Nyamut Gai lost everything four years ago when armed militias stormed through her village in South Sudan, a landlocked African country tormented by civil war, famine and flooding.
Desperate, she and her family fled almost 600 miles north across the border to Sudan, where she worked as a cleaner in the capital, Khartoum, and began to settle in. But then, a fierce war broke out in Sudan in mid-April between rival factions of the military, sending her packing yet again.
As she and her family made the weekslong journey by foot and bus from Khartoum, her 1-month-old son began coughing and withering away from hunger, and soon died. When she finally crossed the border into South Sudan, any sense of relief she felt was shattered when her 3-year-old son succumbed to measles.
“We are not safe anywhere,” Ms. Gai, 28, said on a recent morning at a muddy and congested aid center in Renk, a town in South Sudan.
“People fled war here. There’s a war in Sudan now. There’s war everywhere,” she said. “It never ends.”
The war in Sudan has set off a mass exodus of people who years ago fled a bloody civil war in South Sudan to seek safety in Sudan. But they are returning home to a country still in the grip of political instability, economic stagnation and a massive humanitarian crisis — many of them without actual homes to return to.
Sudan descended into chaos almost five months ago, when a long-simmering rivalry between the leader of the army, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, burst into open warfare across the northeast African nation.
In recent weeks, the conflict has intensified in Khartoum and adjoining cities, and also in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where mass graves have been uncovered. Regional and international efforts to end the fighting have hit a stalemate, with General al-Burhan dismissing any attempts at mediation last month in advance of his first postwar foreign trip to Egypt.
On Wednesday, the United States imposed sanctions on senior leaders in the paramilitary force, including General Hamdan’s brother, Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo.
The vicious fighting has precipitated a staggering humanitarian crisis that has left millions in Sudan, a nation of 46 million, facing shortages of food, water, medicine and electricity. Thousands of people have been killed and injured in the conflict, the United Nations, Sudanese officials and aid agencies estimate.
One of those countries is South Sudan, which has received more than 250,000 people to date. A country of 11 million, it became the world’s newest nation when it gained independence from Sudan in 2011, but soon after was torn apart by a civil war set off by a power struggle between the country’s political leaders.
Intercommunal violence, chronic food shortages and devastating floods continue to afflict the country — and many South Sudanese are now fleeing the war in Sudan only to begin a new ordeal in their…
2023-09-07 01:44:08
Article from www.nytimes.com
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