Sudan keeps key aid crossing from Chad open for hard-hit Darfur region as famine grows

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — Sudan’s military-controlled government said Wednesday that a key border crossing with Chad will stay open to keep much-needed humanitarian aid flowing into the western Darfur region which has been a center of fighting in the country’s ongoing war.

The decision on the Adre crossing followed a meeting with United Nations agencies and local and international aid groups, Sudan’s ruling Sovereign Council said in a statement.

“We very much welcome the Sudanese authorities’ decision to extend the opening of the Adre crossing from Chad,” U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York on Wednesday.

He said the government’s announcement that the Adre crossing will remain open for another three months will enable the U.N. and its partners to continue delivering critically needed aid.

The border crossing, which was closed earlier this year, was reopened in August for three months by the Sovereign Council to address the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Darfur. Famine has been confirmed in the Zamzam displacement camp near El Fasher, North Darfur’s provincial capital.

“Since the crossing was opened in mid-August,” Dujarric said, “we and our partners have now moved more than 337 trucks of humanitarian aid through this route, with more than 11,000 metric tons of food and other relief items that could cover the needs of close to 1.4 million people.”

Some of the aid continues to be distributed around Darfur, and an additional 30,000 metric tons of supplies are already in eastern Chad or on their way, the U.N. spokesman said.

Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital, Khartoum, and spread to other regions, including Darfur, which was wracked by bloodshed and atrocities in 2003.

The war has killed more than 24,000 people and created the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than 14 million people forced to flee their homes.

Dujarric said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spoke to Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, who led a military takeover of the Sudanese government in 2021, on the sidelines of the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan “on the importance of facilitating humanitarian distribution in Sudan and in particular through the Adre crossing.”

While Adre is “a critical lifeline for millions of people,” Dujarric said it isn’t enough and all routes crossing borders and crossing conflict lines need to be opened to meet the spiraling demand for humanitarian assistance.

Aid groups on Wednesday welcomed the news of the extension and urged all parties to stop obstructing humanitarian assistance.

¨This decision, if sustained and supported with streamlined processes, could be a lifeline for the 5.3 million children and families on the brink of starvation,” Mathilde Vu, advocacy manager in Sudan for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told The Associated Press.

The international community should seize the moment and scale up funding to accelerate the response, she said.

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This story corrects that El Fasher is the capital of North Darfur, not West Darfur.

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Mednick reported from Dakar, Senegal and Lederer from the United Nations.