“The government is trapping the people within the city. They’re not allowing the civilians to move out. The reports we’re hearing is they’re using the civilians as human shields,” said Caleb Maisonville of theFree Burma Rangers, a faith-based, frontline aid organization, speaking from the ground in South Kordofan, Sudan.
Now in its third year, Sudan’s civil war has produced what the World Food Programme calls the world’sworst humanitarian crisis. Nearly 34 million people, 65 percent of the population, need urgent humanitarian assistance. Nearly 29 million are acutely food-insecure, representing 61.7 percent of the population, with almost 10.2 million falling into the severe and extreme categories associated with malnutrition and death.
Nearly 14 million people have been displaced, and some estimates put the death toll above 400,000.
The crisis is worst in the regions furthest from international attention, among them the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, where the fighting has converged with a pre-existing blockade to produce famine. The mountains are the historicheartland of Christianityin Sudan, with roughly45 percentof the Nuba people Christian, the largest such community in the country. It is this population, black, Christian, and historically marginalized by the Arab-Islamic government in Khartoum, that is now caughtbetween famine, armed attacks, and near-total abandonment by the international aid system.
The region’s troubles long predate the current war. Acomprehensive peace agreementin 2005 endedSudan’s second civil war, but the Khartoum government insisted on a boundary that left Africans and Christians stranded inside the northern state when South Sudanachieved independencein 2011, retaining control over theresource-richNuba lands. Maisonville described that government as “very Arab and extremely Islamic” and said the people on the ground spoke plainly about what that has meant for them: “Historically, to this day, Sudanese do subjugate and then even eliminate Christians and black people.”
The population responded by forming its own resistance government, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), which grew out of the broader southern liberation struggle. The SPLM-N controls most of South Kordofan and has made freedom of religion a foundational principle of its governance, a deliberate rejection of the Islamist ideology that has driven Khartoum’s treatment of the region for decades.
The regional capital, Kadugli, however, remained under government occupation.
Sudan’scivil war eruptedon April 15, 2023, out of a power struggle between two former allies: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The two had together removed long-ruling Islamist dictatorOmar al-Bashirin a 2019 coup, then jointly seized power again inOctober 2021by overthrowing the civilian transitional government. But neither would accept subordination to the other.
“Between the two, neither would agree to lay down their arms and submit to the other,” Maisonville said. “The ability to create a power-sharing solution did not work.”
The country descended into civil war beginning in Khartoum, and the fighting soon spread to every corner of Sudan.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
