UN official calls for more attention on Sudan’s ‘forgotten’ war amid fresh atrocities

CAIRO — A top United Nations official on Friday called for more international attention to the “forgotten crisis” in Sudan, where more than a year and a half of war has pushed the African country to the brink of famine.

The call by Ted Chaiban, deputy head of the UN children’s agency UNICEF, came as the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces rampaged through villages and towns in Gezira province, looting and vandalizing public and private property, according to a union of doctors and a youth group. Dozens of people were reported killed.

Chaiban said the war, which broke out in April 2023 between the army and the RSF, had created “one of the most acute crises in living memory” with more than 14 million people forced from their homes, making Sudan the largest displacement crisis in the world.

“We’ve never seen numbers like this in a generation,” he told The Associated Press in an interview, referring to the displaced people as well as the 8.5 million people facing emergency levels of food insecurity and another 775,000 people facing famine-like conditions.

“The whole country was dislocated,” he said. “And yet, despite this, the country and the crisis are forgotten.”

The war came four years after a pro-democracy uprising forced the military ouster of the country’s longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, which was followed by a short-lived transition to democracy. So far, it has killed more than 24,000 people, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a group that has been monitoring the conflict since it began.

Chaiban spoke to the AP after he and Raouf Mazou, the assistant high commissioner for operations at the UN refugee agency UNHCR, visited eastern Sudan earlier this week. They met with local authorities and visited displaced people in a sprawling camp housing more than 4,000 people in the eastern province of Kassala.

They called for unfettered access to people in need across the country and called for greater global attention to what Chaiban described as “one of the critical generational crises we face.”

Global attention has turned to the Middle East since the militant group Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel last October, sparking a war that has killed an estimated 42,000 people in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry, run by Hamas, does not distinguish between militants and civilians, but says more than half of the dead were women and children. The Hamas attack killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. International efforts are now focused on the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amid growing concerns about a regional war between Israel and Iran.

“We did everything to respond to the war in Gaza and the war in Lebanon. … Sudan also needs this level of attention,” he said.

The Sudanese army continued a major offensive in September to retake RSF-held areas in and around the capital, Khartoum. Also earlier this month, the army captured Jebel Moya, a strategic mountainous area in Gezira province, in a major setback for the RSF, which also lost other areas in Gezira and nearby Sinnar province.

Also in October, a top RSF commander, Abu Aqlah Keikel, the de facto ruler of Gezira province, defected and surrendered to the army.

Local media reported that Keikel’s surrender was a coordinated operation. The army said in a statement that Keikel “decided to fight alongside our army, abandoning the rebel lines after discovering the falsehood of the Dagalo terrorist militia’s claims”.

The RSF, which is led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, downplayed Keikel’s defection. The commander supported the army at the start of the war but switched sides last August, according to Sudan War Monitor, a group that tracks the conflict.

RSF fighters were enraged and rampaged through several towns and villages east and north of Gezira, as well as the town of Tamboul, killing dozens of civilians and displacing thousands of others.

In one town, Sariha, RSF fighters killed at least 50 people and wounded another 200, according to the Resistance Committees, a network of youth groups that monitor the war. In the village of Saqiaah, at least 12 people were killed, the statement said.

The Sudanese Medical Union said on Thursday that RSF attacks had turned areas of eastern Gezira into a “brutal war zone”.

RSF fighters have committed “systemic sex crimes, burning homes and property and attacking health care facilities, along with systemic looting and forced displacement,” the union said in a statement on Thursday.

The war was marked by atrocities such as mass rape and ethnically motivated killings. The United Nations and international human rights organizations say these acts amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly in the western region of Darfur, which is facing a bitter attack by the RSF.

The conflict has pushed the country to the brink of famine, which was already confirmed in July in the Zamzam camp for displaced people, which is located about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from North Darfur’s embattled capital, al-Fasher, according to global experts from Famine Assessment Committee. Some 25.6 million people – more than half of Sudan’s population – are expected to face acute hunger this year, they warned.