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Darfur: 10 years of conflict

Escalating violence in Darfur forced this woman and her child to find shelter at a camp near El Fasher in North Darfur. Some 2.7 million people have been displaced during ten years of conclict.

Photo: Peter Biro/IRC

NEW YORK - 28 Feb 2013 -  

Darfur: A Humanitarian Disaster

  • A soldier walks past a wrecked armored vehicle on the Sudan side of the border w
  • A mother and child, Darfur refugees, outside their shelter made of blankets
  • An elderly refugee sits in her makeshift home.
  • A burning pile of dead animals
  • A woman cooks mukhet, a seed used as cattle feed.
  • Hadiya Beshir Issa holds her severely malnourished 15-month old daughter Munira
  • A Darfuri refugee holds her malnourished son outside a health facility
  • Sahara, an IRC-trained midwife (left), helped deliver Ali, seen here with his mo
Launch Slideshow

In 2004, the IRC’s Peter Biro traveled to the isolated border town of Bahai – the IRC’s relief hub in Chad – and found a growing humanitarian crisis as refugees streamed across the border from Darfur. These photos chronicle that visit.

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During ten years of conflict in Darfur, Sudan, it is estimated that 300,000 people have died and some 2.7 million have been displaced. Although the worst violence has declined since the conflict’s peak years of 2003 to 2005, fighting still flares up and several rounds of peace talks between rebels and the Sudanese government have failed. Even as some displaced people have returned to their villages, militia raids, aerial bombardment and tribal fighting have driven an estimated 100,000 more people from their homes in the last year, according to the United Nations. Over 1.4 million people still live in camps in and outside Darfur. Some 300,000 Darfuri refugees are in Chad.

In 2009, Sudan expelled the International Rescue Committee and 12 other aid groups from Darfur. The IRC still aids hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees in Chad and South Sudan. That same year the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague indicted Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes committed since 2003 in Darfur. Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state ever indicted by the ICC. 
 

Darfur: An Ongoing Crisis

A decade after the start of the Darfur conflict in Sudan, some 300,000 refugees remain in camps across the border in eastern Chad. Learn how the IRC helps Darfuri refugees.