Sudan war drives one million children from homes: UN

KHARTOUM: The conflict in Sudan has displaced more than one million children, 270,000 of them in the Darfur region, the UN children´s agency (Unicef) has said, warning more were at “grave risk”.

Fighting has raged in Sudan since mid-April between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

As well as the more than one million displaced, at least 330 children have been killed and more than 1,900 wounded, UNICEF said in a statement on Thursday.

“Many more are at grave risk”. The United Nations agency said an estimated 13 million children were in “dire need” of humanitarian assistance.

“Children are trapped in an unrelenting nightmare, bearing the heaviest burden of a violent crisis they had no hand in creating -- caught in the crossfire, injured, abused, displaced and subjected to disease and malnutrition,” said UNICEF Sudan representative Mandeep O´Brien.

It said the situation in Darfur, already scarred by a two-decade war that left hundreds of thousands dead and more than two million displaced, was especially concerning.

“The situation in West and Central Darfur, in particular, is characterised by active fighting, severe insecurity and looting of humanitarian supplies and facilities,” Unicef said. Daglo´s RSF have their origins in the Janjaweed militias which former strongman Omar al-Bashir unleashed on ethnic minorities in the region in 2003, drawing charges of genocide.

Its paramilitaries have been accused of carrying out the Wednesday killing of West Darfur state governor Khamis Abdullah Abakar hours after he made remarks critical of the paramilitaries in a telephone interview with a Saudi TV channel.