A “hunger crisis” is looming for South Sudanese who have fled fighting that has rocked neighboring Sudan for more than five months, the UN World Food Program (WFP) warned on Tuesday.
Since it broke out on April 15, the war in Sudan between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo has left nearly 7,500 dead, according to a conservative estimate by the NGO Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
It also led to the displacement of more than five million people, including 2.8 million who fled the capital Khartoum, where there were constant airstrikes, artillery fire and street fighting.
The majority of people who have fled the fighting and crossed the border into South Sudan are South Sudanese returning “to a country already facing unprecedented humanitarian needs,” the WFP said in a statement.
“We see families moving from one disaster to the next, fleeing danger in Sudan and facing despair in South Sudan,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, WFP director in South Sudan.
However, the WFP does not have the “necessary resources to provide vital assistance to those who need it most,” she warns.
South Sudanese “cross the border with nothing but the clothes on their backs” and some also fall victim to thefts and violence on their journey, says the WFP, which also fears epidemics during the rainy season.
After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan descended into a civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced millions between 2013 and 2018.
A peace agreement signed in 2018 established the principle of power-sharing between rivals Salva Kiir and Riek Machar within a government of national unity.
But tensions and violence continue to undermine the world’s youngest country, which is rich in oil but where the vast majority of the population lives below the poverty line.