Sudan’s deadly civil war 150,000 people and more coercion 11 million The U.S. government on Tuesday said the massacre was carried out by an Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces, one of the war’s main adversaries, as some people fled their homes, according to some estimates. declared.
The war has involved foreign countries and numerous armed groups, and now threatens to spread beyond Sudan’s borders. rear twenty one The world’s first officially declared famine since 2020 follows months of fighting, thousands of people have been killed in ethnic cleansing operations, countless women and girls have been sexually assaulted, and millions have gone hungry. suffering from
So many people have been forced to flee their homes that the United Nations says Sudan is now home. The world’s largest displacement crisis —“A Living Nightmare”, words Words from Amy Pope, Director-General of the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
old and new genocide
General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, Commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, Commander of the Immediate Support Force; They were once allies. In 2021, they worked together to stage a military coup. However, they were later unable to unite their forces and split up.
In April 2023, the two countries went to war, with gunfire escalating in the capital Khartoum.
The RSF, known as the Rapid Support Force, is made up of remnants of the Janjaweed, another militia group responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Sudan’s western Darfur region two decades ago. The killings resulted in genocide charges at the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s authoritarian ruler Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019.
On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the RSF and its allied militias were responsible for the attack. new act of genocide Officials said the targets were Sudan’s Masalit ethnic group, a non-Arab minority whose population and military are predominantly Arab.
In July 2023, a mass grave was discovered with bodies lying there. 87 Human rights groups say most of them were Masarit and were likely killed by the RSF. There have also been reports of sexual violence, torture, and murder of Masalit people.
Estimates of the death toll from the war vary widely. Last year, before the latest wave of fighting, U.S. envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello said the numbers could be as high as: 150,000. In January 2024, an independent panel of experts Submitted a report To the UN, in December 2023 alone, some people 10,000～15,000 People were killed in an RSF massacre in the West Darfur city of El Geneina.
At least as of July last year. 33,000 people were injured in it findingaccording to the World Health Organization. This number is very likely increasing.
mass displacement
more 11.5 million Sudanese citizens (nearly a quarter of the country’s population) kicked out Many of them repeat from home, 8.7 million People who fled during the current war, according to a United Nations report released this week. After the battle started, it ended 3.3 million People are flowing across Sudan’s borders into neighboring countries such as Egypt, Chad and South Sudan.
According to the report, more than half of the evacuees are children. Many people live in dire conditions, with little food or water. Some refugees living in the Adre camp across the border in Chad sleep on the ground even when it rains.
After the disaster ended last October, it got worse. 135,000 The people of El Gezira, a state in eastern Sudan, kicked out The region has seen a 10-day surge in brutal violence, according to a United Nations report.
“Words cannot describe something like this,” said Mohamed Ahmed, deputy head of Sudan’s Médecins Sans Frontières. “I feel really hopeless.”
Many of those who fled Gezira ended up in Gedaref, another province in the country’s southeast, where Mr. Ahmed works. A situation where many children come to his clinic. He said it stayed with him long after he saw them.
“Many of them are weak and exhausted and have been evacuated two or three times,” he said.
hunger and disease
around it 25.6 million More than half of Sudan’s population faces crisis-level hunger in 2024, the report says. Integrated food security stage classificationor IPC, is an initiative run by the United Nations and major relief agencies that is considered the world authority on hunger.
Fourteen months after the conflict began, the IPC reported Sudan is reportedly experiencing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded in the country.
Last August, famine was officially declared in a camp for displaced persons in the Darfur region known as Zamzam. Doctors Without Borders predicts that in February 2024: 13 the children die per day for that camp alone. Zamzam is Estimation home hundreds of thousands of the people.
Sudan does not have enough medical resources to care for the millions of people who need treatment for widespread malnutrition. Outbreak of four major diseases — Malaria, measles, dengue fever, cholera — confront country.
Last November, the World Health Organization reported that Sudan’s medical infrastructure, which was already strained before the war, was on the brink of crisis. collapsetwo-thirds of major hospitals in conflict zones are now closed. of organization documented at least 119 Since the war began, attacks on medical personnel and facilities have continued, resulting in at least 189 death and 140 injury.
Mr Ahmed said children were suffering from a vicious cycle of preventable diseases that made them prone to malnutrition and lamented the plight of children who “should be healthy and playing”.
