Besieged Sudan city residents face starvation, UN warns

The UN’s food agency has warned that families trapped within the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher face starvation.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it had not been able to deliver food to the city in the western Darfur region by road for more than a year.

El-Fasher has been surrounded by paramilitary fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for nearly 16 months – determined to seize it from Sudan’s army.

The WFP warning comes as local activists have already begun reporting deaths by starvation in the city, which is still home to about 300,000 people.

Sudan was plunged into a civil war in April 2023 after a vicious power struggle erupted between the army and its former ally, the RSF – creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The UN’s children’s agency (Unicef) has also issued a statement saying malnutrition is rife across the country, with many children “reduced to skin and bones”.

The WFP warning echoes a recent appeal for urgent support from the North Darfur Governor Al-Hafiz Bakhit, who said the living situation in el-Fasher had become unbearable.

Bakhit is aligned with Sudan’s military-led government, which is trying to retain control of the city, its last foothold in Darfur.

The RSF’s battle to seize el-Fasher from the Sudanese army has intensified in recent months, after the paramilitaries were driven out of the capital, Khartoum.

UN statistics in early July showed that 38% of children under the age of five in camps for internally displaced people within and near el-Fasher suffered from acute malnutrition.

The WFP said severe food shortages had drastically driven up prices for scarce supplies in el-Fasher, and cited reports that people were eating animal fodder and food waste to try to survive.

The agency did not name the party responsible – but the RSF has cut trade routes and blocked supply lines to the city.

“Everyone in el-Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,” said Eric Perdison, WFP’s regional director for eastern and southern Africa.

“People’s coping mechanisms have been completely exhausted by over two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost,” he added.

The agency quoted an eight-year-old girl, Sondos, who had fled the city with five family members.

“In el-Fasher there was a lot of shelling and hunger. Only hunger and bombs,” the girl said, adding that the family had been surviving on only millet.

The WFP said it had trucks loaded with food and nutrition assistance ready to go, and had received clearance from the Sudanese government to proceed to el-Fasher.

It is still waiting for word from the RSF on whether it would support a pause in fighting to allow the goods into the city.

The UN has been pushing for a week-long humanitarian truce since early June, when a UN convoy on the way to el-Fasher was attacked – with the army and the RSF blaming each other for the strike.

Sudan’s state news agency reported that head of the armed forces Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan – the country’s de facto leader – had agreed to the temporary ceasefire.

The RSF did not officially respond. However, reports quoting RSF advisers said the group had rejected the initiative as it believed the truce would be used to facilitate the delivery of food and ammunition to “Burhan’s besieged militias” inside el-Fasher.

They also claimed the RSF and its allies were setting up “safe routes” for civilians to leave the city.

Last month the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said more than one million people had fled el-Fasher since the conflict began, including those from the nearby Zamzam camp that was seized by the RSF in April.

The BBC has heard first-hand accounts of their desperate flight from intensified bombing of el-Fasher, and attacks by RSF-allied gangs on the road.

The WFP said it had made modest progress in delivering food assistance to some other parts of Darfur, but said those fragile gains risked being reversed when roads were closed by the coming rainy season.

Unicef’s Sudan representative Sheldon Yett also said some conditions were slowly improving in areas of central Sudan, which had recently become accessible to aid workers after the Sudanese army drove out RSF fighters.

But he said resources were stretched to the limit because of recent funding cuts, apparently referring to US President Donald Trump administration’s drastic decrease in international aid.

“It is a looming catastrophe,” he said.

“We are on the verge of irreversible damage to an entire generation of children, not because we lack the knowledge or the tools to save them, but because we are collectively failing to act with the urgency, and at the scale this crisis demands. We need access to these children.”