PORT SUDAN, Sudan: War, climate change and man-made shortages have brought Sudan – a country already facing a litany of horrors – to the brink of a water crisis.
“Since the war began, two of my children have walked 14 kilometers every day to fetch water for the family,” said Issa, a father of seven from North Darfur state.
In the scorching sun and at temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius, Issa’s family – like 65,000 other residents of the Sortoni refugee camp – suffers under the burden of the war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
When the first shots were fired over a year ago, most foreign aid organizations were able to stop their work – including the one that ran Sortoni’s local water station. The residents were left to fend for themselves.
Despite its numerous water sources, including the mighty Nile, the country as a whole is not without water shortages.
Even before the war, according to the United Nations, a quarter of the population had to walk more than 50 minutes to fetch water.
From the deserts of western Darfur to the fertile Nile Valley and the Red Sea coast, 48 million war-weary Sudanese are now facing a water crisis. The US ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday that they are already facing the “largest humanitarian crisis on earth”.
About 110 kilometers east of Sortoni, deadly clashes are taking place in the RSF-besieged capital of El-Fasher in northern Darfur. The water supply of more than 800,000 civilians is at risk.
The medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced on Friday that at least 226 people had been killed in the fighting in El-Fasher.
Immediately outside the city, fighting over the Golo water reservoir threatens to “cut off around 270,000 people from a safe and adequate water supply,” warned the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
Access to water and other scarce resources has long been a source of conflict in Sudan.
The UN Security Council called for an end to the siege of El-Fasher on Thursday.
If things continue like this, hundreds of thousands more people who depend on the region’s groundwater will be left without water.
“The water is there, but it is over 60 metres deep, deeper than a hand pump could reach,” explains a European diplomat with many years of experience in the Sudanese water sector.
“If the RSF does not allow fuel deliveries, the water stations will stop operating,” he said, requesting anonymity because the diplomat was not authorized to speak to the media.
“For a large part of the population there will simply be no water.”
Already, people in the nearby village of Shaqra, where 40,000 people have sought shelter, are “standing in 300-meter-long lines to get drinking water,” says Adam Rijal, spokesman for the civilian-led General Coordination for Displaced Persons and Refugees in Darfur.
In photos he sent to AFP, some women and children can be seen huddled in the shade of lonely acacia trees, while most simmer in the blazing sun, waiting their turn.
Sudan is particularly affected by climate change and “this is most clearly noticeable in the increase in temperatures and the intensity of precipitation,” said the diplomat.
Temperatures are expected to continue rising this summer until the rainy season begins in August, bringing torrential floods that kill dozens of people each year.
The capital Khartoum lies at the legendary confluence of the Blue and White Nile – and yet the population suffers from thirst.
The Soba water station, which supplies water to much of the capital, “has been out of service since the war began,” said a volunteer with the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of grassroots groups coordinating war aid.
People have since been buying untreated “water from animal-drawn carts that they can barely afford and that exposes them to disease,” he said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Entire neighborhoods in northern Khartoum “have been without drinking water for a year,” said another volunteer from the area who asked to be identified only by his first name, Salah.
“People wanted to stay in their homes despite the fighting, but without water they could not survive,” Salah said.
Hundreds of thousands have fled the fighting to the east, many to the de facto capital of Port Sudan on the Red Sea. There is a “huge water problem” there that will “get even worse in the summer months,” fears resident Al-Sadek Hussein.
The city relies on only an inadequate reservoir for its water supply.
Here too, citizens rely on carts pulled by horses and donkeys to deliver water. This involves “equipment that must be monitored and controlled to avoid contamination,” says health expert Taha Taher.
“But with all the displacement, of course that doesn’t happen,” he said.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, the Ministry of Health registered nearly 11,000 cases of cholera – a disease endemic in Sudan, “but not to this extent” where it now occurs “all year round,” the European diplomat said.
The outbreak occurred while most hospitals in Sudan were closed and the United States warned on Friday that without urgent action, a famine of historic proportions could occur around the world.
“Health care has collapsed, people are drinking dirty water, they are starving and will become even more hungry, which will cost many, many more people their lives,” the diplomat said.
