“A fast-spreading cholera outbreak has hit Sudan with officials reporting more than 1,000 cases a day in the capital of the war-torn country,” reports Africa News:
The outbreak is centered around the capital, Khartoum, and has spread as many Sudanese who had fled the country’s war return home. Residents are often only able to find unclean water – which is a dangerous conduit for the disease – as much of the sanitation system has collapsed amid the civil war….
Most cases have been reported in Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman, but cholera was also detected in the provinces of North Kordofan, Sennar, Gazira, White Nile and Nile River, health officials said. Khartoum and Omdurman were a battleground throughout the civil war, which nearly emptied them of residents. The region of the capital was recaptured by the military in late March from its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
Khartoum used to have 6 million people before the war, but the vast majority left during the civil war. After the RSF militia was driven out, “some 34,000 people have returned. But the city has been wrecked by months of fighting. Many found their homes damaged. Clean water is difficult to find, in part because attacks on power plants have disrupted electricity and worsened water shortages…Sanitation systems are damaged…the outbreak could spread quickly, since many people are packed into displacement centers making it difficult to isolate those infected.The health system has also broken down. More than 80% of hospitals are out of service and those that are operating have shortages of water, electricity and medication.”
Cholera is a “diarrheal disease caused when people eat food or water contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It is easily treatable with rehydration solutions and antibiotics…in severe cases, the disease can kill within hours if left untreated.” The global stockpile of cholera vaccines has dropped to a very low level — below 5 million doses — “making it increasingly difficult to stop outbreaks.”
The RSF stole most of Khartoum’s copper wiring and destroyed its energy infrastructure. Because utilities can’t provide power, many residents are using solar panels to power their light bulbs and TVs. Temperatures in Khartoum are expected to reach 109 degrees today, Monday, and Tuesday, but there is basically no air conditioning there.
Because the capital city of Khartoum is so ruined, Sudan’s officials moved to Port Sudan, which became Sudan’s de facto capital during the civil war. But recently, the RSF militia sent drones to attack Port Sudan, targeting its fuel depots. ” The explosions at the fuel depots have left Port Sudan without the diesel used to power the pumps that bring up the groundwater.” As a result, many people there ended up thirsty and stinky.
More than 14 million people in Sudan have been driven from their homes by fighting in the civil war, including at least 4 million people who fled into neighboring countries, including two of the world’s most backward countries, South Sudan and Chad, which have recurring civil wars of their own. Sudan is experiencing famine in five locations, such as the Darfur region, where the RSF committed genocide against the Masalit people who predominated in West Darfur state.
“Sudanese people are eating leaves and charcoal to survive after fleeing” an RSF attack on Zamzam, the world’s largest camp for internally-displaced people, the BBC reported a month ago. “Some 400,000 people have been forced to flee the largest displacement camp in Sudan’s Darfur region after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control,” reported DW News. “The RSF attack on the camp left hundreds dead or wounded.”
Sudan is experiencing a bloody civil war. On one side is a genocidal militia — the Rapid Support Forces. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” says the U.S. State Department. On the other side is Sudan’s military, which has used chemical weapons, and tactics that include “indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets, and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The Rapid Support Forces are much worse than Sudan’s military, although both sides are brutal. In January, the State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan, more than a year after the genocide began. As we noted in 2023, “militias aligned with the RSF…referred to locally as the Janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ — were carrying out ethnic killings and have also looted and burned the palace of the sultan of the Masalit tribe. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias; the Masalit are a local African tribe.” Moreover, the “RSF has targeted Masalit refugee camps, killed people attempting to escape to neighboring Chad, kidnapped and raped women and systematically killed influential figures in the community, such as tribal leaders and human rights lawyers and monitors.” The RSF is “engaged in ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region, killing non-Arab peoples in Sudan’s Darfur region. It also abducted and killed a provincial governor. Khamis Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered hours after he accused the RSF of ‘genocide’,” in a “statement to a Saudi news channel. He was killed in the city of el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. ‘Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,’ he said.”
