Khartoum40% of Sudan’s people face acute hunger, per UN food monitors.
The civil war between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army has collapsed aid corridors; army drone strikes are escalating on Nyala.
No humanitarian corridor into Darfur has been announced.
Sources: Drop Site News
THE TWO ARMIES
Sudan's war is not government vs rebels — it is two halves of the same security apparatus turning on each other. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces jointly ousted Bashir in 2019, jointly seized power in 2021, then went to war in April 2023 over who would absorb whom.
THE JANJAWEED LINEAGE
The RSF descends directly from the Janjaweed — the camel-mounted Arab militias Khartoum armed in the early 2000s to crush Darfur's non-Arab rebellion. Bashir formalized them into a paramilitary in 2013 to balance the regular army. The force that the international community indicted for genocide in Darfur is now one of two sides claiming to govern Sudan.
WHY DARFUR STARVES FIRST
Darfur sits 1,000+ km from Port Sudan, the only functioning seaport. The RSF controls most of the region and the roads in; the SAF controls the port and the airspace. Aid convoys need clearance from both — neither grants it consistently. El Fasher has been under RSF siege since May 2024.
THE IPC SCALE
The UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has five levels. Phase 3 is *crisis*, Phase 4 is *emergency*, Phase 5 is *catastrophe/famine*. Famine is only declared when 20% of households face extreme food gaps, 30% of children are acutely malnourished, and 2 in 10,000 people are dying daily. The threshold is deliberately high — most mass-starvation events never get the label.
THE GULF PROXY WAR
The UAE has been the RSF's principal external backer, routing weapons through Chad in exchange for Sudanese gold — Sudan was Africa's third-largest gold producer before the war, and RSF-controlled mines feed Dubai's refineries. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey back the SAF. Iran has resumed arms shipments to Burhan after a decade-long freeze.
THE HISTORICAL ARC
Sudan has been at war with itself for most of its post-colonial existence. The British administered north and south as separate territories, then stitched them together at independence in 1956. The result has been an almost continuous cycle of war, famine, and partition.
WHAT FAMINE ACTUALLY KILLS
Famine deaths are rarely from starvation itself. The collapse of immune function from chronic malnutrition makes ordinary infections — measles, cholera, diarrhea — fatal. In Sudan, cholera has spread through camps because the war destroyed water treatment in 14 states.