The crisis is Sudan is much worse than what is acknowledged |
I recently visited Khartoum for the first time since the war started. It quickly became clear to me that the world still doesn’t fully comprehend what has happened there. In the streets of Sudan’s capital, the destruction was apocalyptic. A city that used to have a population of 7 million seemed almost empty as we drove through its districts.
The buildings were almost all destroyed or partially flattened by shelling and air attacks, while those left standing were riddled with bullet holes. I had never seen this scale of destruction before in my 30 years of working with Islamic Relief.
The difficulty in accessing many areas, and the sense that this a complicated war in a faraway place, means the crisis has not received anywhere near the international attention it needs.
There are more than 58,000 recorded deaths so far, but there are estimates that as many as 150,000 may have been killed. It is hard to track casualty numbers when the country’s infrastructure lies in ruins and millions of people are displaced.
People are not just dying from violence but from disease and starvation. There have been repeated outbreaks of cholera, viral hepatitis, meningitis, yellow fever, and........