People pray for the victims of a RSF drone strike in El Obeid, North Kordofan State, Sudan, Jan. 12.El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters
With food rations on the verge of running out, famine and military siege are triggering a worsening disaster in Kordofan, the latest region of Sudan to become the target of deadly assaults by a paramilitary group.
The Rapid Support Forces, a powerful militia that has battled Sudan’s military since the war erupted in 2023, is laying siege to two cities in Kordofan and advancing closer to a third. The offensive has sparked fears that the RSF will repeat the massacres it allegedly perpetrated in Darfur in recent months.
As the RSF tightens its grip on the cities, food costs are soaring and hunger is growing. The Kordofan region is now enduring “the worst suffering within the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world,” said Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, in a social media post on Wednesday.
The council, a leading humanitarian agency, released a video of a woman from Kadugli, a besieged city in Kordofan, who said the price of a regular portion of corn in local markets had jumped from less than US$1 to about US$32. Some people are going without food for four or five days because of the rising cost, she said.
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Famine was officially declared in Kadugli last September, and the crisis has grown more severe since then as the RSF moves deeper into the region. About 3,000 people have fled from Kadugli and another besieged city, Dilling, between Jan. 15 and 19, the United Nations said.
The UN’s food agency, the World Food Program, has warned that its food stocks in Sudan could be depleted by the end of March, largely because of budget shortages, which worsened after Western governments slashed their foreign aid spending last year.
“Without immediate additional funding, millions of people will be left without vital food assistance within weeks,” said Ross Smith, the WFP emergencies director, in a statement last week.
The agency has been forced to reduce rations “to the absolute minimum for survival,” he said.
The WFP is currently providing emergency food to about four million people in Sudan, but it estimates that 21 million are facing acute hunger in the country, including 3.7 million malnourished children and mothers. The crisis has reached record levels in North Darfur, where half of the young children are malnourished, the organization said.
Fighting has intensified in North Darfur in recent weeks as the RSF seeks to capture the last remaining pockets of the region that are not already under its control. At the same time, it has expanded its offensive in Kordofan, firing drones that have killed scores of civilians in the city of El Obeid, where many people have sought refuge after fleeing their homes elsewhere in the region.
The city’s power supply was reportedly shut down by RSF drone attacks in early January. The city is increasingly at risk of siege by the paramilitary force, according to a Jan. 16 report by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
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The report, based on analysis of satellite imagery, found evidence that the city and the Sudanese military are building earthen walls along key exit points from the city, suggesting that they were “engaged in preparations for siege warfare.”
The report also identified signs of about 100 new burial mounds in the city since early January.
There are mounting fears that the RSF could use the same brutal tactics in Kordofan that it previously used in Darfur, where it allegedly slaughtered thousands of civilians in the city of El Fasher and the Zamzam refugee camp after lengthy sieges.
“I am very worried that the atrocity crimes committed during and after the takeover of El Fasher are at grave risk of repeating themselves in the Kordofan region,” UN human rights chief Volker Turk said in a briefing last weekend.
The RSF committed mass killings in El Fasher and then tried to cover them up by digging mass graves, the International Criminal Court’s deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan told the UN Security Council on Monday.
Her office has concluded that the RSF committed war crimes and crimes against humanity after capturing the city in October, she said.
“Graphic images of these horrendous crimes and their celebration by perpetrators have been widely circulated,” her office said in a report to the Security Council.