Sudan’s civil war is starving thousands of children. Aid workers say Trump’s aid freeze could cost more lives.
Omdurman, Sudan — It is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, but probably the one you’ve heard the least about. Fueled by nearly two years of civil war, Sudan is in the grip of a man-made famine.
More than 25 million people are starving — more than half of the African nation’s population — and of those, 3.2 million are children under the age of 5 who are suffering from acute malnutrition.
Despite those harrowing figures, Sudan’s brutal conflict is often called “the forgotten war.” It has raged in the shadows of other global conflicts, including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Aid organizations were already battling to address the country’s devastating hunger crisis, and those organizations warn President Trump’s 90-day suspension of U.S. foreign aid now threatens to turn the Sudanese disaster into an all-out catastrophe.
For a moment in 2019, it seemed like a new era was dawning. A popular civilian resistance overthrew former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. But instead of a new civilian government, two rival generals, Mohamad Daglo, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and Sudanese army commander Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan joined forces amid the chaos and seized power in a military coup.
Under their cooperation agreement, they were to hand over power to a new, elected civilian administration within two years. But that never happened. Instead, in 2023, they had a falling out and plunged the country into the brutal civil war that has raged ever since.
The U.S. government has sanctioned both leaders, accusing Daglo’s RSF of genocide and Burhan and the army of other war crimes.
Inside the desperation caused by Sudan’s civil war
It took our CBS News team nearly two years to get the visas required to enter Sudan. Once inside, we had to drive 12-14 hours per day on some occasions to reach areas near the front lines, passing through dozens of checkpoints on the way.
At each roadblock, armed forces demanded copies of our permits, passports and visas — we had printed over 100 copies for each member of the team, and we still had to print more.
Some of the most intense fighting is now in places such as al-Gezira, al-Fasher and Darfur. Getting there is impossible, but what we found near the front lines was deeply distressing.
In one of the many tent camps where thousands of displaced families have sought shelter from combat, we saw a newly arrived child in critical condition from starvation. We went out with UNICEF volunteers as they monitored the condition of children under the age of 3. Every single one they saw was severely malnourished, which means without intervention, they were at risk of dying.
The worst cases are hospitalized, their tiny bodies simply wasting away. We saw children battling to breathe on their own, some so dehydrated they were too weak to cry.
At the Al-Buluk Children’s Hospital in Omdurman, just 12 miles from the fighting in the capital Khartoum, we met Dr. Mohammad Fadlala. The Cincinnati native is in Sudan as a volunteer with the Doctors Without Borders charity.
“I think we’re in dire straits here in Sudan,” he told CBS News.
As we arrived, Fadlala was supervising a medical team that had just admitted 13-month-old Ibrahim Jafar. The doctors said the little boy was close to death and his eyesight was badly damaged from severe malnutrition.
“Severe acute malnutrition happens over time,” Fadlala explained. “It’s where kids don’t get enough nutrients…They’re unable to fight infections like normal. They’re unable to utilize nutrition like normal…And the majority of children who have severe acute malnutrition end up getting an infection and dying from it.”
Ibrahim’s family had been trapped by fighting in the state of al-Gezira for months.
“There was no food,” his grandmother, Neamat Abubaker, told us. “At times nothing at all, not even water.”
She desperately wants the war to end. At one point, she broke down crying, worried they’d left it too late to flee the violence to save her grandson. It was a fear shared by every parent in the emergency ward.
Doctors and nutritionists all told us the same thing: Without humanitarian aid and medical intervention, the children we saw in that ward would not be alive.
Much of that aid has come from USAID, the decades-old U.S. government aid program that President Trump has frozen. As of September 2024, the Biden administration said it had committed more than $2 billion to the emergency response in Sudan, including a new promise of $424 million in new humanitarian assistance — $276 million of which was being sent through USAID.
America has also long been the biggest funder of the United Nations’ World Food Program. CBS News visited a WFP warehouse in Port Sudan, on the country’s Red Sea coast, and saw it stacked with tens of thousands of bags of sorghum, a type of grain. A lot of it was paid for by the U.S.
The grain sacks had been gathering dust for more than a month while the WFP battled a debilitating bureaucracy, waiting for permission to transport them to those desperately in need.
As rival warlords burn the country to the ground, everything has been weaponized, from sexual violence, to food. Both sides in the conflict have frequently prevented food aid from reaching millions of starving Sudanese.
As if it wasn’t already hard enough, WFP head of communications Leni Kenzli told CBS News that President Trump’s 90-day foreign aid suspension could prove catastrophic for Sudan.
“The time to roll back funding is not now,” she said. “It’s the time to step up funding.”
Asked if the people of Sudan could afford to wait for 90 days, Kenzli said, “every single delay means lives are lost.”
“We are extremely worried that when we finally get into these places at the scale we need to, it’s going to be too late, and we’re going to be digging up bodies instead of feeding them,” she said.
We went back to see baby Ibrahim a day later. His condition had deteriorated, but the doctors had not given up – determined to ensure that, at least for that little boy, it will not be too late.
