The western Sudanese city of El Fasher has been under siege for almost a year. Fighters in the country’s civil war have blocked all roads, putting around 300,000 inhabitants at risk of famine.
Warnings have been coming for months.
Last December, the global hunger monitor Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported famine in two camps near the Sudanese city of El Fasher, home to hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Even then, they warned Sudan’s ongoing civil war could see famine spread into the city by May.
The warning was prescient. El Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur, has now been under siege for over a year now. This week, the United Nations and a number of its agencies warned that approximately 300,000 people trapped inside the city face starvation.
“WFP [the World Food Program] has not been able to deliver food assistance to El Fasher by road for over a year as all roads leading there are blocked,” the UN aid program said in a statement on Tuesday. “The city is cut off from humanitarian access leaving the remaining population with little choice but to fend for survival with whatever limited supplies are left.”
Many residents are resorting to eating hay or animal fodder. Food that is available in the city costs significantly more than elsewhere in Sudan, making it unaffordable for most people.
“What we really need now is for a humanitarian pause to be agreed upon so that we can safely transport urgent food and nutrition supplies into the city,” Leni Kinzli, a WFP spokesperson based in Sudan, told DW.
Why is this happening?
Sudan’s civil war began in early 2023 when two rival military groups — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) — started fighting for control.
The SAF, with about 200,000 personnel and led by the country’s de facto leader Abdel-Fattah Burhan, operates like a regular army. Burhan’s government, based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, is recognized as Sudan’s government by the UN. The RSF is estimated to have 70,000 to 100,000 fighters and headed by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. It functions more like a guerrilla force and includes the infamous Janjaweed militias, notorious for their brutality in Darfur in the early 2000s.
Both sides have been accused of war crimes.
El Fasher remains the only urban center in the Darfur region not controlled by the RSF. If the RSF wins here, they would control almost all of western Sudan.
The SAF-aligned militias inside El Fasher, known as the Joint Forces, prevent a complete RSF victory. This is why the RSF has laid siege to the city since April 2024, digging trenches and regularly launching attacks on it.
The situation worsened this past April when the RSF attacked two camps near El Fasher sheltering over 500,000 displaced people. Many fled into the city or nearby towns.
Siege on El Fasher has tightened
As the Joint Forces inside El Fasher lose ground, the RSF has tightened the siege in recent moments, said Shayna Lewis, senior adviser on Sudan for the US-based group PAEMA (Preventing and Ending Mass Atrocities).
“The Rapid Support Forces have besieged the city for over a year at this point,” she told DW in a televised interview. “But it’s particularly in the past few months that they’ve tightened that blockade. Nothing is coming in and out. We used to have donkey carts that carried food into the city but now barely anything is able to even be smuggled in.”
Locals have said the RSF aims to starve out SAF-allied forces. There are also reports that some of the forces inside the city are preventing civilians from leaving, using them as a protective buffer.
“They attacked us; it was exhausting,” Enaam Mohammed, a Sudanese woman who fled El Fasher for the nearby town of Tawila, told journalists this week. Tawila, around 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, has seen a massive influx of around 400,000 displaced people since April. Diseases like cholera and measles are now spreading there.
“[They asked us] ‘Where are the weapons? Where are the men?'” Mohammed continued, describing her experience with the RSF. “If they find someone with a mobile phone, they take it. If you have money, they take it. If you have a good, strong donkey, they take it.”
Mohammed said she also saw the RSF killing people and raping women.
What can be done?
Currently, the conflict is at what analysts have described as a “strategic stalemate.” Alongside other smaller groups, the RSF controls much of western Sudan, while the SAF controls the east. Earlier in July, the RSF set up their own civilian government, effectively splitting Sudan in two. There is no credible peace process and heavy fighting is also ongoing in other parts of Sudan.
“Both parties view the conflict through a zero-sum lens,” analysts at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) wrote earlier this year. “The victory of one side is entirely dependent on the defeat of the other.” Neither side wants to negotiate, observers say.
Exacerbating that situation is foreign backing for the different fighting groups. In July, the US postponed a meeting about Sudan that would have brought together Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. The Saudis and Egyptians are thought to support the SAF and the UAE, the RSF — all deny providing military aid to Sudanese groups. The meeting is now rumored to be rescheduled for September.
This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called SAF leader Burhan to ask for a weeklong ceasefire that would allow aid into El Fasher. Burhan agreed, but the RSF has yet to consent.
The impact of the war also goes well beyond the besieged city of El Fasher, the WFP’s Kinzli pointed out.
The UN regularly calls what is happening in Sudan the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Aid agencies estimate that around 12 million people of Sudan’s 46-million-strong population have been displaced by the conflict and that around 150,000 people have died as a result of it. There are famine conditions and infectious diseases in other parts of the country too.
Source : https://www.dw.com/en/a-sudanese-city-is-starving-what-can-be-done-to-help/a-73561705
