El Fasher is Starving: Inside Sudan’s Siege of Hunger

By Dr Abdelnasser Solum Hamed

 

 

In Sudan’s Darfur region, the RSF has turned hunger into a weapon of war. Inside El Fasher, families boil leaves to survive as the world looks away.

 

Hunger in a Child’s Eyes

 

 

At dawn in El Fasher, twelve-year-old Aisha wakes to the sound of shelling. She has not eaten in two days. Her father risks sniper fire to fetch water from a broken pipe at the city’s edge.

 

 

Her mother, Fatima, boils leaves so the children can fall asleep with something in their stomachs. The smell of burning leaves drifts through the camp, a reminder that war has turned even mealtime into despair.

 

 

“I just want bread,” whispered a boy in Zamzam camp, clutching an empty tin bowl.

 

 

This is not famine caused by drought. It is hunger engineered as a weapon of war.

 

 

The Last Fortress

 

 

 

Since April 2023, the RSF has captured Nyala, El Geneina, and Zalingei, securing gold revenues and smuggling routes across Darfur. Only El Fasher remains under the control of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

 

 

For General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, losing El Fasher would mean conceding Darfur entirely. For Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—known as Hemedti—it would cement his parallel state and open the road east to Kordofan and eventually Khartoum.

 

 

The city, once a hub of trade and culture, is now a fortress of desperation.

 

Starvation by Design

 

The siege follows a clear formula:

 

– Roads cut: supply lines from El Obeid in North Kordofan severed.

– Borders sealed: checkpoints manned by RSF fighters and mercenaries from Chad and Libya.

– Markets destroyed: warehouses looted, hospitals shelled, convoys attacked.

 

Food prices have soared by over 800 percent. Families survive on one meagre meal of sorghum porridge a day.

 

In June 2024, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported that Zamzam camp recorded the highest levels of child malnutrition ever documented in Darfur, with nearly one in four children acutely malnourished.

 

“We amputate children’s limbs by candlelight, with no anesthesia,” said one doctor in El Fasher’s main hospital. “But the hunger is worse than the bombs.”

 

Hunger here is not an accident. It is a strategy.

 

 

 

Camps Under Fire

 

 

Nearly 700,000 people remain trapped in and around El Fasher. Camps that once offered shelter—Abu Shouk, Zamzam—are now being shelled.

 

 

Mothers describe losing children not only to bombs but to hunger every night. In Zamzam, aid workers recount infants dying within hours of birth for lack of milk and medicine. At Abu Shouk, families share antibiotics between dozens of patients, while surgeries are carried out without anaesthesia. Hunger and fear travel together in these camps, where people whisper of starvation as if it were a disease catching from tent to tent.

 

Human Rights Watch documented at least a dozen RSF artillery strikes on IDP camps between March and June 2024, killing more than 180 civilians. Survivors describe families torn apart, children buried in shallow graves.

 

International law is explicit:

 

– Geneva Conventions (Article 54): forbids starvation of civilians.

– Rome Statute (Article 8): codifies it as a war crime.

– UNSC Resolution 2417 (2018): declares deliberate starvation a threat to international peace.

 

And yet El Fasher is starving in plain sight.

 

 

Why Starvation?

 

 

The SAF holds positions inside the city, relying on sporadic airstrikes, but it cannot break the encirclement. For the RSF, a direct assault would be costly. Starvation is slower, cheaper—and devastating.

 

Drones, reportedly smuggled through Libya and believed to include Iranian designs, target hospitals and markets. Mercenaries from Chad and Libya reinforce the blockade.

 

This is siege warfare modernised: drones instead of catapults, hunger instead of artillery.

 

The aim is not just to break the SAF. It is to collapse civilian society until surrender is inevitable.

 

 

The Regional Web

 

El Fasher’s siege is tied to a wider regional struggle:

 

– Chad and Libya: porous borders provide manpower, weapons, and escape routes for mercenaries.

– Central African Republic: already destabilised by Wagner-linked groups, now faces RSF infiltration.

