PORT SUDAN, Sudan: War, climate change and man-made shortages have brought Sudan – a nation already facing a litany of horrors – to the brink of a water crisis.
“Since the war began, my two children have been walking 14 kilometers (nine miles) every day to get water for the family,” said Issa, a father of seven from North Darfur state.
Under a blazing sun and temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Issa’s family – along with 65,000 other residents of the Sortoni IDP camp – feel the brunt of the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). .
When the first shots rang out more than a year ago, most foreign aid groups – including those serving the local Sortoni water station – could no longer operate. The residents were left to their own devices.
Throughout the country, despite multiple sources of water, including the mighty Nile River, water shortages are no strangers.
According to the United Nations, even before the war, a quarter of the population had to walk for more than 50 minutes to get water.
Now, from the western deserts of Darfur, through the fertile Nile Valley to the Red Sea coast, a water crisis has affected 48 million war-weary Sudanese, who, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Friday, are already facing “the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet.”
About 110 kilometers east of Sortoni, deadly clashes in North Darfur’s capital, El-Fasher, under RSF siege, are threatening water access for more than 800,000 civilians.
The charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Friday that at least 226 people had been killed in fighting in El-Fasher.
Just outside the city, fighting over the Golo reservoir “threatens to cut off safe and adequate water for an estimated 270,000 people,” warns the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
Access to water and other limited resources has long been a source of conflict in Sudan.
The UN Security Council on Thursday demanded an end to the siege of El-Fasher.
If this happens, hundreds of thousands more people who depend on the area’s groundwater will have no access to water.
“The water is there, but it is more than 60 meters (66 yards) deep, which is deeper than a hand pump can reach,” says a European diplomat with years of experience in Sudan’s water sector.
“If the RSF does not allow fuel to flow in, the water stations will stop working,” he said, requesting anonymity because the diplomat was not authorized to talk to the media.
“For a large part of the population there will simply be no water.”
Already in the nearby village of Shaqra, where 40,000 people have sought shelter, “people are standing in 300-meter lines for drinking water,” said Adam Rijal, spokesman for the civilian-led General Coordination of Displaced Persons and Refugees in Darfur.
The photos he sent to AFP show some women and children huddled in the shade of lonely acacia trees, with most of them waiting their turn in the blazing sun.
Sudan is strongly affected by climate change, which is “clearly visible in the increase in temperature and rainfall intensity,” the diplomat said.
Mercury levels are expected to continue rising this summer until the rainy season arrives in August, bringing with it torrential floods that kill dozens of people every year.
The capital, Khartoum, lies at the legendary meeting point of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, and yet its inhabitants are parched.
The Soba water station, which supplies water to much of the capital, “has been out of service since the beginning of the war,” said a volunteer with the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of grassroots groups coordinating war aid.
Since then, people have been buying untreated “water from animal carts that they can barely afford and are exposing themselves to disease,” he said, asking not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Entire districts of North Khartoum “have been without drinking water for a year,” said another local volunteer, asking only to be identified by his first name, Salah.
“People wanted to stay in their homes even during the fighting, but they couldn’t survive without water,” Salah said.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the fighting east, many of them to the de facto capital of Port Sudan on the Red Sea, which itself faces a “huge water problem” that “will only get worse in the summer months,” worries resident Al-Sadek Hussein .
The city’s water supply depends only on one, insufficient reservoir.
Here too, citizens bring water by horse and donkey carts, using “tools that need to be monitored and controlled to prevent contamination,” said public health expert Taha Taher.
“But with all this displacement, that’s obviously not happening,” he said.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, the Ministry of Health recorded almost 11,000 cases of cholera – a disease endemic to Sudan, “but not in this form” since it occurs “all year round”, said a European diplomat.
The outbreak comes after 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.
“The health service has collapsed, people are drinking dirty water, they are hungry and will be hungry, which will kill many, many more,” the diplomat said.
