SUDAN faces a “massive” humanitarian aid crisis, with millions of starving people being denied access to vital food supplies as fighting rages in the war-torn country, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.
WFP Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told Al Jazeera on Sunday that his organisation was assisting five million people across the nation, including two million in hard-to-reach areas, but it was not enough.
“The needs are massive. We’re talking about 20 million people acutely food insecure, some six million in starvation,” he said.
“It is a massive crisis, and what we’re able to do, which is important, isn’t enough.”
He said the organisation had “tried every way possible” to get aid to populations in need, including air drops, digital cash transfers and stationing convoys outside besieged areas.
But it had not been possible in violence-ridden areas like el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, which was under an 18-month siege before it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in October, or the West Kordofan city of Babnusa, which the RSF claimed to have gained control of last week.
The government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has denied that Babnusa has fallen.
Skau said global attention needed to focus on the Kordofan region, where fighting has been intensifying between SAF and the RSF for weeks.
His warning follows similar comments from the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk, who said on Thursday that the Kordofan region could face a wave of mass atrocities similar to the widespread killings documented in el-Fasher, which fell to the RSF last month.
“The fighting there is intensifying, and they’re also besieged areas,” said Skau.
“World attention needs to be on Sudan now, and diplomatic efforts need to be stepped up in order to prevent the same disaster we saw in el-Fasher.”
Before el-Fasher fell in November, the UN issued urgent warnings about potential atrocities, but those alerts went largely unheeded. After the city’s capture, mass killings ensued, with corpses visible from satellite imagery, prompting UN chief Antonio Guterres to describe it as a “crime scene”.
Famine conditions have already been confirmed in areas in the Darfur and Kordofan regions.