It feels like humanity has died in Sudan

“When I got there, it had been taken over by fighters from the RSF,” she says. “One of them grabbed my wrist and pulled me into an empty shop.” He raped her, then issued his warning.

“When she came home, I saw her face and asked what had happened,” her aunt, Najat, recalls. But Souad kept silent. “That fighter’s face and his gun and knife came to my nightmares every night,” she says. Souad’s family are among a million Sudanese who have fled and crossed into neighbouring Chad, settling in makeshift camps scattered across the border. The largest is in the town of Adré, where a so-called Spontaneous Camp that sprang up on the scrubby desert now hosts more than 160,000 refugees, four times the local population of about 40,000.

After they had been in Adré for a while, Souad became sick. “I took her to a clinic, then the doctor came out and asked me how old she was,” says Najat. “I said 12. Then he told me she was pregnant. I was shocked.” The doctor told her Souad was too young to deliver and advised an abortion, but the family refused. “The baby was already more than three months and it is against Islam,” Najat says.

Now 13, Souad, who should be at school playing with her friends, instead sits plucking at the hem of her long black and white dress, eight-month-old baby Suma on her shoulder. A child herself who cries every night, with a baby daughter born of the worst day of her short life.

We meet in the Zahra Centre for survivors of sexual violence, a small shelter of woven grass inside the Spontaneous Camp, started by Zahra Khamis, a Sudanese psychologist whose own 17-year-old son was killed as they fled. Her small volunteer team is helping 350 survivors but that, she says, “is the tip of the iceberg”. The UN estimates that more than half the women and girls arriving from Sudan are victims of sexual violence, many too ashamed to speak.

“This is sexual violence on an industrial scale,” says Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, who visited Adré last week accompanied by actress Carey Mulligan, an ambassador for the charity War Child. The pair met on a panel at Davos and Cooper invited her along.

Yvette Cooper and Carey Mulligan in Adré

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As a long-time campaigner on violence against women and girls, Cooper has taken a special interest in the situation in Sudan since taking office in September, asking Foreign Office staff for twice daily updates on the deadly struggle between two generals battling for control of the country’s future and its resources: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese army (SAF), and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known by his nickname Hemedti, a camel trader turned goldmine owner who leads the RSF, the biggest militia in Africa.

As forces of both sides kill, loot, rape and pillage, it is Sudan’s civilians who pay the price. More than 14.5 million people, almost a third of Sudan’s population, have been displaced, according to the UN, and 8 million face famine.

Water is a precious commodity at the refugee camp

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Visibly shocked by what she saw during about five hours on the ground, Cooper accused the international community of “failing on Sudan, particularly its women”.

It would be hard to visit Adré and not be affected. Literally a city built on sand, it is also a city of the dispossessed, the traumatised and the forgotten. Something else quickly becomes clear, bumping along its sandy tracks: it is a city of women — 85 per cent of the inhabitants are women and children. They live in tiny makeshift shelters cobbled together from sticks and dried grass, as well as occasional pieces of tarpaulin and plastic. These provide little respite from the unforgiving heat of the long dry season or from the rains of May to August that will turn the camp into a swamp. The main mode of transport is donkeys and horse and carts, often driven by women, heads swathed in scarves against the dust, which is everywhere.

Women work the many small brick kilns of the nearby town, too, their printed dresses the only colour. And it is women and children who queue at taps with yellow plastic cans for the too little water they carry on their heads.

This is what the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis looks like in a world that doesn’t much seem to care.

As Adré is not an official refugee camp — these must be further from the border for security reasons — its inhabitants get only what the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, calls “lifesaving aid”. This means just food, emergency medical care and some water (less than half the recommended daily minimum) but no shelter, no education, no child-friendly spaces.

Even those in official camps fare little better. “We’re far from covering the minimum needs,” says Patrice Ahouansou, UNHCR representative for Chad, adding that his own staff are traumatised from not being able to provide enough.

It is getting worse. The civil war is soon to enter its fourth year, with no sign of the fighting abating. There is increasing use of deadly drones.

• Sudan’s brutal civil war explained

At the same time international aid cuts, particularly by the Trump administration a year ago, mean the World Food Programme has had to slash rations by more than half. The sorghum, rice, salt and vegetable oil they get not only provides little variety but amounts to just 840 calories a day — far below the recommended minimum of 2,000 — and will now only be distributed every two months instead of monthly.

