royal panalo ‘No food, nothing’: famine grips Sudan

This image grab taken from AFPTV video footage on April 20, 2023, shows an aerial view of black smoke rising above the Khartoum International Airport amid ongoing battles between the forces of two rival generals. Famine was declared in Zamzam — a massive decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people near North Darfur’s besieged capital El-Fasher– last July, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. FILE PHOTO/Agence France-Presse

CAIRO — Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.

In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.

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“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, told AFP via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.

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READ: UN says 5 million at risk of starvation in Sudan

Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhoea.

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Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.

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El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

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In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.

READ: Sudan on course to become the world’s worst hunger crisis

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By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.

The Sudanese government, aligned with the army, has denied reports of famine, even as millions across the country suffer on the brink of starvation.

Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anaemia with no access to medical care.

“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said.

“We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”

‘It’s all we have’

At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents the employees, is negotiating a new contract with the Oakland-based health giant. It said the strikers demand Kaiser hire more people to ease the burden put on the current staff.

Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed.

“It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.

Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge three kilometres (two miles) to fetch.

“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali told AFP.

Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.

Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said.

“Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah told AFP.

The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded”, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

‘Vomit it back up’

About 700 kilometers southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.

Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.

Photos she shared with AFP showed men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones.

After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo told AFP.

“For others, even when they get food… they vomit it back up,” she said.

In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.

“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.

With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.

In southeastern Gedaref state, home to over a million displaced people, families fleeing the front lines arrive malnourished and desperate.

Mary Lupul, humanitarian director at aid group Save the Children, described seeing “some of the skinniest children” she has ever encountered, with “runny noses and cloudy eyes”.

“Parents are making heart-wrenching decisions, deciding which of their children to feed,” she told AFP.

In South Khartoum district, World Food Programme teams reported seeing people “just skin and bones” surviving on lentils and boiled grains, head of communications Leni Kinzli told AFP.

WFP said parts of the capital Khartoum may already be experiencing famine conditions, but a lack of reliable data has prevented an official assessment.

‘Haunt Sudan for generations’

In both army-controlled and RSF-held areas, aid groups said officials and fighters have made their work nearly impossible.

“You can’t just put supplies on a truck and drive them to famine-hit areas,” said Lupul.

“Multiple checkpoints, outright refusals and looting by armed groups often block access to those in desperate need.”

According to the IRC, the army is “leveraging its status as the internationally recognised government”, blocking UN and other agencies from reaching RSF-controlled areas.

Meanwhile, the RSF has laid siege to starving villages, looted aid and demanded exorbitant fees for access.

Without swift action, aid groups warn famine could spread through the whole country.

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“People are dying now, but the long-term impact will haunt Sudan for generations,” Lupul said.

As night fell over Zamzam camp, Ibrahim fussed over her daughter Rashida, who lay listlessly, her breathing shallow.

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“I do not know how much longer we can hold onroyal panalo,” she said.

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