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
On April 15, 2026, the war in Sudan entered its fourth year, a grim milestone that passed largely unnoticed, overshadowed by conflicts elsewhere. Yet the United Nations has called it unequivocally the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Germany pledged a further 20 million euros ($23.6 million) to Sudan this year, the development ministry said on Wednesday, ahead of an international aid conference hosted in Berlin that is aiming to gather more than $1 billion in funding commitments.
Two arms brokers arranged illegal deals to supply ex-Soviet surface-to-air missile systems to South Sudan and fighter jets to Libya during its civil war, British prosecutors told a London court on Tuesday.
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