By Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA (Reuters) -Thousands of children are facing an imminent risk of death as malnutrition rates skyrocket in the besieged city of al-Fashir in Sudan’s Darfur region, four United Nations agencies said on Thursday.
More than a quarter of a million civilians, about half of them children, have been cut off from food and healthcare in the city during a 16-month-old standoff, the agencies said.
“Health facilities have collapsed, and thousands of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition are now without treatment,” the agencies said.
Famine-stricken al-Fashir is the Sudanese army’s last holdout in the vast, western region as it battles the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in a civil war that began in April 2023.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), refugee agency UNHCR, children’s organisation UNICEF and the World Food Programme said their representatives had seen widespread devastation in Darfur and other parts of the country during visits.
Malnutrition rates were also soaring across the country as a whole, the agencies said.
“Famine was confirmed in parts of Sudan last year and the hunger situation remains catastrophic, with children among the hardest hit,” the agencies said.
People who returned to the capital this year after the army retook Khartoum found devastated neighbourhoods.
“I met people coming back to a city still scarred by conflict, where homes are damaged and basic services are barely functioning,” said Ugochi Daniels, IOM’s Deputy Director General for Operations.
In all, more than 30 million people, including nearly 15 million children, were in dire need of aid, the agencies said.
Only a quarter of the $4.2 billion asked for in the 2025 U.N. Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan has been funded so far, they added.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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