Some 800,000 people in a Sudanese city are in "extreme and immediate danger" as worsening violence advances and threatens to "unleash bloody intercommunal strife throughout Darfur," top U.N. officials warned the Security Council on Friday.
A handout photograph, shot in January 2024, shows a woman and baby at the Zamzam displacement camp, close to El Fasher in North Darfur, Sudan. MSF/Mohamed Zakaria/Handout via Reuters
Some 800,000 people in a Sudanese city are in "extreme and immediate danger" as worsening violence advances and threatens to "unleash bloody intercommunal strife throughout Darfur," top U.N. officials warned the Security Council on Friday.
War erupted in Sudan one year ago between the Sudanese army (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), creating the world's largest displacement crisis.
U.N. 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 intercommunal strife throughout Darfur," DiCarlo said, echoing a warning by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday.
The U.N. has said nearly 25 million people, half of Sudan's population, need aid and some 8 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 U.N. aid operations director, Edem Wosornu.
"And it risks triggering further violence in other parts of Darfur – where more than 9 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 is needed to "prevent widespread death and total collapse of livelihoods and avert a catastrophic hunger crisis in Sudan."
Donors pledged more than $2 billion for war-torn Sudan at a conference in Paris on Monday.
Reporting by Michelle Nichols
Human Rights Watch has accused an Abu Dhabi-based security company of recruiting Colombian private military contractors and deploying them to fight alongside Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) between 2024 and 2025, adding to what the rights group describes as a growing body of evidence of Emirati military support for the paramilitary group.
Farmers across Sudan say the hike in global fuel and fertilizer costs resulting from the Iran conflict will force them to cut back on planting this summer, restricting food production in a country where war has caused acute hunger.
At least nine people were killed and six others injured when a four-storey building collapsed overnight in the Moroccan city of Fez, about 200 kilometres (124 miles) east of Rabat, local authorities said on Thursday.
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