Sudan war: Fleeing victims find little aid at Chad border
Thousands of people fleeing violence in Sudan have crossed into Chad.
At a transit camp on the Chad-Sudan border, Najwa Isa Adam, 32, hands out bowls of pasta and meat to orphaned Sudanese children from Al Fasher, the site of a recent violent takeover by paramilitary forces in Sudan.
Adam herself is a refugee from the city and arrived in October.
Now, she buys and prepares food for newly arriving refugee families, using money donated by other refugees living in the border town of Tine.
“People here don’t have anything to eat,” she says. “The only support we get is from the people of Tine.”
Refugee families arriving at this border town are finding little international humanitarian aid available to them. For many, the only source of food comes from donations from other refugees, some who arrived here recently and others many years ago, during an earlier conflict in Sudan.
A handful of NGOs work in the town, including Médecins Sans Frontières, which has a mobile clinic at the border and a small out-patient department open three days a week in the camp.
About one in four children MSF has seen at the camp is malnourished, a situation that is worsening with the arrival of families fleeing Al Fasher, said Josh Sim, an MSF emergency nurse.
On Saturday, the World Food Programme restarted limited food distributions to pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and children under age 2 to prevent malnutrition. But in an effort to encourage refugees to move to safer areas, the UN food relief agency has shifted the majority of resources to other camps, farther from the border, a spokesman said.
Dwindling funding
“We haven’t got anything,” said Nawal Abubakr Abdul Wahab, 49, who used to be a teacher in Al Fasher and fled last month during the attack. “We have no shoes, nothing, no water.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has only 38% of the $246 million it estimates it needs to respond to the Sudanese refugee crisis in Chad, a UNHCR spokesperson said.
US cuts in foreign aid under the Trump administration are a major reason for the gap in funding, the spokesperson said. In 2024, US contributions of $68.4 million represented 32% of UNHCR’s total budget. This year, US contributions have dropped to $35.6 million, about 10% of the total budget, which has risen along with humanitarian needs.
The US Department of State and the US Mission to the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment.
Normally, a transit camp like the one in Tine would hold refugees only briefly, with regular relocations to safer camps further inland. But limited funding to provide sufficient water, clean sanitation and shelter at those inland camps has slowed relocation efforts, the UNHCR spokesperson said.
Relief organisations provide no durable shelter – not even tents – to new arrivals here. Instead, staff hands out plastic tarps, “just something to block the sun so they have a little protection,” said Magatte Guisse, the UNHCR representative for Chad.
Ibrahim Mohamed Ishaq, 35, arrived at the crossing on 22 November with his wife and their two daughters, ages 3 and 5. They had been living in the Abu Shouk camp on the north side of Al Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur.
‘Thank God I arrived’
Al Fasher fell to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary in late October after 18 months of violence, marking a turning point in the war between the militia and the Sudanese army which started in April 2023.
More than 100,000 people are believed to have escaped the city, according to the International Organisation for Migration. An estimated 9,500 have made it to Chad. MSF estimates that about 180 people are crossing the border into Tine each day.
Ishaq and other members of his family fled Al Fasher by donkey the day before the RSF swept in. RSF fighters chased them and others in the road, he said, and he saw more than four of his relatives shot and killed.
“Thank God I arrived here safely with my family,” Ishaq said.
After crossing the border, the family stopped at a mobile clinic where an MSF nurse administered medicine to the 3-year-old.
Then the family went to a UNHCR checkpoint where a representative from the International Committee of the Red Cross handed Ishaq and his family a sack containing an empty water jug, a plastic teapot, two bars of soap, two plastic pails, and a temporary tarp.
The family was then driven to a transit site about 6 kilometers away from the border, where they joined about 1,400 to 1,600 refugees awaiting transfer to other camps farther inland.