(Eric) This update comes even as the brutal RSF siege of El Fasher (capital of North Darfur) and the adjacent Abu Shouk IDP camp grinds on. The Rapid Support Forces continue to target civilians, deny all humanitarian access, and are particularly targeting the heavily non-Arab Zaghawa civilian population. Those attempting to flee are murdered, raped, or taken into a horrific captivity. Those who stay face starvation. Gaffar, who speaks daily to people within El Fasher, says that estimates of mortality are shocking: 200 – 300 people starving to death daily. The higher figure would translate into a crude mortality rate (CMR) of 10.
While various factors go into a famine determination, the CMR threshold is 2.0/day/10,000 of population, according to the humanitarian gold standard. the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. The belated UN famine declaration of August 2024—which had Zamzam and El Fasher as its epicenter—was based largely on research by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). An MSF survey in January 2024 found a CMR of 2.5. What El Fasher is experiencing now is starvation at four times this rate.
[See also the July 3, 2025 report from MSF: “Besieged, attacked, starved: Mass atrocities in El Fasher and Zamzam, Sudan”: for excerpts from this extraordinary and singularly authoritative report, see here.]
And still the international community does nothing for the people of El Fasher, nothing to calln attention to the vast support provided by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the genocidal RSF. Only with this support is the heavily armed and supplied paramilitary able to maintain its death grip on El Fasher and Abu Shouk.
El Fasher lies about 15 kilometers to the northeast of what remains of Zamzam camp, where for nearly five years we were able to work to provide humanitarian assistance for many thousands of displaced persons, including counseling for victims of rampant sexual violence, food for children and those least able to provide for themselves, and medicine and sanitary supplies. These efforts have now moved to Tina/Tiné on the Chad/Darfur border, a town seasonally divided by a wadi that floods with the heavy rains of late July to mid-September. Team Zamzam is working on both sides of the town and will be able to join forces in a month (see the grim August 31 report from Team Zamzam’s coordinating counselor.)
The immediate goal is to begin to set up one or two camps on the Darfur side of the wadi. They have already begun to provide substantial humanitarian assistance, particularly in the form of food/“food kitchens,” the provision of tenting material for shelters, and the grimly persistent task of trying to guide girls and women from the overwhelming trauma of sexual assault, which frequently takes the form of gang-rape.
UN and international NGO efforts in the area are woefully inadequate, as both suffer from the severe budget cuts imposed by the Trump administration and the insecurity that does not permit safe passage of aid workers and supply convoys. There is a good deal of humanitarian capacity in Ádre to the south but little reaches the growing number of people gathering in Tiné/Tina, many having been among the vast population of Zamzam (over 600,000 people).
Team Zamzam fled to this area after the brutal assault on Zamzam by the Rapid Support Forces (mid-April): there was simply no alternative (The Guardian [August 7, 2025] offered a horrific and detailed account of the RSF assault on Zamzam, which resulted in many thousands of deaths in the camp and in desperate flight from it; we will likely never know the true death toll).
El Fasher lies about 15 kilometers to the northeast of what remains of Zamzam camp, where for nearly five years we were able to work to provide humanitarian assistance for many thousands of displaced persons, including counseling for victims of rampant sexual violence, food for children and those least able to provide for themselves, and medicine and sanitary supplies. These efforts have now moved to Tina/Tiné on the Chad/Darfur border, a town seasonally divided by a wadi that floods with the heavy rains of late July to mid-September. Team Zamzam is working on both sides of the town and will be able to join forces in a month (see the grim August 31 report from Team Zamzam’s coordinating counselor.)
The immediate goal is to begin to set up one or two camps on the Darfur side of the wadi. They have already begun to provide substantial humanitarian assistance, particularly in the form of food/“food kitchens,” the provision of tenting material for shelters, and the grimly persistent task of trying to guide girls and women from the overwhelming trauma of sexual assault, which frequently takes the form of gang-rape.
UN and international NGO efforts in the area are woefully inadequate, as both suffer from the severe budget cuts imposed by the Trump administration and the insecurity that does not permit safe passage of aid workers and supply convoys. There is a good deal of humanitarian capacity in Ádre to the south but little reaches the growing number of people gathering in Tiné/Tina, many having been among the vast population of Zamzam (over 600,000 people).
Team Zamzam fled to this area after the brutal assault on Zamzam by the Rapid Support Forces (mid-April): there was simply no alternative (The Guardian [August 7, 2025] offered a horrific and detailed account of the RSF assault on Zamzam, which resulted in many thousands of deaths in the camp and in desperate flight from it; we will likely never know the true death toll).
Work by Team Zamzam began, remarkably, in Tiné Chad in June, and the most recent updates on the Team’s are posted on July 20 and August 7, 2025. Because it seemed artificial to allow a finally arbitrary border to divide the larger humanitarian response, Team Zamzam—as a member of the consortium of Darfuri humanitarian actors in the area—voted, with all other members, to work in both Tiné (Chad) and Tiné (Tina) in Darfur:
As many as 250,000 people who fled the RSF assault on Zamzam have reached the area and will find this a much more secure and responsive setting to attempt to regain their lives.
Highlights of the work by the Team over the past month may be found in the latest report from the coordinating counselor. A few of the first photographs of Team Zamzam at work in Tina-Darfur appear below; many more will accompany future updates.
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It has been a truly remarkable five years for the Zamzam Project, so much of it made possible by the generosity of donors like you. We face tremendous challenges ahead in confronting the terrible suffering and deprivation that continues along with war in Sudan. But Team Zamzam has never been in a better position to utilize all the support we can give them.
Please make a tax-deductible contribution to our project, using a portal on the website of a 501/c/3 organization operating in Sudan. Operation Broken Silence, working primarily on health and education issues in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, has created a special site for tax-deductible contributions to our project, and we hope this makes contributing to the health and well-being of for the desperate refugees and displaced persons from Zamzam and other locations in North Darfur.
The members of Team Zamzam remain understandably proud to have been recognized by the Humanitarian Affairs Commission of North Darfur as a “non-governmental organization:
But there remain far too many starving children and adults for whom we have no adequate resources
