Julud, Sudan. 18 June, 2024.

Two mothers sit with their children inside the hut that they share in the Tanto IDP camp on the outskirts of the rebel-held town of Julud. From L to R, Aram, 30, holding her son Mohammed, Aram’s daughter Raja, Hamisa Abdul Hamid, 22, holding her 1 year-old child.

Sudan’s war has left at least 10 million people fleeing their homes — more than the entire population of New York, and currently the largest displacement of people in the world. One U.S. estimate in March said that 150,000 people might be dead in the fighting, though the chaos has left an accurate body count impossible. Hospitals have collapsed. Khartoum’s international airport is a ghost town, destroyed by militiamen. Western Darfur, on the country’s frontier with Chad, stands besieged by paramilitary groups who have rekindled the ethnic slaughter that made Darfur a household name in the early 2000s.
And then there is the threat of starvation, the specter that haunts nearly all conflicts in Africa and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. More than 15 million Sudanese did not have enough to eat even before the war began. Since then, the fighting has destroyed not just schools and roads, but also farms and agricultural infrastructure, as the warring parties pillage the countryside to sustain themselves. The possibility of a great famine like the one that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s has become real again.