800,000 people in Sudan face ‘extreme, immediate danger’ : UN

Top UN officials have warned the Security Council that some 800,000 people in a Sudanese city are in “extreme and immediate danger” as raging violence advances and threatens to “unleash bloody inter-communal strife throughout Darfur.”

Sudan slipped into internal war one year ago between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, creating the world’s largest displacement crisis.

UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the 15-member Security Council that clashes between RSF and SAF-aligned members of the Joint Protection Forces were nearing El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

“Fighting in El Fasher could unleash bloody inter-communal strife throughout Darfur,” DiCarlo said, echoing a warning by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday.

The UN has said nearly 25 million people, half of Sudan’s population, need aid and some eight million have fled their homes.

“The violence poses an extreme and immediate danger to the 800,000 civilians who reside in El Fasher,” said the UN aid operations director, Edem Wosornu.

“And it risks triggering further violence in other parts of Darfur – where more than nine million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance,” she said.

A United Nations-backed global authority on food security said late last month that immediate action was needed to “prevent widespread death and total collapse of livelihoods and avert a catastrophic hunger crisis in Sudan.

Initially confined to Khartoum, the conflict, which began in April 2023 between the army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF, has since spilled over to several regions in the western, central, and southern parts of Sudan.

The conflict has claimed over 13,900 lives and displaced more than eight million people, despite multiple failed ceasefire agreements brokered by international mediators.