“The government is trapping the people within the city. They’re not allowing the civilians to move out. The reports we’re hearing is they’re using the civilians as human shields,” said Caleb Maisonville of the Free Burma Rangers, a faith-based, frontline aid organization, speaking from the ground in South Kordofan, Sudan.
Now in its third year, Sudan’s civil war has produced what the World Food Programme calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Nearly 34 million people, 65 percent of the population, need urgent humanitarian assistance. Nearly 29 million are acutely food-insecure, representing 61.7 percent of the population, with almost 10.2 million falling into the severe and extreme categories associated with malnutrition and death.
Nearly 14 million people have been displaced, and some estimates put the death toll above 400,000.
The crisis is worst in the regions furthest from international attention, among them the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, where the fighting has converged with a pre-existing blockade to produce famine. The mountains are the historic heartland of Christianity in Sudan, with roughly 45 percent of the Nuba people Christian, the largest such community in the country. It is this population, black, Christian, and historically marginalized by the Arab-Islamic government in Khartoum, that is now caught between famine, armed attacks, and near-total abandonment by the international aid system.