CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.

In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.

“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.

Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.

Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.

El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.

In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.

By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.

Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.

“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”

At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.

Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.

Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.

“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.

Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.

Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.

The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.

Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.

Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones. 

After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.

In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.

“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.

With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.

DAMASCUS: The leader of the former rebel group that toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad last month was named on Wednesday the country’s interim president, following a meeting of the former insurgent factions.
The appointment of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, a rebel once aligned with Al-Qaeda, as the country’s president “in the transitional phase,” was expected. The announcement was made by the spokesperson for Syria’s new, de facto government’s military operations sector, Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, the state-run SANA news agency said.
Abdul Ghani also announced the cancelation of the country’s constitution passed in 2012 under Assad’s rule and said Al-Sharaa would be authorized to form a temporary legislative Council until a new constitution is drafted.
He also announced the dissolution of the armed factions in the country, which he said would be absorbed into state institutions.
Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, is the leader of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamist former insurgent group that led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad last month. The group was once affiliated with Al-Qaeda but has since denounced its former ties, and in recent years Al-Sharaa has sought to cast himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance.
The United States had previously placed a $10 million bounty on Al-Sharaa but canceled it last month after a US delegation visited Damascus and met with him.
Since Assad’s fall, HTS has become the de facto ruling party and has set up an interim government largely composed of officials from the local government it previously ran in rebel-held Idlib province.
As the former Syrian army collapsed with Assad’s downfall, Al-Sharaa has called for creation of a new unified national army and security forces, but questions have loomed over how the interim administration can bring together a patchwork of former rebel groups, each with their own leaders and ideology.
Even knottier is the question of the US-backed Kurdish groups that have carved out an autonomous enclave early in Syria’s civil war, never fully siding with the Assad government or the rebels seeking to topple him. Since Assad’s fall, there has been an escalation in clashes between the Kurdish forces and Turkish-backed armed groups allied with HTS in northern Syria.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces were not present at Wednesday’s meeting of the country’s armed factions Wednesday and there was no immediate comment from the group.
Al-Sharaa had been expected to appear in a televised speech following the meeting, but it remained unclear if he would. The exact mechanism under which the factions selected him as interim president was also not clear.