Declan Walsh:
It’s extremely serious. Since we have been here, we have traveled around parts of the city that had changed hands in recent weeks and months. And we met many people who were in a dire situation, people with no water, no electricity, in many cases for the last two years, malnourished children in extremely badly provisioned hospitals, some of them literally gasping for life.
And their parents told us that they had been living in areas where they were unable to get any food or certainly very meager food rations because of the fighting. There are aid groups that have accused both sides in the war of using food as a weapon of war, of denying food access to humanitarian groups in areas that are controlled by their enemies.
And we certainly saw on the ground here the really dire consequences of all of those factors coming together. And that’s just here in Khartoum, in the capital. Out in the West of Sudan, in particular in the area of Darfur, conditions are in many cases even worse. A famine has officially been declared already in parts of Darfur.
