By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
El Obeid, once a way station, has become something closer to a last refuge. Civilians fleeing fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces militia keep arriving in the city and the camps that ring it — and conditions there are dire and getting worse, according to people on the ground cited in reporting on the crisis.
The scale is the story. The United Nations says more than 15,000 families have arrived since mid-July alone, according to a briefing given to the UN Security Council by Tom Fletcher, the under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs. That's on top of more than 200,000 people who arrived in El Obeid in just the first half of the year, a figure attributed to Sudanese government data and cited by Save the Children.
Those numbers, drawn from UN and NGO sources rather than independent verification on the ground, describe a city and its outskirts absorbing a small nation's worth of displaced people in a matter of months. Save the Children has separately reported nearly 39,000 displaced children have arrived in the city over six months, describing it as "close to breaking point."
Sudan's civil war, now well into its third year, has produced one of the world's largest displacement crises, and El Obeid's strain is a local snapshot of a national collapse in aid capacity. There is no sign, from this reporting, that the flow of arrivals is slowing — nor that resources to meet them are keeping pace.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE —
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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