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The UN’s main food agency has warned that families trapped within the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher face starvation.<\/p>\n
The World Food Programme (WFP) said it had not been able to deliver food to the city in the western Darfur region by road for more than a year.<\/p>\n
El-Fasher has been surrounded by paramilitary fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for nearly16 months – determined to seize it from Sudan’s army.<\/p>\n
The WFP warning comes as local activists have already begun reporting deaths by starvation in the city, which is home to about 250,000 people.<\/p>\n
Sudan’s civil war that erupted in April 2023 has created what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.<\/p>\n
The WFP said severe food shortages had drastically driven up prices for scarce supplies in el-Fasher, and cited reports that people were eating animal fodder and food waste to try to survive.<\/p>\n
The agency did not name the party responsible – but the RSF has cut trade routes and blocked supply lines to the only city in Darfur currently controlled by the army.<\/p>\n
“Everyone in el-Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,” said Eric Perdison, WFP’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa.<\/p>\n
“People’s coping mechanisms have been completely exhausted by over two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost,” he added.<\/p>\n
The agency quoted an eight-year-old girl, Sondos, who had fled el-Fasher with five family members.<\/p>\n
“In el-Fasher there was a lot of shelling and hunger. Only hunger and bombs,” the girl said, adding that the family had been surviving on only millet.<\/p>\n
The WFP said it had trucks loaded with food and nutrition assistance ready to go if it got guarantees of safe passage.<\/p>\n
It sent such a convoy in early June: but that was attacked, with the army and the RSF blaming each other for the strike.<\/p>\n
Since then, the UN has been pushing for a week-long humanitarian truce in el-Fasher.<\/p>\n
But it is not clear how either side would respond to another attempt for an aid convoy to break the siege.<\/p>\n
Sudan’s civil war has also led to claims of a genocide in Darfur.<\/p>\n
More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country since 2023, and about 12 million have fled their homes.<\/p>\n