region on the brink of another genocidal campaign.
Before the declaration of famine, around 24 million Sudanese people were considered to be in acute hunger and 600,000 were said to be facing famine.
Previously, the UN has described the Sudanese civil war as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. As per estimates, up to 150,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands injured, and 14 million displaced.
The Sudanese civil war began in 2023 after an uneasy power-sharing arrangement between the country’s military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, collapsed.
With El-Fasher’s fall, the RSF effectively took control of the mineral-rich Darfur region, splitting Sudan into two: the paramilitaries and allied militias controlling the western and southwestern regions while the Sudanese military retained control of the east and the capital city of Khartoum.
Food supplies cut off, kitchens bombed
The IPC first declared famine in Sudan in August 2024 at the Zamzam displacement camp, located south of El-Fashir.
During the 18-month-long siege, food supplies were cut off, forcing people to eat animal feed and sometimes animal hides, Reuters reported residents as saying.
Residents further said that places where people gathered for community kitchen meals were targeted by drone attacks.
The result was that all children arriving in the nearby town of Tawila after fleeing El-Fasher were malnourished while adults arrived emaciated, MSF project coordinator Sylvain Pennicaud told Reuters.
In addition to El-Fasher and Kadugli, the IPC said that towns of Tawila, Mellit, and Tawisha, where people have been fleeing form El-Fashir, were at risk of famine.
The IPC said that food insecurity fell by 6 per cent. But that meant that 45 per cent of the total population —21.2 million people— still faced acute food storage.
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