War-torn Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 31 people, injuring another 81, on February 11–12, in yet another attack on the Zamzam camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the largest in the country, sheltering over half a million people.
An average of 13 children have died of starvation every day for more than six months now in this famine-stricken camp, located 15 kilometres south of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the last foothold of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the western region of Darfur.
Taking control over the other four states in Darfur, the RSF has been battling to consolidate its control over the region by dislodging the army from North Darfur. Laying a siege on El Fasher since last April, the RSF has since carried out an estimated 180 attacks on the state’s capital and its surrounding villages and small towns.
The latest attack on Zamzam was the 10th of its kind, since late last year. Using heavy weapons and artillery, the RSF attacked the camp from the north and southeast, battling the former rebel groups of Darfur, now allied with the SAF, for hours in densely populated areas.
“The streets of the camp have turned into death fields, filled with blood and body parts, while children and women face hours of terror,” said Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees.
“Fires consume homes, and screams mingle with the sound of bullets, as dozens fall between the dead and wounded in a brutal attack revealing the true face of forces that have lost all humanity,” he added in his statement.
Unequipped “to deal with traumatic injuries requiring surgery”, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), whose field hospital is the only medical facility in the camp, complained that “it is now impossible to send critical patients to Saudi Hospital in El Fasher because of intense clashes on the road”.
The RSF’s “direct shelling of the camp’s main market … amid an ongoing famine is an egregious violation of international humanitarian law and will lead to further deaths,” Daniel Sullivan, Refugees International Director for Africa, Asia and the Middle East said on February 13.
“We estimate that at least one child is dying every two hours” of hunger in Zamzam camp, Claire Nicolet, head of MSF’s emergency response in Sudan, said earlier this month. “Those with severe malnutrition who have not yet died are at high risk of dying within three to six weeks if they do not get treatment. Their condition is treatable if they can get to a health facility. But many cannot” because the RSF has blockaded the camp, where “40% of the pregnant and breastfeeding women were also found to be malnourished”.
Even before the war between SAF and RSF began in April 2023, the 350,000 people residing in this camp were dependent on food aid. They were displaced in the course of the Darfur civil war which broke out at the turn of this century, claiming up to 300,000 lives to violence, hunger and disease, and forcing 2.5 million people to flee their homes.
SAF spawned the RSF during the Darfur war
It was during this war that the SAF laid the roots of the RSF. By recruiting and training fighters from Arabic-speaking tribes of nomadic herdsmen, the SAF created the Janjaweed militias. They were used for mass killings, rapes and burning down villages of the local community of African-language-speaking sedentary farmers who had supported the rebel groups.
Later in 2013, the Janjaweed militias coalesced to form the paramilitary RSF, under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo aka Hemeti. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, SAF’s regional commander in Darfur during this war, later took charge of the army.
Burhan and Hemeti, close confidants of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, seized power together, jointly forming a military junta after the December Revolution — the mass pro-democracy protests that erupted by the end of 2018 — forced the removal of Bashir in April 2019.
Together, the two forces orchestrated a violent campaign on the pro-democracy movement which nevertheless continued mass demonstrations until April 15, 2023. At that point, the power struggle between Burhan and Hemeti pitted the two forces against each other, plunging the country into civil war.
World’s largest and fastest growing displacement crisis
Now nearing two years, the fighting between SAF and RSF has since displaced an additional 14 million people across Sudan. About 3 million of them have fled to neighbouring countries. More than 11 million have become IDPs. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) describes the situation in Sudan as “the largest as well as the fastest growing displacement crisis globally”.
As this crisis unfolded, existing IDP camps came under increasing pressure, with Zamzam’s population roughly doubling, with current estimates ranging between 500,000 to 800,000 people. Food supplies, which were already short to feed the growing population of displaced, have been largely cut off since the RSF’s siege last April.
In August, Zamzam became the first area in the country where a famine was confirmed before it spread to other areas. Famine has now “been confirmed or projected to take hold” in “10 areas”, according to the UN World Food Program (WFP).
“A total of 24.6 million people (around half the population) are acutely food insecure, while 638,000 (the highest anywhere in the world) face catastrophic levels of hunger,” it said. “Sudan risks becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis in recent history as conflict continues to rage across the country,” WFP warned.
Most vulnerable to hunger are the IDPs, whose numbers continue to swell. In just two days last week between February 7 and 8, more than 8000 families were forced to flee from Saloma and surrounding smaller villages to the southwest of El Fasher. The RSF burnt down the homes in these villages, killing at least five people in its attack. In the rural settlement of Umm Hagalig, the RSF burnt and looted another 23 villages, Rojal reported on February 14.
Indiscriminate aerial bombardment by the SAF
In the nearby town of Shangil Tobaya and its surrounding villages, indiscriminate bombardment from the air by the SAF in a bid to stop perceived RSF advances has displaced an estimated 3000 families.
For six consecutive days at the start of this month, the SAF planes also bombarded densely populated neighborhoods of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state, under the control of the RSF.
“Despite the enemy’s positions being known and identifiable, the attacks have directly targeted innocent civilians whose only ‘crime’ is residing in the city without the means to flee to safer areas,” Rojal said in early February.
Both the warring parties thus continue to fuel this cycle of displacement and hunger, even as the WFP warns that “a protracted famine is taking hold,” making Sudan “the only place in the world at this level of hunger,” where “hundreds of thousands could die” if help does not arrive soon.
In Darfur alone, “we have approximately 243,000 children with severe acute malnutrition”, Antony Spalton, UNICEF’s Chief of Field Office for the region, said in a statement on February 13.
Describing the situation in Sudan as the “biggest humanitarian catastrophe on earth”, Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told the Munich Security Conference on February 14: “If the humanitarian response continues to be very poor inside Sudan and outside, in terms of financial support, please, nobody should be surprised if we start seeing secondary movement of people going to North Africa … and even trying to get to Europe.”
[Reprinted from Peoples Dispatch.]