- Written by Barbara Plett Asher
- BBC Africa correspondent
The woman with sad eyes and a quiet voice is one of the millions living in camps for people forced to flee their homes in Sudan, where civil war broke out a year ago between the military and armed militias. Just one of them. The country is currently facing what the United Nations calls “the world's worst hunger crisis.”
Kisma Abdirahman Ali Abubaker goes through the motions of waiting in line to receive food, but her heart isn't in it.
The small bag doesn't have to stretch as much as the one her family used.
She says three of her children have died from disease and malnutrition in the past four months. The oldest child was 3 years old, the other was 2 years old, and the last one was a 6-month-old baby.
Abubaker has taken refuge in the Zamzam camp for displaced people in parts of the western region of the northern region of Darfur amid warnings of a catastrophic nutritional crisis.
These camps are the country's oldest and largest, but there is renewed despair and sadness as Sudan's civil war enters its second year.
Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said in January that it had found at least one child dying every two hours in the camp. With food, clean water and medical care scarce, diseases that were once treatable are now deadly.
MSF is one of the last international humanitarian agencies still operating in Darfur.
It has just completed mass testing of vulnerable women and children in Zamzam and has shared the results exclusively with the BBC.
The agency revealed that three in 10 children under the age of five are acutely malnourished, and a third of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers suffer from acute malnutrition, which previous research had suggested This confirmed concerns about a “disaster.”
This is double the nutritional emergency threshold and is likely just the tip of the iceberg of Sudan's hunger crisis, said Abdallah Hussein, MSF's Sudan operations manager.
“We haven't reached all the children in Darfur, we haven't reached the children in North Darfur. We're only talking about one camp,” he said at MSF's regional headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya's capital. told me.
Darfur is very difficult to access for foreign journalists and aid agencies, but we worked with a local photographer to help Abubaker tell his story.
She couldn't afford to take her children to the hospital or buy medicine.
“The first one died on the way home from the pharmacy, and the second one died six days later from malnutrition,” she says.
The baby became ill and died three days later.
Abubaker's family, like many in Darfur, are small-scale farmers. They struggled to grow enough food, and the violence and insecurity of the war severely disrupted agriculture.
“People are sick and starving,” she told the BBC. “Displaced people have no jobs and they are the only ones with money. [government] employee. 90% of the population is sick. ”
Zamzam was already fragile, formed by people caught up in ethnic violence two decades ago, and relied almost entirely on humanitarian aid.
However, food supplies stopped due to the war. Most aid agencies were evacuated as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control of large swaths of the area.
Fighters from the RSF and its allied militias have been accused of looting hospitals and stores, a charge the RSF has consistently denied.
Transporting new supplies across conflict zones has proven nearly impossible. Aid workers claim Sudanese military authorities are too slow in issuing visas and permits to travel within the country.
The military also cut off land routes from neighboring Chad, saying it was necessary to stop arms shipments to the RSF.
Barriers to food supplies have eased somewhat, but although the World Food Program has recently succeeded in introducing two convoys, it is not enough.
Food shortages are linked to the collapse of health services.
Only 20-30% of health facilities across the country are still functional.
One of them is the Babikhel Nahar Children's Hospital in Fasher City, near Zamzam Camp. The hospital has a nutritional therapy center for children and an intensive care facility for worst-case scenarios.
On the day the photographer visited, both wards were full.
The baby, who had a tube inserted into his nose, was crying silently in his mother's arms.
Amin Ahmed Ali gave the serum to his young son through a syringe. She has her 6-month-old twins who are slowly recovering from weeks of rubella. Other children were eating packs of high-calorie food.
Dr Ezzedine Ibrahim said the hospital used to treat malnourished patients before the war, but now “the number has doubled”.
“Even though northern Darfur had a system of complete nutrition programs that continued, and the numbers were increasing month after month, it was lost because of the war. ”
This is a mostly good standard for pediatric health care in Darfur, but other regions are further cut off and in a desperate situation.
Local emergency workers sent us images of what aid workers call a humanitarian “black hole”.
There is a photo of an emaciated three-year-old girl named Ihsan Adam Abdullah from Karma IDP camp in southern Darfur. She is said to have passed away last month.
Another photo shows a similarly depleted boy from the Geneubia camp in central Darfur. His mother, Fatima Mohamed Osman, recorded a video pleading for help to feed her 10 children. According to her, “Even the smallest ones are living between starvation and death.”
MSF is opening a 50-bed tent hospital in Zamzam and is calling on other international aid agencies to return to share the heavy humanitarian burden.
“We need massive mobilization of humanitarian aid to reach disconnected populations,” Hussein said, adding that access “with simplified permits and visas and open borders” and humanitarian He said there was a need to respect aid workers and civilians. infrastructure.
Without these basic conditions, it will be impossible to turn the tide on this huge crisis, and many more children will die.