GENEVA: The UN appealed Monday for six billion dollars to provide desperately-needed aid to people in war-ravaged Sudan, as the African country faced an emergency of “shocking proportions”.
The aim is to provide assistance to nearly 26 million people this year, the United Nations’ humanitarian agency OCHA and refugee agency UNHCR said in a joint appeal.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been locked in a brutal conflict between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The UN agencies said the civil war has displaced 12 million people, including around 3.5 million who have fled the country.
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of Sudan’s population needs emergency aid, as swathes of the nation face famine conditions.
“Sudan remains in the grip of a massive humanitarian crisis,” UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said at the appeal launch in Geneva.
Describing the situation as an emergency of “shocking proportions”, he said that over half of Sudan’s population was food insecure, “with alarming reports of famine conditions spreading”, even as “women and girls continue to suffer through appalling patterns of conflict related sexual violence”.
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