(CNN) — Sudan is at a “breaking point,” a United Nations agency said Monday, as a growing number of people need food, water, shelter and medical care in a country devastated by intensifying war.
Over eight million people have been displaced since fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last year, plunging the country into what the UN has called “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory.”
“Without an immediate, massive, and coordinated global response, we risk witnessing tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the coming months,” Othman Belbeisi, the Middle East and Africa director for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said in a statement. “We are at breaking point, a catastrophic, cataclysmic breaking point,” he added.
At least half of the displaced are children in a war tarred by “appalling levels of rights violations, ethnic targeting, massacres of civilian populations and gender-based violence,” the statement said.
Earlier this month, the UN-backed Famine Review Committee said at least one refugee camp in Sudan’s Darfur region is experiencing famine, which the agency has only declared twice in Sudan’s history. In May, the World Food Programme said people in that region had been forced to eat grass and peanut shells to survive.
“Over the next three months, an estimated 25.6 million people will face acute food insecurity as the conflict spreads and coping mechanisms are exhausted,” the IOM statement said. “Many other places” in Sudan are also at risk of famine, it added.
Armed forces are also blocking urgently needed aid deliveries to Sudan, and the IOM said it needs additional funding to reach those in need. Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said a key bridge used by aid workers to reach the Darfur region collapsed last week after severe flooding.
The warning comes as a new round of ceasefire talks led by the US and Saudi Arabia are expected to begin this week in Switzerland, the AP reported Monday. The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed militia that spearheaded the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, has agreed to attend the talks, but Sudan’s military has not.
“This was the only safe route for humanitarian aid to reach Central & (South) Darfur,” the agency said Monday in a post on X. “This adds another major obstacle to our efforts in delivering life-saving aid to Sudan.”
A Sudanese government delegation met over the weekend with US officials in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah in a bid to convince the military to attend Wednesday, but no breakthrough was achieved, according to the AP.
“We’ve had extensive engagement with the SAF,” Tom Perriello, the US special envoy for Sudan, told reporters Monday, according to the news agency. “They have not yet given us an affirmation, which would be necessary today for moving forward.”
“We have not given up hope that SAF will attend the talks,” he added.
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