Dire choice: Starving Sudanese kids resort to animal feed

The city’s last functioning hospital has been bombed more than 30 times. Between 30 and 40 severely malnourished children arrive every day, seeking help. There’s nothing to give them but animal feed.

“Even we’re eating animal feed,” said Dr Omar Selik, tilting his camera during a video call to show his meal: a sludgy paste made from pressed peanuts that is usually given to cows, camels, and donkeys. “There’s nothing else.”

El Fasher is the worst battleground of Sudan’s brutal civil war. For nearly 18 months, the city, in the western region of Darfur, has been under siege by paramilitaries trying to starve it into submission. Fighters have erected a 20-mile earthen wall around its boundaries.

That leaves residents with a dire set of choices. Stay, and risk being bombed or starved. Run, and risk being killed, robbed, or sexually assaulted.

“People seem to have forgotten us,” said Selik, breaking into tears as he spoke. “Oh my God, it’s a very painful story.”

The war in Sudan started more than two years ago, when clashes broke out between Sudan’s army and its paramilitary rival, the Rapid Support Forces. The fight has engulfed Africa’s third-largest country, forcing about 12 million people from their homes, killing tens of thousands, and setting off a major famine. Aid groups call it the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

Since March, when the Rapid Support Forces was expelled from the capital, Khartoum, the group has redoubled its effort to capture Darfur, the vast region in western Sudan where most RSF fighters are from. El Fasher is the last city in their way.

More than 500,000 people have fled El Fasher since April, when the RSF rampaged through Zamzam, a famine-stricken camp 7 miles south of the city, killing between 300 and 1,500 people in what the U.N. described as one of the worst massacres of the war.

A month later, the RSF began to circle the city with the giant earthen berm, according to satellite images published by the Yale School of Public Health. On Aug. 27, construction to extend the berm was continuing.

An estimated 2,60,000 people are left in El Fasher, trapped by the tightening siege. A kilo of pasta sells for $73, 10 times the normal price, Taha Khater, one of the few aid workers left in the city, said by phone. His group, known as the Emergency Response Rooms, recorded the deaths of 14 children from malnutrition in the past two weeks. Cholera is spreading.

Food convoys from the United Nations, which has not been able to deliver food to El Fasher in over a year, have been attacked by drones as they approached the city. One strike in June, on a convoy of 15 trucks, killed five aid workers; another last month destroyed three trucks and forced the rest to turn back. It is unclear which side carried out the attacks.

Young men attempting to flee the city, scrambling over the berm at night, have been executed by fighters, Khater said.

International aid groups offer help in Tawila, a small town 40 miles to the west now heaving with more than 600,000 refugees. But the journey to Tawila is perilous. Fighters roam the area, robbing or extorting fleeing civilians. The road is lined with hastily dug graves and abandoned bodies, aid workers say.

Sudan’s military has also been accused of widespread war crimes, including bombing raids on crowded markets near El Fasher that killed several hundred people. In January, the US imposed sanctions on Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, the leader of Sudan’s military, for alleged use of chemical weapons.

Hospitals are a major target in the conflict. Of about 200 medical facilities in El Fasher before the war, just one remains — the Al Saudi hospital, where a handful of besieged medics are hanging on, despite bombs, starvation, and a vanishing supply of medicines.

Targeted more than 30 times in the war, the worst strike was in January, when an RSF drone fired a missile into a crowded ward, killing 70 patients and staff, said Suleman, a senior doctor who works there.

Now, doctors shelter in foxholes during bombing raids, and malnourished patients are sustained with animal feed, said Suleman, who asked to be identified by one name because he has received death threats for his work.

The animal feed, known locally as ambaz, is a desperate solution because it is prone to fungal contamination, especially in the rainy season. At least 18 residents have died in recent weeks after eating ambaz, local responders said.

“But there is no other option,” Suleman said.

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