More than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting in Sudan have headed home, the United Nations said Friday, pleading for greater international aid to help returnees rebuild shattered lives.
Over a million internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned to their homes in recent months, UN agencies said.
A further 320,000 refugees have crossed back into Sudan this year, mainly from neighbouring Egypt and South Sudan.
While fighting has subsided in the “pockets of relative safety” to where people are beginning to return, the situation remains highly precarious, the UN said.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander over the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The fighting has killed tens of thousands.
The RSF lost control of the capital, Khartoum, in March and the regular army now controls Sudan’s centre, north and east.
In a joint statement, the UN’s IOM migration agency, UNHCR refugee agency and UNDP development agency called for an urgent increase in financial support to fund the recovery as people begin to return.
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It said humanitarian operations were “massively underfunded”.
Sudan has 10 million IDPs, including 7.7 million forced from their homes by the current conflict, they said.
Over four million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.
‘Living Nightmare’
Sudan is “the largest humanitarian catastrophe facing our world and also the least remembered”, the IOM’s regional director Othman Belbeisi, speaking from Port Sudan, told a media briefing in Geneva.
He said most of the returns (71 percent) had been to Al-Jazira state, while eight percent had been to Khartoum.
Other returnees were mostly heading for Sennar state.
Both Al-Jazira and Sennar are located southeast of Khartoum.
With the army controlling Sudan’s centre, north and east, and the RSF holding nearly all of the western Darfur region, Kordofan in the south has become the main battleground of the war in recent weeks.
“We expect 2.1 million to return to Khartoum by the end of this year but this will depend on many factors, especially the security situation and the ability to restore services in a timely manner,” Belbeisi said.
He said the “vicious, horrifying civil war continues to take lives with impunity”, imploring the warring factions to put down their guns.
“The war has unleashed hell for millions and millions of ordinary people,” he said.
“Sudan is a living nightmare. The violence needs to stop.”
AFP
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