CAIRO (AP) 鈥� All roads around Sudan鈥檚 in North Darfur are blocked and the security situation for aid workers on the ground has become 鈥渦nbearable,鈥� an international aid worker said.
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name M茅decins Sans Fronti猫res, or MSF, because of safety concerns caused by intensified fighting between the Sudanese army and rival paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
Marion Ramstein, MSF鈥檚 project coordinator for North Darfur, spoke with The Associated Press on Tuesday about the dire conditions in Zamzam Camp.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not even possible now to go from Zamzam to (the city of) El Fasher ... all the roads around Zamzam are blocked because of the conflict,鈥� she said.
plunged into a civil war in April 2023 when fighting erupted between the military and the RSF. has killed at least 20,000 people, forced more than 14 million people out of their homes and created famine in various parts of the country.
MSF said in a statement on Monday that being close to violence and facing challenges to send supplies and experienced staff left the charity with limited choice.
鈥淪o far, there is no more MSF activities since a couple of days now in Zamzam because the security was unbearable for our team. They鈥檙e not able to work anymore. They didn鈥檛 have enough capacity,鈥� she said.
MSF said that two of its ambulances in December and January were shot at twice while carrying patients from the camp to El Fasher. Ramstein said that in one shooting, a woman who was accompanying her sister inside the ambulance was killed.
The international organization will come back to operate in Zamzam, but teams currently can鈥檛 work in a high-risk environment, Ramstein said.
鈥淯nfortunately, MSF was kind of one of the few organizations still working in Zamzam, when we decided to suspend the activities 鈥� that was really a heartbreaking decision. We know that we left the population with no other support,鈥� she said, referring to the difficulty of delivering food aid and necessary supplies in the area because of inaccessible roads.
A report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, found last year that Zamzam Camp and some parts of North Darfur known as IPC Phase 5.
Ramstein said that MSF received a lot of cases of young children in the camp suffering from anemia. In September, during a vaccination campaign in Zamzam and found that 34% of them suffer from acute malnutrition.
Zamzam camp hosts around 500,000 people and has seen displaced families arriving from the areas of Abu Zerega, Shagra, and Saluma. They have told MSF teams of abuses in villages and on roads in that include killings, sexual violence, lootings and beatings.
The Associated Press
