As Sudan famine spreads, troops block aid trucks at border. – Today

As Sudan descends into famine, the country’s military is blocking large shipments of U.N. food into the country through key border crossings, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people at the height of the civil war.

Experts warn that Sudan, left barely functioning after 15 months of fighting, will soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades. But Sudan’s military has refused to let UN aid convoys across border points, hampering what aid groups say is a comprehensive aid effort to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, with some estimates putting the death toll as high as 2.5 million by the end of the year.

The risk is greatest in Darfur, an area the size of Spain where genocide took place two decades ago. Of the 14 regions in Sudan at immediate risk of famine, eight are in Darfur, just across the border the UN is trying to cross. Time is running out to help them.

The closure is at Adre, Chad’s main crossing into Sudan, a call made with increasing urgency by U.S. officials. At the border, little more than a concrete bollard in a dry riverbed, everything seems to be moving: refugees and traders, quad bikes carrying hides and donkey carts loaded with barrels of fuel.

Yet what has been barred from Sudan are UN trucks loaded with desperately needed food for Darfur, where experts say 440,000 people are on the brink of starvation. Refugees fleeing Darfur now say hunger, not conflict, is the main reason they are leaving.

Bahja Muhakar, a mother of three, collapsed under a tree exhausted after her family migrated to Chad at the Adre crossing. He said it had been a horrific six-day journey from the besieged city of El Fasher and along the road, where militants threatened to kill them. But the family felt they had no choice.

“We have nothing to eat,” Ms. Muhakar said, pointing to the children squatting next to her. He said they often survived on just one piece of cake a day.

Sudan’s military issued the decree at the crossing five months ago, allegedly to ban arms smuggling. It seems to have made little sense. Weapons, cash and fighters continue to flow into the rest of Sudan along the 870-mile border, much of which is controlled by the enemy, a heavily armed paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The army cannot even control the Adre crossing point, where MSF fighters are stationed 100 metres behind the border on the Sudanese side.

However, the UN said a no-crossing order from the military based in Port Sudan, 1,000 miles to the east, must be respected because it is Sudan’s sovereign authority. Instead, UN trucks were forced to take a 200-mile detour north through Tine, a border crossing controlled by militias allied to the Sudanese army, before being allowed into Darfur.

The detour is dangerous, expensive and takes five times longer than going through Adre. UN officials say a fraction of the needed aid is arriving through Tine — 320 truckloads of food have been delivered since February, rather than the thousands needed. The Tine crossing has been closed for much of this week as seasonal rains turned the border into a river.

Between the closure of the Adre crossing in February and June, the number of people facing emergency hunger increased from 1.7 million to 7 million.

With the prospect of mass famine looming in Sudan, the closure of Adre has become a priority for the United States, by far the largest donor, to step up emergency relief efforts. “This obstruction is totally unacceptable,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters recently.

Even before the war, getting aid to Darfur was difficult. Adré is about the same distance from the Atlantic Ocean to the west as it is from the Red Sea to the east, 1,100 miles as the crow flies in either direction. The roads are potholed, lined with corrupt officials and prone to seasonal flooding. A truck from the port of Douala on Cameroon’s west coast takes nearly three months to reach the Sudanese border, according to a United Nations official.

The army alone is to blame for the impending famine. The Rapid Support Forces also paved the way. Since the war began in April 2023, the militants have caused millions of people to flee their homes, burned factories producing baby food and looted aid convoys. They continue to pillage Sudan’s bread-producing regions, which are among the most productive in Africa, leading to severe food shortages.

The international community’s response to the situation in Sudan has been largely weak, slow and lacking in urgency.

At a conference in Paris in April, donors pledged $2 billion in aid to Sudan, half the amount requested, but those pledges have yet to be fully delivered. In overcrowded refugee camps in eastern Chad, lack of funds has led to desperate living conditions.

In Adre, nearly 200,000 people are crammed into a makeshift camp that stretches across the surrounding desert. Toilets are overflowing. Shelters are scarce.

The United Nations refugee agency that manages the camps in Chad said its operations were 21 percent funded in June. The World Food Program was recently forced to cut food rations because of a lack of money.

Aisha Idriss, 22, huddled under a plastic sheet in the pouring rain, clinging to it against the strong winds as he breastfed his 4-month-old daughter. His three other children crouched beside him.

“We sleep here,” he said, referring to the wet ground.

In the malnutrition center run by Doctors Without Borders, there are only three empty beds, which are filled with hungry babies. The youngest child is only 33 days old, a girl whose mother died during childbirth.

In a nearby bed lay Moaid Salah, a 20-month-old boy with thinning hair and a gaunt face, classic signs of malnutrition. He arrived in Chad last November after militants crossed the Darfur border into his home in El Geneina and killed his grandfather.

“They killed him in front of our eyes,” said Dahabaya Ibet, Moaid’s mother. Now their struggle is to survive on meagre UN rations.

“Whatever we get, it’s not enough,” he said, feeding Maide formula.

The situation is much worse in Darfur, where only a handful of aid organizations are still working with international staff. The United Nations withdrew when the war began, working through local organizations. The World Food Program says it can only reach 10% of those in need.

In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said one in four children in the central state of Darfur are malnourished and could soon die.

Experts say only the World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to scale up a large-scale emergency operation. But without unimpeded access to borders, delivering aid is extremely challenging.

Trucks alone take days to reach the Tine crossing. To enter Sudan, trucks need permits from Port Sudan authorities, which can take weeks to arrive, if they even get them, aid officials said.

Sudan’s UN ambassador Haris Idris Haris Mohamed defended the closure of the Adre factory in an interview, citing evidence of arms smuggling gathered by Sudanese intelligence. He said the UN was “happy” with the agreement to send trucks north through the Tine crossing.

He added that foreign predictions of famine in Sudan were based on “old data” and were looking for an excuse for “international intervention.”

“We are seeing a deliberate and detailed politicization of humanitarian aid in Sudan by donors,” he said.

The army’s inability to control anything entering Sudan was evident at the Adre crossing, where donkey-cart porters said they were transporting hundreds of barrels of gasoline, which were consumed by Doctors Without Borders’ four-wheeled vehicles, which were often armed.

Further north, the United Arab Emirates, a powerful sponsor of Doctors Without Borders, continues to smuggle weapons and cash across its porous border, several Western officials said.

The growing crisis has sparked recriminations within the aid community. Aid workers and U.S. officials privately say the U.N. leadership should have pressed the military more forcefully to reopen the Adre crossing. Some wonder why the organization hasn’t lined up trucks at the border to increase pressure, as it did in Gaza last year.

The United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan did not respond to questions for this report.

In Washington, intelligence reports provided to the State Department and White House confirm grim forecasts issued by aid groups of massive famine-related deaths by the end of the year, said a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The official said the next famine could be as deadly as the one in Somalia in 2011, and in the worst cases it could be comparable to the great famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s.

To overcome the blockade of Adre, U.S. officials, including Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, have asked the U.N. Security Council to allow U.N. trucks to enter Adre without military authorization, as has been the case for cross-border aid to Syria. But analysts say Russia, which has recently supplied weapons to the Sudanese military, is likely to veto such a resolution.

Another hope now is new ceasefire talks announced this week and brokered by the United States, scheduled to begin in Switzerland in mid-August. Tom Perriello, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, said in an interview that he would urge both sides to allow full humanitarian access if they attend the talks.