{"id":2932,"date":"2024-04-14T14:01:04","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T14:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=2932"},"modified":"2024-04-14T14:01:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T14:01:04","slug":"sudan-civil-war-the-children-living-between-starvation-and-death-in-darfur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=2932","title":{"rendered":"Sudan civil war: The children living between starvation and death in Darfur"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>5 Minute, 18 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

The woman with sad eyes and a quiet voice is just one of the millions of people living in camps for those forced to flee their homes in Sudan, where a civil war broke out a year ago between the army and an armed paramilitary group.<\/p>\n

The country now faces what the UN says is the \u201cworld worst hunger crisis\u201d.<\/p>\n

Qisma Abdirahman Ali Abubaker goes through the motions of waiting in line to pick up her food ration, but her heart is not in it.<\/p>\n

The small bag does not have to stretch as far as it used to for her family.<\/p>\n

Three of her children have died of disease and malnutrition in the past four months, she says. The oldest was three, another was two years old, the last was a six-month-old baby.<\/p>\n

Ms Abubaker has taken refuge at Zamzam Camp for displaced people in Northern Darfur, part of a region in the west of the country, amid warnings of a catastrophic nutrition crisis there.<\/p>\n

It is the oldest and largest such camp in the country, but there is fresh desperation and grief as Sudan\u2019s war grinds into its second year.<\/p>\n

The medical charity M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (MSF) says it found in January that at least one child in the camp dies every two hours. With little food, clean water or healthcare, illnesses that could once be treated now kill.<\/p>\n

MSF is one of the last international humanitarian agencies still on the ground in Darfur.<\/p>\n

It has just completed a mass screening of vulnerable women and children in Zamzam and shared the results exclusively with the BBC.<\/p>\n

The agency found that three out of every 10 children under five were acutely malnourished, as well as a third of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, confirming fears of a \u201ccatastrophe\u201d that an earlier survey had suggested.<\/p>\n

This is double the threshold for a nutrition emergency, and probably just the tip of the iceberg of Sudan\u2019s hunger crisis, says Abdalla Hussein, MSF operations manager for Sudan.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have not reached all the children in Darfur, not even in North Darfur, we\u2019re talking about only one camp,\u201d he told me at the MSF regional headquarters in Kenya\u2019s capital, Nairobi.<\/p>\n

Thousands of people at Zamzam Camp are in desperate need of help.<\/p>\n

Access to Darfur is extremely difficult for foreign journalists as well as aid agencies, but we worked with a local cameraman, and Ms Abubaker told him her story.<\/p>\n

She could not afford to take her children to hospital or buy medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first child died on the way home from the pharmacy, and the second child died after six days due to malnutrition,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The baby fell sick and died three days later.<\/p>\n

Ms Abubaker\u2019s family are smallholder farmers like many in Darfur. They have struggled to grow enough food, and the violence and insecurity of the war has severely disrupted farming.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are sick and hungry,\u201d she tells the BBC. \u201cThe displaced people are jobless and the only people who have money are [government] employees. Ninety per cent of the people are sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zamzam was already fragile, formed by those caught up in ethnic violence 20 years ago, and almost entirely dependent on humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n

But the food supplies stopped with the war. Most aid agencies evacuated as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over large swathes of the region.<\/p>\n

Fighters for the RSF and its allied militias are accused of looting hospitals and stores, something which the RSF has consistently denied.<\/p>\n

Getting new supplies transferred across conflict lines has proved almost impossible. Aid workers say the Sudanese military authorities are too slow to issue visas and internal travel permits.<\/p>\n

And the army has blocked land routes from neighbouring Chad, saying it needs to stop weapons shipments to the RSF.<\/p>\n

That barrier has eased slightly for food supplies \u2013 the World Food Programme recently managed to bring in two convoys \u2013 but not nearly enough.<\/p>\n

The lack of food combines with a breakdown in health services.<\/p>\n

Across the country only 20-30% of health facilities are still functional.<\/p>\n\n

Hundreds of thousands of people live in Zamzam Camp \u2013 forced from their homes in a series of conflicts<\/p>\n

One of those is the Babiker Nahar Paediatric hospital in the city of Fasher, near Zamzam Camp, which has a therapeutic feeding centre for children and intensive care treatment for the worst cases.<\/p>\n

Both wards were full on the day our cameraman visited.Babies with tubes in their noses whimpered quietly in their mothers\u2019 arms.<\/p>\n

Amin Ahmed Ali fed her tiny son serum through a syringe \u2013 she has six-month-old twins slowly recovering from weeks of dysentery. Other children ate from packets of calorie-rich food.<\/p>\n

Dr Ezzedine Ibrahim says that the hospital was dealing with cases of malnutrition before the war, but now \u201cthe numbers have doubled\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery month and the next month the numbers increase, despite the fact that we in Northern Darfur we had a system, a full nutritional programme which continued but it lapsed because of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is about as good as it gets for child healthcare in Darfur, other places are even more cut off and desperate.<\/p>\n

A regional emergency worker sent us images from areas in the region that aid workers have called a \u201cblack hole\u201d in humanitarian assistance.<\/p>\n

There is a photo of a three-year-old emaciated little girl from Kalma IDP Camp in Southern Darfur, named as Ihsan Adam Abdullah. She is said to have died last month.<\/p>\n

Another photo shows an equally wasted little boy, from Genubia Camp in Central Darfur. His mother, Fatima Mohamed Othman, recorded a video pleading for help to feed her 10 children \u2013 anything, she says, even \u201csomething small \u2013 they are living between starvation and death\u201d.<\/p>\n

MSF is about to open a 50-bed tent hospital in Zamzam and is appealing for other international aid agencies to return to share the heavy humanitarian load.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need a massive mobilisation of humanitarian aid to reach the population that is cut off,\u201d says Mr Hussein, as well as access with \u201cpermits and visas to be simplified and the borders to be opened\u201d, and respect for humanitarian personnel and civilian infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Without these basic conditions it will not be possible to turn the tide on this colossal crisis, and many many more children will die.<\/p>

\n
\n \n
\n \n \"Happy\"\n <\/a>\n
\n Happy <\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n \n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \n \"Sad\"\n <\/a>\n
\n Sad <\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \n \"Excited\"\n <\/a>\n
\n Excited <\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \n \"Sleepy\"\n <\/a>\n
\n Sleepy <\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n \n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \n \"Angry\"\n <\/a>\n
Angry<\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n \n \"Surprise\"\n <\/a>\n
Surprise<\/div>\n
\n 0<\/span>\n 0<\/span> %<\/span>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The woman with sad eyes and a quiet voice is just one of the millions of people living in camps for those forced to flee their homes in Sudan, where… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_2277560469115098_106292521332774":"","twitter_aToxNzczMzI3Njk4OTg4ODUxMjAxOw==_1773327698988851200":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}