– Gulf markets: networks smuggling Darfur’s gold continue to provide vital financing for the RSF.

– Russia and China: shield Sudan from stronger UN Security Council action.

 

From Chad’s borderlands to Libya’s deserts, El Fasher’s siege is sustained by a regional shadow economy of guns, gold, and mercenaries.

 

In Chad, opposition groups accuse the government of quietly tolerating RSF recruitment among impoverished youth, fueling tensions in N’Djamena. Meanwhile, Libya’s southern desert has become a highway of war: convoys of weapons and fighters move through Sabha and Kufra, linking Darfur’s siege to smuggling networks that stretch as far as the Mediterranean coast. El Fasher is thus not only a Sudanese battleground but a node in a trans-Sahel war economy.

 

Darfur’s gold flows outward even as its children starve. This paradox lies at the heart of Sudan’s war economy.

 

Silence and Complicity

 

 

The siege is not hidden. Satellites see it. Aid agencies warn of it. Survivors speak about it.

 

And yet:

 

– The UN Security Council remains paralysed.

– The African Union has failed to mediate credibly.

– Western governments issue statements, but sanctions are weak and unenforced.

– The International Criminal Court moves at a crawl.

 

The silence is not passive. It is lethal.

In El Fasher, famine is not only a crime—it is a performance staged in full view of the world.

 

 

What Comes Next?

 

The fate of El Fasher is not only about one city. If the siege succeeds, the RSF will have secured control of nearly all Darfur, opening the road to Kordofan and deepening Sudan’s fragmentation. It would mark not just a humanitarian catastrophe, but the consolidation of a war economy built on gold, mercenaries, and famine.

 

For Sudanese civilians, it means displacement on a massive scale. For the wider region, it signals more instability across the Sahel and towards the Red Sea. For the world, it sets a precedent: starvation can deliver victory where bullets cannot.

 

 

 

Why El Fasher Matters

 

 

To outsiders, El Fasher may seem distant. But its fall carries global consequences:

 

– Security: an RSF-controlled Darfur would destabilise the Sahel, exporting mercenaries and weapons.

– Migration: famine-driven displacement would push refugees north through Libya towards Europe.

– Economy: smuggled gold links Sudan’s war to global markets.

– Red Sea: instability threatens one of the world’s busiest trade corridors.

– Precedent: if starvation succeeds here, it will be used elsewhere.

 

This is not just Sudan’s tragedy. It is a test of whether the world will accept hunger as a legitimate weapon of war.

 

History Written in Empty Plates

 

As a Sudanese researcher, I have seen my country fracture. But El Fasher feels different. It is not only the fall of a city—it is the slow starvation of a people in plain sight.

 

“We are not dying because there is no food,” one father told me. “We are dying because the world lets hunger be used as a weapon.”

 

And in the words of a mother in Zamzam camp:

“Every night, I pray my children wake up in the morning. Every morning, I pray they make it to night.”

 

History will not ask whether the world knew. It will ask why it looked away.

 

And in El Fasher, history is already being written—not in books, but in the empty plates of children who will never see tomorrow.

 

Unless the world acts, El Fasher risks becoming another Srebrenica—its name remembered not for bullets but for the silence that let hunger finish what war began.

 

Author Biography

Dr. Abdelnasser Solum Hamed is a Sudanese researcher specialising in crisis management and counterterrorism. He is the Director of the East Africa & Sudan Program at FOXS Research, a Sweden-based institute.

 

He has over fifteen years of experience analysing armed conflicts, insurgencies, and peace processes in Sudan and the wider Horn of Africa. His research focuses on non-state armed groups, proxy warfare, and the weaponisation of humanitarian crises.

 

Dr. Hamed has provided regular briefings to journalists, diplomats, and international organisations on developments in Sudan. His work has been cited in policy debates in Europe and the United States.

 

He is currently completing a major study on the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Sudan, examining its legal,

political, and humanitarian dimensions.

 

Sudanese researcher specialising in crisis management and counterterrorism, Director of the East Africa & Sudan Program at FOXS Research (Sweden).