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

Cairo — Enas Arbab fled Sudan’s western region of Darfur after her hometown was captured by Sudanese paramilitary forces, taking only her one-year-old son with her and the memory of her father, who was killed, she said, just for working in a charity kitchen serving people displaced by the fighting.

The Rapid Support Forces – or RSF, a paramilitary group at war with the Sudanese army since April 2023 – had besieged El-Fashar in the West Darfur region, starving people before it could invade the city.

UN officials say several thousand civilians were killed when the RSF took over El-Fashar last October. Officials said only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee the attack, thousands of whom were injured. The fate of the rest is still unknown.

Arbab says that during the fighting, RSF soldiers took away his father Mohammad Arbab from his home after beating him in front of the family and demanding his release. When the family couldn’t pay, they told him they killed him, he says. Even today, the family members do not know where his dead body is.

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

Her father was one of more than 100 charity kitchen workers killed since the war began, according to workers who spoke to The Associated Press and the Aid Workers’ Security Database, which tracks major incidents around the world affecting aid workers.

In areas of intense fighting – particularly in Darfur – famine is spreading and food and basic supplies are scarce. Community-led public kitchens have become a lifeline but many who work there have been kidnapped, robbed, arrested, beaten or killed.

Salah Semsaya, a volunteer with the Emergency Response Rooms – a group that emerged as a local initiative and now operates with 26,000 volunteers in 13 provinces across Sudan – acknowledges the dangers faced by workers in charity kitchens.

He says the actual number of workers killed is estimated to be higher than 100, but the war has prevented reliable data collection and record-keeping.

Semsaya shared documents showing that 57% of recorded killings of charity kitchen workers took place when the Sudanese capital was under RSF control, mainly in Khartoum, before the army retook it last March. At least 21% of the killings took place in Darfur.

Semsaya said more than 50 of those killed in Khartoum worked with his group.

Sudan’s war erupted after tensions between the army and the RSF began in Khartoum and spread nationwide, killing thousands and triggering mass displacement, disease outbreaks and severe food insecurity. Aid workers were often targeted.

Dan Tengo, head of communications at the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, says it is unclear whether the charity kitchen workers were targeted because of their work or because of their ties to one side of the war or the other.

Activists say kitchen workers are important in their communities because the work they do makes them obvious targets. Ransom demands typically range from $2,000 to $5,000, often increasing after families make initial payments.

“The apparent deterioration in the security situation … has significantly affected local communities, including the volunteers who support community kitchens,” Tengo said.

Farooq Abkar, 60, of El-Fasher, spent a year handing out bags of grain at a charity kitchen in Zamzam camp, just 15 kilometers (9 miles) south of the city. He survived the drone strike and remembers the day RSF soldiers raided his kitchen. One of them hit him in the face, knocking out some of his teeth.

Abkar fled El-Fasher by night with his daughter, walking for 10 days. Along the way, some RSF soldiers fired birdshot, which hit him in the head and caused a chronic headache.

Now in Egypt, he shares an apartment with at least 10 other Sudanese refugees and cannot afford medical care. The horrific images of his hometown still haunt him.

“Many things happened in El-Fasher,” he said. “There was death, there was hunger.”

Mustafa Khater, a 28-year-old charity kitchen worker, fled to Egypt with his pregnant wife days before El-Fasher fell to the RSF.

Khater said that during the 18-month siege, some el-Fashar residents cooperated with the RSF, telling the paramilitary fighters who the kitchen workers were. Many disappeared.

“They take you to a dry river bed and kill you there,” Khater said.

A volunteer working with Semsaya’s aid group in Darfur said some of his colleagues were beaten, arrested and interrogated, accusing their attackers of receiving “illegal funds” for the kitchen. The volunteers spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Despite the challenges, many charity kitchens remain the only reliable source of food in conflict-ridden areas, and people can come and offer mutual support, Semsaya said.

The town of Khazan Jedid in East Darfur province has three charity kitchens that feed about 5,000 people every day, said Haroon Abdelrahman, spokesman for the region’s emergency response rooms branch.

Abdelrahman was once interrogated by RSF soldiers while several of his colleagues were robbed at knifepoint. Despite fear and harassment, many kitchen workers are still working as volunteers, he said.

In Kassala, eastern Sudan, military agents questioned branch volunteers there and their colleagues in January 2024, they said, after their kitchen began serving food and people who had escaped near Wad Madani after the RSF captured that town. He spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation.

Khater, a 28-year-old who fled el-Fasher, said he had heard from friends back home that after the RSF takeover, all the charity kitchens in the city were closed and his colleagues had been “killed or run away”.

Teng’o says the closures in the fighting areas have left “vulnerable families with no viable alternatives” and forced people to shop at local “markets where food prices are unaffordable”.

Arbab, a pregnant 19-year-old who fled with her child, hoped to rebuild her life in Egypt, her friends and a humanitarian worker said on condition of anonymity to speak about the young mother.

But last month on the road to the northern city of Alexandria, she and her son were stopped by Egyptian authorities and deported to Sudan.