The three years of war in Sudan between the regular army (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been described by the UN as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
It is a grim tally of more than 200,000 deaths, and refugees are facing severe hardship and danger.
There are 14 million people who have fled their homes, more than 11.5 million wandering inside Sudan, often displaced several times by the advancing fighting, and more than 4.4 million who have crossed borders to neighboring countries, Chad in particular hosting a total of 1.3 million Sudanese.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 84% of new arrivals in Chad reported having suffered serious violations: beatings, sexual assaults, rapes… violence that extends to summary executions, kidnappings, and detention with ransom release.
This phenomenon and the extreme danger have been compounded by the food insecurity that refugees arriving in Chad experience, physically weakened by the lack of water and food, while others arrive gaunt and exhausted.
Most arrive by trucks or carts, after a journey during which they have often had to walk for several days.
Many refugees recount having had to cross trenches filled with decomposing corpses to flee the city, while others fled at night, notably those who left El Fasher, in southwestern Sudan, to avoid the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that had surrounded the city up to its fall in October.