Cooper is shown the severely reduced rations that refugees are now receiving

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The UNHCR has received only 20 per cent of the funding it needs for this year. “We’re facing a catastrophe and not seeing a way out,” Ahouansou says. “ Since April 2023 there has not been a single day when a refugee didn’t cross the border — the minimum was 70, maximum 2,000 — and we’re expecting more, not less, yet we have only 20 per cent of the money.”

The situation inside Sudan is even worse. “In all my decades [in the field] I have never seen a bigger gap between the need and what’s being given,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, almost in tears after spending five days inside the country, in Kordofan, the latest frontline in Darfur, meeting civilians who had managed to flee.

• Why Kordofan matters: the next flashpoint in Sudan’s brutal civil war

Darfur is no stranger to violence. The RSF has its origins in the Janjaweed, a militia that launched a similar spree of killing in 2003-05. That time, celebrities including George Clooney and Brad Pitt got involved. This time is very different.

“It feels like we don’t matter,” says Fuda, 20, as she lifts her orange scarf to show me vivid scars on her right shoulder and right side of her ear. A high school student when the war started, she and her family first fled to Ardamata, a garrison area of El Geneina, where they thought they would be safe. But then the RSF came and they fled again. The first village they got to was being burnt and looted by the RSF and in the chaos of ­running away, she was separated from her mother and siblings.

Fuda, 20, shows the scars from the attack

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Speaking so softly I have to lean in, Fuda recounts how a pick-up of RSF fighters blocked her way. “They grabbed me, three of them, and began beating me then as I was lying bleeding, they took turns in raping me.” Left with a broken shoulder and unable to walk, she was eventually taken in by a local woman. When the bleeding did not stop for 21 days, the woman arranged for a driver to take Fuda to Adré, where she spent 15 days in a clinic and was reunited with her mother and one brother who had also made it out. Her other siblings are still missing.

“I was crying a lot and couldn’t sleep but then someone told me about Zahra Centre. It helps a lot to be with other women.” Like Souad, she found she was pregnant and now has an 18-month-old boy. “He is a good baby but sometimes when I look at him I feel this badness deep inside,” she says, tears spilling from her eyes. “RSF stole my dignity and there must be accountability.”

But she also blames someone else. “Do people think we don’t know where these arms are coming from?”

Many are angry at the international community for not just failing to stop the war but also the arms that are flooding in from countries, particularly the UAE, which provides missiles and drones, air defences and logistical support to the RSF, through Chad, Libya and Uganda, apparently in return for gold. The UAE has denied this. Human rights organisations have documented serial numbers on weapons tracing them back to the UAE, as well as using satellite imagery and flight tracking. Last week, Dubai announced it was planning to build the first ever street paved with gold.

• How is the UAE involved in Sudan’s civil war?

UK officials estimate 12 countries are involved in supply and logistics. The Sudanese army is thought to be supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia and Iran, though Egypt and Saudi Arabia deny providing arms.

Meanwhile, at Adré crossing, more come every day. Last week saw an average of 120 a day, mainly from Nyala or El Fasher, the city where the most recent RSF massacre is thought to have taken place when they took control in October. No one knows exactly what happened in this city which once had 1.5 million people and where 260,000 were living before it fell. But satellite footage showed empty streets and so much blood that it could be seen from space.

“I saw dead bodies lying in the streets,” says Mahmoud Yusuf Ahmed, 58, a trader who arrived from El Fasher on Wednesday. “The majority of men were killed. The RSF were going door-to-door executing young and old and raping the women.” He himself had been picked up by the RSF in May 2024, he said, and beaten so badly he could not walk. He was left in the sun. “I felt like I was dead,” he says.

Eventually, they dragged him along the ground and took him to one of their detention centres, where he was held for five months in a shipping container with between 75 and 100 men, “so many we had to sleep standing”. Eventually he was recognised by a guard who had been at school with him and offered to release him to a relative for 1.5 million Sudanese pounds (about £1,800).

Though warned not to go back to El Fasher, he returned to look for his wife Sadia and three children, eventually leaving with them to Tawila, then Nyala. Terrified by what they said was an increasing use of drones, they decided to leave and arrived in Chad last week with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

His family, like many, arrived starving, some having resorted to eating leaves. At the UNHCR reception centre where they register and provide their biometrics, a trestle table is laid out with sachets of Plumpy Nut, a peanut-based paste to combat malnutrition, now given routinely. People sit on mats on the ground trying to find a patch of shade.

