As the Sudanese civil war rages unabated, man-made devastation and the changing climate are exacerbating a dangerous water crisis.

War, climate change and man-made shortages have brought Sudan to the shores of a water crisis.

In the blistering sun, as temperatures climb past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Issa’s family — along with 65,000 other residents of the Sortoni displacement camp — suffer the weight of the war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

When the first shots rang out more than a year ago, most foreign aid groups could no longer operate. Residents were left to fend for themselves.

The country at large, despite its many water sources including the mighty Nile River, is no stranger to water scarcity.

Even before the war, a quarter of the population had to walk more than 50 minutes to fetch water.

Now, from the deserts of Darfur, through the fertile Nile Valley and all the way to the Red Sea coast, a water crisis has hit 48 million war-weary Sudanese who, according to the US ambassador to the UN, are already facing “the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet.”

No fuel, no water

Around 110 kilometres east of Sortoni, deadly clashes in North Darfur’s capital of El-Fasher, besieged by RSF, threaten water access for more than 800,000 civilians.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Friday said fighting in El-Fasher had killed at least 226.

The UN Security Council on Thursday demanded that the siege of El-Fasher end.

If it goes on, hundreds of thousands more people who rely on the area’s groundwater will go without.

Dirty water

Sudan is hard-hit by climate change, and “you see it most clearly in the increase in temperature and rainfall intensity,” the diplomat said.

The capital Khartoum sits at the legendary meeting point of the Blue Nile and White Nile rivers — yet its people are parched.

The Soba water station, which supplies water to much of the capital, “has been out of service since the war began,” said a volunteer from the local resistance committee.

People have since been buying untreated “water off of animal-drawn carts, which they can hardly afford and exposes them to diseases,” he told AFP, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Entire neighbourhoods of Khartoum North “have gone without drinking water for a year,” another local volunteer told AFP, requesting to be identified only by his first name, Salah.

Parched and displaced

Hundreds of thousands have fled the fighting eastward, many to the de facto capital of Port Sudan on the Red Sea — itself facing a “huge water issue” that will only get “worse in the summer months,” resident al-Sadek Hussein worries.

The city depends on only one inadequate reservoir for its water supply.

Between April 2023 and March 2024, the health ministry recorded nearly 11,000 cases of cholera — a disease endemic to Sudan, “but not like this” when it has become “year-round,” the European diplomat said.

The outbreak comes with the majority of Sudan’s hospitals shut down and the United States warning on Friday that a famine of historic global proportions could unfold without urgent action.

With AFP