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CAIRO: Mona Ibrahim has already buried two of her children.

In the span of just two months, the Sudanese mother watched helplessly as severe malnutrition killed her 10-year-old daughter, Rania, and her eight-month-old son, Montasir, in the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp.

“I could only hold them as they faded away,” Ibrahim, 40, said via video call, sitting outside her straw-and-plastic shelter near North Darfur state’s besieged capital El-Fasher.

Rania was the first to succumb. In El-Fasher’s only functioning hospital, understaffed and unequipped, she died in November just three days after being admitted with acute diarrhea.

Her baby boy Montasir followed weeks later, his tiny body bloated from severe malnutrition.

El-Fasher, under paramilitary siege since May, is only one grim battlefield in the 21-month war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces.

In July, a UN-backed review declared famine in Zamzam, a decades-old displacement camp home to between 500,000 and a million people.

By December, it had spread to two more camps in the area, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam, as well as parts of the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification determined.

Now, Ibrahim fears for her four-year-old daughter, Rashida, who battles severe anemia with no access to medical care.

“I am terrified I will lose her too,” she said. “We’re abandoned. There is no food, no medicine, nothing.”

At Salam 56, one of Zamzam’s 48 overcrowded shelters, exhaustion was etched onto mothers’ faces as they cradled their children, too weak to stand.

Multiple families gathered around bowls with a few scraps of peanut residue traditionally used as animal feed. “It’s all we have,” said Rawiya Ali, a 35-year-old mother of five.

Contaminated water collects in a shallow reservoir during the rainy season, which the women trudge 3 km to fetch.

“Animals drink from it and so do we,” Ali said.

Salam 56 is home to over 700 families, according to its coordinator Adam Mahmoud Abdullah.

Since war began in April 2023, it has received only four food aid deliveries, the most recent in September, a mere 10 tonnes of flour, he said. “Since then, nothing has come,” Abdullah said.

The desolation in Zamzam lays bare the true cost of the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted over 12 million others, and created the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee. About 700 km southeast of Zamzam, the situation was just as dire.

Outside one of the last functioning community kitchens in the town of Dilling in South Kordofan state, queues stretched endlessly, according to Nazik Kabalo, who leads a Sudanese women’s rights group overseeing the kitchen.

Photos show men, women and children standing hollow-eyed and frail — their bellies swollen and skin pulled taut over fragile bones. 

After days without a single morsel, “some collapse where they stand,” Kabalo said. “For others, even when they get food ... they vomit it back up,” she said.

In South Kordofan state, where agriculture once thrived, farmers are eating seeds meant for planting, while others boil tree leaves in water to stave off hunger.

“We are seeing hunger in areas that have never seen famine in Sudan’s history,” Kabalo said.

With vast oil and gold reserves and fertile agricultural land, Sudan has had its economy bludgeoned by war and decades of mismanagement, and now, hunger is everywhere.