On the side of a dirt road in Adré, a major border crossing between Sudan and Chad, Buthaina, 38, sits on the ground, surrounded by other women. They all have their children with them. None appear to be carrying anything.
Buthaina and her six children fled el-Fasher, a besieged town in Sudan’s Darfur region, more than 300 miles away, when food and water ran out.
“We left with nothing, we ran for our lives,” Buthaina told the BBC. “We didn’t want to leave – my children were top of their class at school and we had a good life at home.”
Sudan’s civil war began in April last year, when the military (SAF) and their former paramilitary allies, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), launched a fierce battle for power, partly over proposals to transition to civilian rule.
The war, which shows no signs of ending, has claimed thousands of lives, displaced millions and plunged parts of the country into famine.
Aid agencies warn that Sudan could soon experience the world’s worst famine unless more help arrives.
The BBC saw first-hand the desperation of the Sudanese people when we visited camps in Adré, on the country’s western border, and Port Sudan, the country’s main aid centre, 1,000 miles away on the east coast.
Adré has become a powerful symbol of the political failure and humanitarian disaster that the current conflict has brought about.
Until last month, the border crossing had been closed since January, allowing only a few trucks carrying aid into the country.
The district has now reopened, but aid organizations fear that the deliveries now arriving will be too late.
Every day, dozens of Sudanese refugees cross the border into Chad, many of them women carrying their hungry and thirsty children on their backs.
As soon as they arrive, they run to a water tank set up by the World Food Programme (WFP), one of many UN agencies raising the alarm about the scale of the humanitarian impact of the conflict.
When we arrive in Adré, we go to a makeshift camp near the border. This camp was set up by refugees with pieces of wood, cloth and plastic.
It starts to rain.
As we leave, the rain is pouring and I ask if the precarious shelters will survive the downpours. “They won’t,” says our guide Ying Hu, an associate reporting officer for the UNHCR, another UN agency – for refugees.
“With rain comes all kinds of diseases,” he adds, “and the worst thing is that sometimes it can take days before we can get back here by car, because of the flooding, and that means that help can’t get here either.”
Famine has been declared in one area – in the Zamzam camp in Darfur – but that’s because it is one of the few places in war-torn Sudan about which the UN has reliable information.
According to the WFP, more than 200,000 tonnes of food were delivered between April 2023 and July 2024. That is far less than was needed. However, both sides are accused of blocking supplies to areas under rival control.
The RSF and other militias are accused of stealing and damaging supplies, while the SAF is accused of blocking supplies to areas under RSF control, including most of Darfur.
The BBC approached the RSF and SAF about the allegations but has not yet received a response. Both factions have previously denied obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid.
A single convoy of aid supplies can wait in Port Sudan for six weeks or more before the SAF gives permission to move on.
On August 15, the SAF agreed to allow aid agencies to resume deliveries via Adré, which would provide much-needed aid to the population in Darfur.
In May, Human Rights Watch said ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity had been committed against ethnic Massalit and non-Arab communities in part of Darfur by the RSF and its Arab allies. The RSF rejects this and says it is not involved in what it calls a “tribal conflict” in the region.
During our tour of Port Sudan we visit a camp for people who have been displaced within Sudan.
As we walk from tent to tent, we hear story after story of loss and horror.
In one, a group of women sit in a circle, some clutching their babies, all sharing stories of abuse, rape and torture in RSF prisons.
One of the women, who the BBC is not naming, said she was captured with her two-year-old son as she fled Omdurman, near the capital Khartoum.
“Every day they would take my son to a room down the hall, and I would hear him crying as they raped me,” she told me.
“It happened so often that I tried to concentrate on his cries while they were doing it.”
Also in the camp I meet Safaa, a mother of six children who also fled Omdurman.
When asked where her husband is, she replies that he stayed behind because the RSF targets any man who tries to escape.
“Every day my children ask me, ‘Where is Baba? When is he coming?’ But I haven’t heard from him since January when we left, and I don’t know if he’s still alive,” she says.
Asked what future she envisions for herself and her children, she says: “What future? Our future is over – there is nothing left. My children are traumatized.
“Every day my 10-year-old son cries and wants to go home. We went from a house where we went to school to a tent.”
The BBC approached RSF for comment on the rapes and other attacks but has not yet received a response. The BBC previously said reports that its fighters were responsible for widespread abuses were incorrect, but where a small number of isolated incidents had occurred, its forces had been held to account.
A worker from UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, who shows us around the camp, says that those who have arrived here are the “lucky ones”.
“They managed to escape the fighting and came here… they have shelter and help,” he says.
The BBC visited Adré and Port Sudan with UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohamed and her senior team. They met with government officials and Sudan’s de facto president, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to urge them to keep the Adré crossing open.
Her aim is to put Sudan back on the agenda of the international community, now that the world’s attention is focused on the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
“There is a sense of fatigue because there are so many different crises around the world, but that is just not good enough,” she says.
“You come here, you meet these mothers and their children and you realize that they are not just numbers.
“If the international community does not act, people will die.”
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