Sudan civil war: The children living between starvation and death in DarfurQisma Abdirahman Ali Abubaker goes through the motions of waiting in line to pick up her food ration, but her heart is not in it.
The small bag does not have to stretch as far as it used to for her family.
Three of her children have died of disease and malnutrition in the past four months, she says. The oldest was three, another was two years old, the last was a six-month-old baby.
Ms Abubaker has taken refuge at Zamzam Camp for displaced people in Northern Darfur, part of a region in the west of the country, amid warnings of a catastrophic nutrition crisis there.
It is the oldest and largest such camp in the country, but there is fresh desperation and grief as Sudan's war grinds into its second year.
The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it found in January that at least one child in the camp dies every two hours. With little food, clean water or healthcare, illnesses that could once be treated now kill.
MSF is one of the last international humanitarian agencies still on the ground in Darfur.
It has just completed a mass screening of vulnerable women and children in Zamzam and shared the results exclusively with the BBC.
The agency found that three out of every 10 children under five were acutely malnourished, as well as a third of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, confirming fears of a "catastrophe" that an earlier survey had suggested.
This is double the threshold for a nutrition emergency, and probably just the tip of the iceberg of Sudan's hunger crisis, says Abdalla Hussein, MSF operations manager for Sudan.
"We have not reached all the children in Darfur, not even in North Darfur, we're talking about only one camp," he told me at the MSF regional headquarters in Kenya's capital, Nairobi.......................
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68788650
