WORLD NEWS | UN hosts Middle East and European envoys to raise funds for humanitarian crisis in Sudan

CAIRO, June 19 (AP) — Envoys from the Middle East and Europe joined a United Nations-hosted meeting on Monday to raise funds to address Sudan’s deepening humanitarian crisis.

Sudan has been fighting for more than two months as the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces vie for control of the country. More than 3,000 people have been killed in clashes that have devastated the country’s fragile infrastructure and sparked ethnic violence in West Darfur, Sudan’s health ministry said on Saturday.

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Representatives from Egypt, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the African Union and the European Union met in Geneva to discuss helping Sudan. The U.N. said its emergency aid program launched after the war broke out on April 15 had received less than 16 percent of the $2.57 billion needed.

Some 24.7 million people, more than half of Sudan’s population, are in need of humanitarian aid, the United Nations said. More than 2.2 million people have fled their homes for other, safer parts of Sudan or into neighboring countries, according to the latest United Nations figures.

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On Sunday morning, the country’s warring forces began a three-day ceasefire, the ninth since the conflict began. Most ceasefire agreements have failed.

The conflict has turned the capital Khartoum and other urban areas into battlegrounds. According to residents and activists, paramilitary forces commanded by General Mohammad Hamdan Dagalo seized people’s homes and other civilian property. The army, led by General Abdul Fattah Burhan, has repeatedly launched airstrikes on densely populated civilian areas.

West Darfur has experienced some of the worst violence. Thousands of residents have fled to neighboring Chad. Rights groups say Rapid Support Forces and affiliated Arab militias have repeatedly attacked the provincial capital, Jena, targeting the non-Arab Masalit community.

The province’s former governor, Khamis Abdalla Abkar, a Masalit, was killed last week after he accused Arab militias and paramilitary forces of attacking Jinana in a television interview last week. Kidnapped and killed. The United Nations and the Sudanese military blamed the killing on the Rapid Support Forces. It denies this.

Last week, Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top humanitarian official, described the situation in West Darfur as a “humanitarian catastrophe”. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)