Famine Review Committee Confirms Famine in Sudan’s Zamzam IDP Camp

Three years ago, I visited Zamzam, the largest camp in Sudan for internally displaced people. Zamzam, which sits on the outskirts of El Fasher, the besieged capital of North Darfur, is home for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Sudanese people – some of whom have been displaced there for more than two decades. The people I spoke to in 2021 expressed hope that under the civilian-led transitional government, conflict in Sudan might finally be coming to an end. Several of the residents I spoke with had pooled their money together for the nine-hour bus ride to Khartoum to join the protests that toppled Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship.

Today, hope has given way to horror, with independent experts from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, or IPC, confirming that Famine has been ongoing inside the camp for more than a month. 

This is entirely a man-made famine. The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has devastated Sudan’s economy, driven more than 10 million people from their homes, and prevented humanitarian agencies from reaching starving populations. RSF’s ongoing siege of El Fasher has trapped civilians in Zamzam, and both the SAF and RSF – enabled by external patrons – are using starvation as a weapon of war, actively preventing food, including life-saving emergency nutritional supplements, from reaching people in need. 

The suffering is not limited to Zamzam alone. Millions across Sudan are on the verge of starvation. More than 90 percent of children screened by humanitarian organizations across Central Darfur – more than four thousand children in five locations – are experiencing some form of acute malnutrition. At one health facility in South Darfur State’s Al Radoum locality, local health workers report that four to five children are dying each day from malnutrition.  

The United States continues to demand that the SAF and RSF enable full and unfettered humanitarian access throughout the country to allow brave local and international humanitarian workers to surge assistance and prevent famine conditions from taking hold across wider swaths of the country. The parties to this conflict must return to the negotiating table this month in Switzerland and take immediate steps – including reopening the Adre border crossing from Chad and facilitating cross-line humanitarian access – to alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people.