Sudan’s civil war is starving thousands of children. Aid workers say Trump’s aid freeze could cost more lives.
Sudan Omdurman- This is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, but it is probably the least you hear about. Been nearly two Sudan In a Artificial famine.
More than 25 million people are starving – more than half of the African country’s population – of which 3.2 million are children under the age of 5 who suffer from acute malnutrition.
Despite many painful characters, the brutal conflict in Sudan is often called the “forgotten war”. It rages in the shadow of other global conflicts, including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Aid groups are already fighting for the country’s devastating hunger crisis, which warns that President Trump’s 90-day suspension of foreign aid to the U.S. now threatens to turn the Sudan disaster into a full-blown disaster.
In the moment of 2019, it seems that a new era is emerging. Popular civilian resistance to overturn Former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. But two rival generals, Mohamad Daglo, the leader of the paramilitary rapid support force, and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the commander of the Sudanese army, joined in the chaos The army and seize power in a military coup.
Under their cooperation agreement, they will hand over power to the new elected civilian government within two years. But this never happened. Instead, in 2023, they fell, Pull the country into a brutal civil war It has been raging since then.
The U.S. government approved two leaders. RSF accusing Daglow of genocide There are also Burhan and other war crimes troops.
In the Despair caused by the Sudanese Civil War
It took nearly two years for our CBS news team to obtain the visa required to enter Sudan. After entering the room, we have to drive 12-14 hours a day on certain occasions to reach the area near the front line and pass dozens of checkpoints along the way.
In every roadblock, the armed forces require copies of our permits, passports and visas – we have printed over 100 copies for each member of the team and we still have to print more.
Now, some of the most intense battles are in places like Al-Gezira, Al-Fasher and Darfur. Getting there is impossible, but what we find near the frontline is painful.
In one of thousands of tent camps seeking shelter from displaced families, we see a new child in critical condition due to hunger. We worked with UNICEF volunteers to monitor the status of children under 3 years of age. Everyone they see is severely malnutrition, which means they are at risk of dying without intervention.
The worst case was hospitalized, their small bodies were just wasted. We see kids breathing on their own, some so dehydrated that they are too weak to cry.
At the Al-Buluk Children’s Hospital in Omdurman, just 12 miles from the battle in the capital Khartoum, we met Dr. Mohammad Fadlala. Cincinnati natives volunteer in Sudan for doctors at charities without borders.
“I think we are in a serious strait in Sudan,” he told CBS News.
When we arrived, Fadrara was overseeing a medical team of Ibrahim Jafar, who had just admitted to 13 months old. The doctor said the little boy was dying and his vision was severely damaged by severe malnutrition.
“Severe acute malnutrition can happen over time,” Fadrara explained. “This is where the kids don’t have enough nutrition… They can’t fight infections as they normally do. They can’t be like Use nutrition as normal… Most children with severe acute malnutrition will eventually get infected and die.”
Ibrahim’s family was trapped in Al-Gezira for several months.
“No food,” his grandmother, Neamat Abubaker, told us. “Sometimes there is nothing at all, not even water.”
She desperately hopes that the war will end. Once, she started crying, worried that it would be too late for them to escape violence to save her grandson. This is the fear of every parent in the emergency ward.
Both doctors and nutritionists tell us the same thing: without humanitarian aid and medical intervention, the children we see in this ward would not be alive.
Most of the aid comes from USAIDPresident’s decades of U.S. government aid program Trump has frozen. As of September 2024, Biden administration says It has promised more than $2 billion to Sudan’s emergency response, including a new commitment of $424 million in new humanitarian aid – of which $276 million has been sent through the United States Agency for International Development.
The United States has long been the largest funder of the United Nations World Food Programme. CBS News visited a WFP warehouse in the country’s Red Sea coast, the Port of Sudan and saw it piled up with thousands of sorghum bags, a kind of grain. Many of them are paid by the United States
Cereal sacks have gathered dust for more than a month, and WFP fights a debilitating bureaucracy waiting to allow them to be shipped to those in desperate need.
Everything was weaponized when rival warlords burned the entire country to the ground Sexual violence,food. Both sides in the conflict often prevent food aid from reaching millions of hungry Sudanese.
It seems not difficult enough, WFP communications chief Leni Kinzli told CBS News that President Trump’s 90-day moratorium on foreign aid could cause a catastrophic disaster for Sudan.
“It’s not just rolling back funds,” she said. “It’s time to step up funds.”
Asked if the Sudanese people have the ability to wait for 90 days, Kinzli said: “Every delay means loss of life.”
“We are very worried that when we finally get into these places at the scale we need, it will be too late and we will dig our bodies instead of feeding them,” she said.
One day later, we went back to see the Ibrahim baby. His condition worsened, but the doctor did not give up – resolve, at least for the little boy, it wouldn’t be too late.
