PORT SUDAN, Sudan (AP) — Famine. Massacres. And now badly needed food and other supplies are under strain. Sudan on Wednesday entered a fourth year of war that’s being called an “abandoned crisis,” as a new conflict in the Middle East throws into shadow the fighting that has forced 13 million people to flee their homes.

The North African country has been described as the world’s largest humanitarian challenge, notably in terms of displacement and hunger.

There is no end in sight to the fighting between the military and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, which witnesses and aid groups say has laid waste to parts of the vast Darfur region.

Growing evidence shows regional powers like the United Arab Emirates backing combatants behind the scenes.

Attempts by the United States and regional powers, now distracted by the Iran war, have failed to establish a ceasefire.

“This grim and chastening anniversary marks another year when the world has failed to meet the test of Sudan,” UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said.

Numbers tell the tale

At least 59,000 people have been killed. At least 6,000 died over three days as the RSF rampaged through the Darfur outpost of el-Fasher last October, according to the United Nations, with UN-backed experts concluding that the offensive bore “the defining characteristics of genocide.”

More than 11,000 people were missing over the course of the war, the Red Cross says.

The war has pushed parts of Sudan into famine. The number of people with severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous and deadly kind, is expected to increase to 800,000, the world’s foremost experts on food security, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said in February.

About 34 million people, or almost two out of three Sudanese, need assistance, the UN says. Only 63 percent of health facilities remain fully or partially functional amid disease outbreaks, including cholera, according to the World Health Organization.

At a center for malnourished children in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, health staff........

© The Times of Israel