Over 30 million in need of aid in war-torn Sudan – UN

More than 30 million people, over half of them children, are in need of aid in Sudan after twenty months of war, the United Nations said on Monday.

The UN has launched a $4.2 billion call for funds, targeting 20.9 million people across Sudan from a total of 30.4 million people it said are in need in what it called “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis”.

Sudan has been torn apart and pushed to the brink of famine by the war that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million internally displaced, which, in addition to 2.7 million displaced before the war, has made Sudan the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.

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A further 3.3 million people have fled across Sudan’s borders to escape the war, which means over a quarter of the country’s pre-war population, estimated at around 50 million, are now uprooted.

Famine has already been declared in five areas in Sudan and is expected to take hold of five more areas by May, with 8.1 million people currently on the brink of mass starvation.

Sudan’s army-aligned government has denied there is famine, while aid agencies complain that access is blocked by bureaucratic hurdles and ongoing violence.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

For much of the conflict, the UN has struggled to raise even a quarter of the funds it has targeted for its humanitarian response in the impoverished northeast African country.

Sudan has often been called the world’s “forgotten” war, overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine despite the scale of the horrors inflicted upon civilians.