One of the worst famines in decades is on the verge of breaking out in Africa’s third-largest country. Sudan is in the grips of more than 15 months of ruinous civil strife that’s led to untold calamity and horror.

Though casualty figures are far from clear, the top U.S. envoy to the region recently suggested that some 150,000 people may have been killed since the conflict between two rival warlords exploded last year. Now, the United Nations claims that some 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation. Western officials liken what’s unfolding to the famine in Somalia in 2011, where a quarter of a million people died, half of whom were children.

The war’s vast effects are already measured in superlatives: Sudan is home to the world’s biggest internal displacement crisis, with some 11 million people forced by the fighting to flee their homes. Sudan is home to the world’s largest education crisis, with most schools shuttered and some 19 million children unable to attend classes. And it’s home to the world’s biggest hunger crisis: An estimated 26.6 million people — more than half the population — is “food insecure,” according to U.N. agencies, while 14 areas in the country have been declared “at risk of famine.”

The country is being torn apart by forces loyal to two former allies — Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, top commander of the Sudanese military, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally referred to as Hemedti, chief of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a faction that traces its antecedents to the genocidal campaigns of the Janjaweed militia in the western Darfur region two decades ago. Rather than burying the hatchet, both sides seem bent on further bloodying their enemies as the war sprawls across the country after flaring in the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023.

They blame each other for the suffering unleashed on the civilian population, with numerous reports of massacres, mass rapes and other atrocities. Bombardments and airstrikes indiscriminately flatten neighborhoods. There are documented cases of war crimes, particularly involving the RSF and allied militias slaughtering ethnic non-Arabs in towns and cities they’ve seized. Widespread looting and violence wrecked harvests across Sudan’s agricultural sector, and relief groups complain of severe difficulties bringing aid into the country.

A team from The Washington Post recently toured through five cities in Sudan and recounted the scale of the disaster. “In the emergency wards, the hennaed hands of mothers fanned the twig-like ribcages of babies struggling for breath, and other parents told of sleeping children killed in their beds when artillery shells crashed into their neighborhoods,” The Post reported. “Prisoners and soldiers alike spoke of young men shot far from home, their corpses decaying in the heat, before they were flung in unmarked graves.”

The warring parties have agreed to participate in fresh negotiations, facilitated by a joint U.S. and Saudi-led effort and slated to be held in Switzerland next month. “The talks in Switzerland aim to reach a nationwide cessation of violence, enabling humanitarian access to all those in need, and develop a robust monitoring and verification mechanism to ensure implementation of any agreement,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement last week.

The conflict has been punctuated by myriad false dawns, with repeated cease-fires and truces barely lasting days, even hours, after they’re clinched. Aid organizations warn that the Sudanese military — which represents the faction formally recognized as Sudan’s government by the United Nations — is impeding the flow of critical food assistance into western areas of the country controlled by the RSF. What supplies do cross the border are often subject to diversion or looting, while the RSF’s rampages across Sudan’s breadbasket regions contribute to the food shortages.

For relief groups, access to imperiled communities and the resources needed to help them are both scarce. A Paris donor conference in April pooled some $2 billion in pledges for Sudan — just half of the figure requested by the United Nations — but the promised funds have yet to fully materialize.

“In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said that one quarter of children in central Darfur state were so malnourished that they could soon die,” reported the New York Times. “Experts say that only the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian organization with a budget of $8.5 billion last year, has the resources and expertise needed to ramp up an emergency operation at scale. But without unimpeded access to the border, providing aid is proving extremely challenging.”

The war rages on, shaped by a thicket of conflicting geopolitical interests. “The [Sudanese military] is currently supported politically or materially by Egypt, Iran and Ukraine,” noted Ilhan Dahir of the United States Institute of Peace. “Meanwhile, the RSF is allegedly supported by the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit, and the UAE, which has reportedly sent arms to support Hemedti in an effort to ‘roll back Islamist influence’ in Sudan as a part of the Emirates’ larger strategy in the region. Continued external interference in Sudan is likely to prolong the war.”

A briefing by rights group Amnesty International last week charted “the constant flow of weapons” into the conflict. The group documented the presence of new arms and ammunition from countries as diverse as China, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the UAE and Yemen, imported in “large quantities into Sudan” and then proliferating across its battlefields, including in the benighted Darfur region, which is subject to a two-decade-old U.N. arms embargo.

“Our research shows that weapons entering the country have been placed into the hands of combatants who are accused of international humanitarian and human rights law violations,” said Amnesty’s Deprose Muchena in a statement. “It is clear that the existing arms embargo that currently applies only to Darfur is completely inadequate, and must be updated and extended to cover the whole of Sudan. This is a humanitarian crisis that cannot be ignored.”