CAIRO, Egypt (AFP) — 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, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) 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 (RSF).
In July, a United Nations-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.
The Sudanese government, aligned with the army, has denied reports of famine, even as millions across the country suffer on the brink of starvation.
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.”
‘It’s all we have’
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 three kilometers to fetch.
“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali told AFP.
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 tons of flour, he said.
“Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah told AFP.
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.