KHARTOUM, June 19 (Xinhua) — Mutawakil Sha’aban’s life unraveled overnight. For years, he lived peacefully with his family in Omdurman city, north of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
But two weeks into the civil war that erupted last year, Sha’aban, 62, found himself in a spare room attached to a mosque, far from his loved ones.
“Armed men in RSF uniforms stormed my house without warning,” Sha’aban recounted, referring to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. “They treated us very roughly. I told them I was sick and had spinal cord surgery, but they wouldn’t care.”
The attackers ordered Sha’aban and his family to evacuate the house. While his wife and daughters sought safety in other Sudanese cities or even Egypt, his health restricted him to Al-Iskan, north of Omdurman.
Confined to his small room and dependent on a walker, Sha’aban faces his ordeal alone.
The clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF, which began in April 2023, have displaced over 8.8 million people nationwide, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates.
The UN agency has called the civil war, which has killed more than 15,550 people, in the African country a crisis of “epic proportions.”
In addition to internal displacement, the conflict also caused a large exodus of Sudanese to neighboring countries.
Mohamed Yaqoup Ismail, a Sudanese refugee in Chad, described his escape from El Geneina, the capital city of West Darfur State, as “fleeing from death to death.”
Many perished during the five-day trek through the scorching desert, he said, killed by armed tribal groups or succumbing to exhaustion.
The conflict also forced more than 300,000 Sudanese refugees to flee to neighboring South Sudan, straining the already crowded camps there.
Abdullah Adam, a refugee in South Sudan’s Gorom camp, told Xinhua that refugees there have insufficient food supplies, noting that they can have only two meals a day comprising lentils, beans, or rice.
Medical care is scarce, Adam added, with many refugees suffering from chronic illnesses like diabetes and cancer.
“Sudan is facing the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world,” said Amjad Farid, executive director of the Khartoum-based Fikra for Studies and Development.
Criticizing the international community’s inadequate response, Farid said the world has not yet “seriously” dealt with the disaster in Sudan, and refugees and internally displaced persons are “suffering alone.”
