Omdurman, Sudan – It is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, but probably the one you have heard the least about. Fueled by almost two Civil War Years, Sudan is under the influence of a Artificial famine.
More than 25 million people are hungry – more than half of the population of the African nation – and among these, 3.2 million have children under the age of 5 who suffer from acute malnutrition.
Despite these heartbreaking figures, Sudan’s brutal conflict is often called “forgotten war”. He raged in the shadow of other world conflicts, including wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Aid organizations were already fighting to fight against the country’s devastating hunger crisis, and these organizations warn the 90 -day suspension of President Trump’s foreign aid now threatens to transform the Sudanese disaster into a total disaster.
For a while in 2019, it seemed that a new era was zero. Popular civil resistance has overturned The old Sudanese dictator Omar Al-Bashir. But instead of a new civil government, two rival generals, Mohamad Daglo, head of the paramilitary forces of rapid support, and the commander of the Sudanese army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, united the forces in the middle of chaos and seized power in a military coup.
Under their cooperation agreement, they had to give power to a new civil administration elected within two years. But it never happened. Instead, in 2023, they had a fall and plunged the country into brutal civil war who has been raging since.
The US government has sanctioned the two leaders, Accusing the RSF of the Daglo genocide and Burhan and the army of other war crimes.
Inside despair caused by Sudan’s civil war
It took nearly two years to our team of CBS news to get the visas necessary to enter Sudan. Once inside, we had to drive 12 to 14 hours a day on certain occasions to reach areas near the front lines, including dozens of control points on the path.
At each road dam, the armed forces demanded copies of our permits, passports and visas – we had printed more than 100 copies for each member of the team, and we had to print more.
Some of the most intense fights are now found in places such as Al-Gezira, Al-Fasher and Darfour. It is impossible, but what we found near the front lines was deeply painful.
In one of the many tent camps where thousands of displaced families asked for a shelter in the fight, we saw a newly arrived child in a critical state of famine. We went out with UNICEF volunteers as they monitored the state of children under the age of 3. Each person they saw was seriously ill -nourished, which means without intervention, they risked dying.
The worst cases are hospitalized, their tiny bodies waste simply. We saw children fight to breathe alone, some if dehydrated that they were too weak to cry.
At the Al-Buluk children’s hospital in Omdurman, just 12 km from the fighting in the Khartoum capital, we met Dr. Mohammad Fadlala. The native of Cincinnati is in Sudan as a volunteer with doctors without borders.
“I think we are in terrible straits here in Sudan,” he told CBS News.
When we arrived, Fadlala supervised a medical team that had just admitted Ibrahim Jafar, 13 months. Doctors said the little boy was close to death and his sight was seriously damaged by serious malnutrition.
“Severe acute malnutrition occurs over time,” said Fadlala. “This is where children do not get enough nutrients … They are unable to fight infections like normal. They are unable to use nutrition like normal … and the majority of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition end up making it an infection and dying. »»
The Ibrahim family had been trapped by fighting in the state of Al-Gezira for months.
“There was no food,” said his grandmother, Neamat Abubaker. “Sometimes nothing at all, not even water.”
She desperately wants war. At one point, she broke down by crying, feared leaving him too late to flee violence to save her grandson. It was a fear shared by all the parents in the emergency room.
Doctors and nutritionists all told us the same thing: without humanitarian aid and medical intervention, the children we saw in this neighborhood would not be alive.
A large part of this aid comes from Usaidthe US government aid program for several decades that the president Trump frozen. In September 2024, the Biden administration said He had hired more than $ 2 billion in the emergency response to Sudan, including a new promise of $ 424 million in new humanitarian assistance – of which 276 million dollars were sent by USAID.
America has also long been the largest fundaler in the United Nations World Food Program. CBS News visited a WFP warehouse at the Sudan port, on the country’s Red Sea coast, and has seen it stacked with tens of thousands of sorghum bags, a type of cereals. Much part was paid by the United States
The cereal bags have gathered dust for more than a month while WFP fighting against a debilitating bureaucracy, awaiting permission to transport them to those who desperately need.
While the rival warlords burn the country on the ground, everything has been armed, sexual violenceto food. The two parts of the conflict have often prevented food aid from reaching millions of hungry Sudanese.
As if it was not already difficult enough, the head of WFP communications, Leni Kenzli, told CBS News that the 90 -day foreign help suspension of President Trump could prove to be catastrophic for Sudan.
“Time to retreat funding is not now,” she said. “It’s time to take over funding.”
When asked if the inhabitants of Sudan could afford to wait 90 days, Kenzli said: “Each delay means that lives are lost.”
“We are extremely worried that when we finally enter these places on a scale we need, it will be too late, and we are going to dig up bodies instead of feeding them,” she said.
We returned to see Bébé Ibrahim a day later. His condition had deteriorated, but the doctors had not abandoned – determined to make sure that, at least for this little boy, it will not be too late.