Children are given rations of Plumpy Nut for nutrition

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One of five recently arrived women who met Cooper last week was Abir Suleyman, 25, a university student from El Fasher. She told me afterwards she hadn’t known who Cooper was. “If I had known who she was, I would have said please stop the war and those countries sending in arms,” she says.
Her dream is to go back to university and “become a psychologist and help survivors. My country is so destroyed.”

She and others say now at least in Adré they feel safe. But some end up feeling they have swapped one nightmare for another.

Abir Suleyman met the foreign secretary when she visited the camp

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“Violence is everywhere here,” says Darel Salam, a women’s community leader in Adré. “We have lots of atrocities in the camp — rape, killing … we are scared to be out after dark.”

Salam co-founded another safe space for women with Aman El Agiba, 54, a Sudanese psychologist with a master’s from Dublin, who spent 20 years working for the UN, and was part of the revolution in 2019 that deposed Sudan’s former ­dictator, only for the two generals to launch a coup then declare a war on each other.

The centre helps survivors with medical care, counselling, legal support and activities such as basket weaving, jewellery making and producing clothes on two old-fashioned sewing machines.

Among the victims who come in are not only women raped in the war, but others raped in the camp in Adré. Women going to collect firewood have been raped by locals. Some of the women resort to survival sex to get food. Last week, a 15-year-old girl came in, pregnant after a local man bought her a phone in return for sex.

However, much of the problem, says Salam, is marauding gangs of teenage ­refugee boys. With no schools for the children, apart from a private one most cannot afford, there is nothing for them to do and glue-sniffing is common.

In a camp of heartbreaking stories, most heartbreaking of all was meeting five-year-old Makari, clinging to her mother, Tayba, 28. Tayba was going out every day to work carrying things on construction sites for about £20 a week, to supplement their rations. She left behind Makari and her elder sister, Musawi, ten. One day last year, Musawi went to the market to fetch something for a neighbour and came back to find a 17-year-old refugee raping her then four-year-old sister. Neighbours managed to catch him and he was jailed for two months, but now he is free.

Tayba is very worried about her little daughter. “Sometimes at night she starts crying and says the boy came at me.

“I can’t leave her any more for work but rations are not enough, we are hungry, and now they have been cut in half I don’t know what we will do.”

UNHCR trucks carry refugees from the civil war

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Salam’s centre was among the places visited by Cooper on her whistlestop tour, in which she promised to use the UK’s forthcoming presidency of the UN security council to lobby for a humanitarian truce in Sudan, to get aid through and to work for peace.

“The international community is still failing on Sudan,” Cooper says. “El Fasher should have been a turning point and it wasn’t, and that’s why I keep relentlessly raising Sudan in every international forum, in every meeting with other foreign ministers, and any opportunity that I can, to put the pressure on the two warring parties.”

Cooper believes Sudan needs “a Gaza moment” — something she says she has been “working on directly with Massad Boulos”, the Lebanese-American businessman who is President Trump’s envoy for Sudan and whose son is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as well as speaking to all participants of the Quad, the four-member group comprising US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE that is working on solutions.

“My view is that in order to make progress, we have to have that same international energy for Sudan that we had around the Gaza ceasefire,” she says. “I think this has to be about all countries together putting pressure on, to get both the two military parties to pull back, to agree first the humanitarian truce, let the aid in, and then to have a political process, so that we can get a civilian transition. But also so that the voices of the women, some of whom I spoke with on my visit, can be heard.”

After her trip, she announced that the UK will fund a new £20 million programme to support survivors of rape and sexual violence in Sudan on top of the £150 million aid already provided. The UK government also imposed sanctions against one senior commander of the Sudanese armed forces and five from the RSF.

Aid arrives from Britain

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But the list did not include either of the two leaders, and refugees and aid workers were unimpressed.
“So many ministers come and take selfies on the border then increase spending on defence while cutting aid, and Europe refuses to say anything to UAE as it’s such an important trading partner,” the head of one agency said.

Cooper ended her visit watching some dancing by young girls, including a ­ten-year-old whose leg was hacked off by the RSF, but left before they could give her the message they planned.
“These kids have a really black heart for the international community,” said Salam. “They don’t understand why Trump can stop the war in Gaza but do nothing here. Or why the UK don’t stop the UAE arming RSF. We have a long history with the UK as our former colonists and expected more from them.”

She shakes her head. “Sometimes it feels like humanity died here in Sudan.”