MORE than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting in Sudan have headed home, the United Nations said Friday, pleading for greater international aid to help returnees rebuild shattered lives.
Over a million internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned to their homes in recent months, UN agencies said.
A further 320,000 refugees have crossed back into Sudan this year, mainly from neighbouring Egypt and South Sudan.
While fighting has subsided in the “pockets of relative safety” that people are beginning to return to, the situation remains highly precarious, the UN said.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The fighting has killed tens of thousands.
The RSF lost control of the capital, Khartoum, in March and the regular army now controls Sudan’s centre, north and east.
In a joint statement, the UN’s IOM migration agency, UNHCR refugee agency and UNDP development agency called for an urgent increase in financial support to pay for the recovery as people begin to return, with humanitarian operations “massively underfunded”.
Sudan has 10 million IDPs, including 7.7 million forced from their homes by the current conflict, they said.
More than four million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
Sudan is “the largest humanitarian catastrophe facing our world and also the least remembered”, the IOM’s regional director Othman Belbeisi, speaking from Port Sudan, told a media briefing in Geneva.
He said 71 percent of returns had been to Al-Jazira state, with eight percent to Khartoum.
Other returnees were mostly heading for Sennar state.
Both Al-Jazira and Sennar are located southeast of the capital.
“We expect 2.1 million to return to Khartoum by the end of this year but this will depend on many factors, especially the security situation and the ability to restore services,” Belbeisi said.
With the RSF holding nearly all of the western Darfur region, Kordofan in the south has become the war’s main battleground in recent weeks.
