US announces $424 mn in new aid for Sudanese at UN meeting

By AFP - Sep 25,2024 - Last updated at Sep 25,2024

A health worker wears a protective outfit at a hospital where Cholera patients are treated in Sudan's Red Sea State on September 25, 2024 (AFP photo)

UNITED NATIONS, United States — The United States on Wednesday announced $424 million in new aid for displaced and hungry Sudanese as it urged others to ramp up efforts on one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The assistance includes $175 million with which the United States will buy some 81,000 metric tons of surplus food from its own farmers to feed people in and around Sudan, where a UN-backed assessment has warned of wide-scale famine, US officials said.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told a UN event that the world must scale up its efforts "massively" as she regretted that many were ignoring "a catastrophe of truly unfathomable proportions."

"As we sit here today, more than 25 million Sudanese face acute hunger. Many are in famine, some reduced to eating leaves and dirt to stave off hunger pangs -- but not starvation," she said.

"This humanitarian catastrophe is a man-made one -- brought on by a senseless war that has wrought unspeakable violence and by heartless blockades of food, water and medicine for those made victims of it," she said.

"The rape and torture, ethnic cleansing, weaponization of hunger -- it is utterly unconscionable," she said.

She made a new appeal to let assistance into El-Fasher, which has been besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as the paramilitary force seeks a complete takeover of the western Darfur region.

"We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas," she said.

Sudan plunged into a devastating war last year as the army battled the RSF.

The World Health Organization said this month at least 20,000 people have been killed. But some estimates are far higher, with the US envoy on Sudan, Tom Perriello, saying that up to 150,000 people may have died -- far more than in the war in Gaza.

The United States organized talks last month in Switzerland on the Sudan crisis and President Joe Biden in a UN speech on Tuesday demanded that outside powers stop arming the two sides.

But a day earlier he welcomed the leader of the United Arab Emirates, widely accused of arming the RSF.

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