The children living between starvation and death
The woman with sad eyes and a quiet voice is just one of the millions of people living in camps for those forced to flee their homes in Sudan, where a civil war broke out a year ago between the army and an armed paramilitary group. The country now faces what the UN says is the “world worst hunger crisis”.
Qisma Abdirahman Ali Abubaker goes through the motions of waiting in line to pick up her food ration, but her heart is not in it.
The small bag does not have to stretch as far as it used to for her family.
Three of her children have died of disease and malnutrition in the past four months, she says. The oldest was three, another was two years old, the last was a six-month-old baby.
Ms Abubaker has taken refuge at Zamzam Camp for displaced people in Northern Darfur, part of a region in the west of the country, amid warnings of a catastrophic nutrition crisis there.
It is the oldest and largest such camp in the country, but there is fresh desperation and grief as Sudan’s war grinds into its second year.
The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it found in January that at least one child in the camp dies every two hours. With little food, clean water or healthcare, illnesses that could once be treated now kill.
MSF is one of the last international humanitarian agencies still on the ground in Darfur.