PORT SUDAN: Nearly 400,000 Sudanese have returned to their homes over the past two and a half months after being displaced by the ongoing conflict, the United Nations migration agency said on Monday.
Between December and March, “approximately 396,738 individuals” returned to areas retaken from paramilitary forces by the army, which has advanced through central Sudan in recent months, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been locked in a brutal conflict between army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Nearly all the returnees moved back to their homes in the central Sudanese states of Sennar, which the army largely recaptured in December, and Al-Jazira after it was retaken the following month.
Thousands more have returned to the capital Khartoum, where the army regained large areas last month and appeared on the verge of expelling the RSF.
Displaced families have headed back in droves, even to looted and burned homes, after more than a year of displacement.
Across the country, 11.5 million people are internally displaced, many of them facing mass starvation in what the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
A further 3.5 million people have fled across borders since the war broke out.
Parts of the country have already descended into famine, with another 8 million people on the brink of mass starvation.
On Monday, the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said only 6.3 percent of the funding necessary to provide lifesaving aid had been received.
Nationwide, nearly 25 million people are suffering dire food insecurity.
The conflict divided the country into two parts, with the army controlling the country’s north and east while the RSF holds nearly all Darfur and parts of the south.
A medical source said RSF shelling on Sunday on a strategic city in Sudan’s south killed nine civilians and injured 21 others.
El-Obeid, the state capital of North Kordofan, came under attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, said the source at the city’s main hospital and several witnesses.
