Omdurman, Sudan — Hunger is everywhere in war-torn Sudan. While the poorest of the poor, including hundreds of thousands of people trapped in war zones, are facing famine, soup kitchens have even sprung up on street corners in the center of cities like Omdurman, which is home to two million people.
Well-heeled professionals have been lining up for food handouts. There has been a complete erosion of the middle class.
CBS News met Mohammed Hamad in one of the lines. He’s an electrical engineer and once had a lucrative business. But like so many others in Sudan, he’s found that the raging civil war has meant there’s no work, and no income.
The country’s economy has collapsed, and Hamad said he cannot provide for his family.
“We rely on God and aid,” he told us.
Right now, it’s being left largely up to God.
The soup kitchen provides one small meal per day for Hamad and his wife and four children. His reliance on charity is a source of deep pain for him.
“It breaks my heart. I can’t provide food or even medicine if they are sick. Sometimes we make our own medicine from ingredients we have at home,” he said.
Hamad’s wife had a lung infection when we met, and he said he couldn’t even afford transportation to get her to a hospital.
Many of the soup kitchens dotted across Sudan’s urban areas have been funded by the U.S. Nearly 80% of them shut down quickly following President Trump’s suspension of U.S. foreign aid.
The soup kitchens also served the few hospitals still standing in Omdurman, including Al Noa, which is the largest hospital in Omdurman that has continued functioning during the war. It’s about 12 miles from the front lines in the capital Khartoum.
The facility has no funds to provide meals itself. When we visited the hospital, a soup kitchen run by the Emergency Response Room charity was busy serving patients some rice and lentils. It was the only food they would eat that day.
The hospital is overwhelmed and under-resourced. It’s been hit by rockets several times during the nearly two-year war. Makeshift tents have been set up outside to cope with the overflow. CBS News saw patients being treated on the floor because of a lack of beds.
In the midst of it all, medical staff under the leadership of Dr. Jamal Mohammad have been struggling to save the lives of those left wounded and starving by the war.
Despite the financial support from the U.S. and other donors, they were already running out of everything from painkillers and bandages to life-saving equipment before Mr. Trump put the brakes on all U.S. foreign aid.
“I don’t know what’s behind that decision of President Trump, but I think it’s going to increase and deepen the suffering of our people,” he told us. “We are the forgotten war.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to the African Union Jesseye Lapenn told CBS News that, in many ways, U.S. support in countries like Sudan, which has long come primarily through USAID, has been “the face of American values. It is the ground game of our foreign policy.”
She said she worried that the drastic and sudden aid withdrawal, even if it does prove to be temporary, will have dire consequences.
“What we’re seeing now is, I fear, going to mean a lack of respect for the United States, an undermining of U.S. interests, and certainly real negative impacts on the ground for African partners,” she said.
Lapenn argued that there had been a misrepresentation of USAID’s work by officials in Washington.
“I think the debate now sort of frames USAID as if it was charity, and as if it was charity that we can’t afford. And I don’t think that’s true on either point,” she said. “We know it’s maybe 1% of the federal budget, so we can afford it. But at the same time, it wasn’t charity. It was much more a strategic investment in U.S. relationships globally.”
Without partnerships with the U.S. some countries may have little choice but to turn elsewhere to try to fill the financial void. Some may have to resort to trading or selling off their natural resources to meet those needs.
The United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia are all backing either side in the Sudan conflict, with their eyes on mineral wealth, or, in the case of Russia, a base on Sudan’s coast in Port Sudan.
The United Nations issued a fresh appeal for emergency funding last week, seeking $6 billion to ease hunger in Sudan — 40% more than the global body said was needed last year — and calling it the worst hunger catastrophe it has ever attempted to address.
Cindy McCain, who heads the U.N.’s World Food Program, said over the weekend that the agency was working to provide support to some 25 million people facing hunger in Sudan, but warning that “humanitarian services are at the brink.”
“The global community must act now — lives depend on it,” she said in a social media post, days after saying Sudan was “now the epicenter of the world’s largest and most severe hunger crisis ever.”
It’s unclear who or what might help fill the gap left by the suspension of USAID’s work, but certainly at the hospital CBS News visited, the Sudanese staff were determined to carry on as best they can.
As we followed Mohammad, the head doctor at the Al Noa hospital, he stopped in one of the overcrowded wards to console 10-year-old Akram Atlan, whose leg had been shattered by shrapnel. He was playing with friends by a river when it happened. The little boy was tearful, terrified he would lose his leg and, with it, his dream of being a soccer player.
But he was in good hands. Mohammad was a leading orthopedic surgeon before the war started. He lost everything when the conflict began – his home, his lucrative private practice in Khartoum, his car and his life savings. His family fled to safety in Egypt, but he stayed behind and, for nearly two years, has been running the hospital without any pay. He performs three to four operations on most days.
As young Akram was prepped for surgery later in the day, Mohammad told us he never imagined he would be operating on the war wounded. His previous job was focused on healing broken bones and changing people’s lives for the better, not grappling to keep them alive.
But despite the limited resources, he still brings hope. He operated for over four hours on the little boy, repairing the broken bones and removing a large piece of shrapnel from his leg. The operation was a success, and Akram will once again be able to play soccer.
“It’s my oath,” said Mohammad when asked why he’d decided to stay behind in his war-torn nation, without his family, to keep the beleaguered hospital running. “That’s it. To save lives.”
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