The war, which began on 15 April 2023, has killed at least 30,000 people according to the Sudanese Medical Union and displaced more than 10 million internally and externally, making it the world's worst wave of displaced persons.

The humanitarian response so far has been deeply inadequate. Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) international head Christos Christou said this, adding that there are 'extreme levels of suffering throughout the country and the needs are growing by the day'.

The organisation visited 46,000 children under the age of five between March and April, a third of whom were found to be suffering from acute malnutrition. MSF supports hospitals like the one in Al Nao, which was hit by heavy bombing in Omdurman, twin city of the capital Khartoum. It is the largest functioning public hospital and receives large numbers of urgent cases and war wounded every day, in recent weeks facing mass arrivals. Attacks on health facilities throughout Sudan have become frequent. Only in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, the oil terminal for years in Chinese hands and the de facto administrative capital, is the situation relatively calm.

The rest of the country is torn apart by the power struggle of the two contenders, the regular army led by General al-Burhan and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (Rsf) of the self-proclaimed former camel jockey General Dagalo known as 'Hemetti', who made a career out of planning and carrying out the genocide in Darfur 20 years ago and is now repeating it.

Dagalo is supported by the Russians, who provide him with mercenaries from Central Africa and Haftar's Libya, and by the Emirates, who supply them with weapons. Al-Burhan is supported by the Saudis, Egyptians and Americans. The conflict therefore does not seem close to a solution despite the proclamations. Meanwhile in Darfur, which is rich in gold mines that Dagalo exploits together with Russian paramilitaries of the Africa corps, formerly the Wagner corporation (gold that finances the Sudanese and Ukrainian conflicts), the cutthroats of the Rsf are carrying out another genocide, according to several testimonies. People told Reuters that they have been locked up in camps for displaced people mainly in the south. Children, the refugees say, are dying every day. Malnutrition is rampant and cemeteries are spreading like wildfire, according to satellite surveys. In central Sudan at least 25 people were killed few days ago in an Rsf assault on five villages, said the resistance committees, civilian groups that keep humanitarian accounts so that the African country does not fall into oblivion.

And the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Völker Turk, said the generals leading the two sides in the conflict in Sudan 'bear responsibility for possible war crimes and other atrocities', including ethnically motivated attacks and sexual violence.

In recent days in South Darfur, the World Food Programme has at least managed to bring aid to 50,000 people, but this is too little.

At the end of a visit to the country on Wednesday, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi predicted the imminent arrival of a famine, and a report by the authoritative Dutch think tank Clingendael Institute estimates that 2.5 million Sudanese could die of starvation by the end of September. But the situation is also dramatic for the refugees, officially more than half a million, who have managed to flee to neighbouring countries such as Chad, Ethiopia and Egypt. From which Amnesty International has denounced, they are being illegally repatriated. According to the civil rights organisation, women, children and men seeking help and safety were arrested en masse, detained in inhuman conditions and at least three thousand were deported to Sudan in September 2023 alone.

In Libya, the International Medical Corps has raised the alarm of an imminent humanitarian catastrophe in the oasis of Kufra, due to the increasing influx of Sudanese refugees, some 45,000, arriving between 250 and 300 people every day.

Health workers are calling for urgent aid. The International Medical Corps revealed that there are four main routes used by Sudanese refugees. The most frequently used goes directly from Sudan to Kufra, then via Chad to Murzuq or via Chad to Qatroun, and the least used via Egypt to Tobruk. Predictable is the increase in flows and departures in the Mediterranean, but not even this seems to pierce indifference.

See, L’Onu: «Crimini di guerra in Sudan».  

Photo. Sudan has fallen into a humanitarian catastrophe as the armed forces and RSF continue a violent power struggle © AFP