Sudan's war puts charity kitchen workers feeding displaced families at risk

Charity kitchens are a lifeline in Sudan after nearly three years of war but the community-led public kitchens have been targeted and some of their workers abducted, robbed, beaten or killed

CAIRO -- Enas Arbab fled Sudan's western region of Darfur after her hometown fell to Sudanese paramilitary forces, taking only her year-old son with her and the memory of her father, who was killed, she said, simply for working at a charity kitchen serving people displaced by the fighting.

The Rapid Support Forces — or RSF, a paramilitary group that has been at war with the Sudanese army since April 2023 — had laid siege on el-Fasher in the western Darfur region, starving people out before it overran the city.

U.N. officials say several thousand civilians were killed in the RSF takeover of el-Fasher last October. Only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee the onslaught, thousands of whom were wounded, the officials said. The fate of the rest remains unknown.

During the fighting, Arbab says RSF fighters took her father, Mohamed ِArbab, from their home after beating him in front of the family, and demanded a ransom. When the family couldn't pay, they told them they had killed him, she says. To this day, the family doesn't know where his body is.

When her husband disappeared a month later, Enas Arbab decided to flee north, to Egypt. “We couldn’t stay in el-Fasher," she said. "It was no longer safe and there was no food or water.”