Two Generals' War Left Kulbus Families Without Food, Water or Toilets

Nearly two out of every three families in Kulbus, West Darfur, are going hungry and thirsty at the same time. Read that again. Not one problem but two, landing on the same kitchen table, the same children, the same mothers who wake before dawn to find water they cannot trust. This is what war looks like after the cameras leave.

We have grown used to numbers like these coming out of Sudan. We should not grow used to them. Behind every percentage is a household that has run out of options.

The Inter-Agency Rapid Needs Assessment for Kulbus, finalised on 28 September 2026, surveyed 300 households across six locations. Of those, 198 (66.0%) reported both severe food gaps and insufficient water. In 139 households, 46.3% of the sample, people said they had only partial access to health care or none at all. Think about what that means. A child with diarrhoea and an empty stomach has no hospital to go to, because the facility meant to serve them is not functioning the way it should. Kulbus Rural Hospital needs to be stabilised now, and the outreach clinics that depend on it need to be linked back to it.

Hunger here is not only a refugee problem. It is a community problem. Severe food gaps affect 65.4% of permanent-resident households and 85.7% of displaced households. Some families have lived in Kulbus for generations. Others fled fighting and arrived with nothing but what they could carry. Both groups are hungry. When a government or an armed force decides who deserves protection based on which side of the displacement line a family stands, it has already chosen cruelty.

The sanitation figures should shock anyone with a conscience. In the five locations outside Kulbus town, 101 of 142 households (71.1%) report open defecation. In town, the figure is 14 of 158 (8.9%). The overall average of 38.3% hides a catastrophe. In Wadi Bardi, every household assessed was affected. Field observers describe latrines that simply do not exist near the wadis, and waste left where children play and women fetch water. Cholera does not need an invitation. It only needs dirty water and people with no alternative. Open defecation near water sources is how a manageable health problem becomes a funeral procession.

And the water itself is at risk. The programme serving Kulbus depends on two rainfall-fed sources. Field reports warn that poor rainfall in the coming weeks could cut the supply. Let that sink in. A community already short of food and water is being told that its main lifeline may thin out just as the dry season bites. Who planned for this? Who is accountable when a dry well becomes a death sentence?

Let us be precise about who is responsible for the conditions that make this possible. The war in Sudan has raged since April 2023, pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces against the Rapid Support Forces. Both sides have made choices that turned farms into battlegrounds, markets into ruins and clinics into targets. Both have blocked, taxed or looted aid. Civilians in Darfur have lived through this before. The Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the International Criminal Court in 2005, and the court has been investigating crimes there for two decades. Twenty years later, the same region is still counting its dead and still waiting for justice.

The regional and international powers pretending to be neutral deserve scrutiny too. Gold, land and arms have flowed through a war economy in which ordinary Sudanese pay the price. Foreign backers who cloak their interests in the language of stability should answer a simple question: how is it stable when two-thirds of the families you claim to care about cannot eat or drink safely? Sovereignty is not a shield for generals who bomb their own people. It is a responsibility.

Kulbus also shows how aid itself has been failing. The assessment found that 172 households (57.3%) received no assistance at all. Of the 128 households that did receive something, only five described it as adequate. Think about the arithmetic of that failure. Roughly 97% of households that received help said it was not enough. Aid that arrives in the wrong quantity, to the wrong place, at the wrong time is not charity. It is a box ticked on a donor report while children go to bed hungry.

There is a better path, and Africa has already shown it. Botswana built one of the continent's most resilient economies by insisting on transparent institutions, disciplined public finance and an independent judiciary. Mauritius turned a sugar-dependent island into a services hub by protecting property rights and governing through rules rather than whims. Senegal, after years of tension, proved that peaceful transfers of power and civic pressure can hold a state accountable. Those are not foreign blueprints. They are African victories, and they are the building blocks Sudan's people deserve: rule of law, accountable administration and markets that allow families to earn and trade again.

So what must happen in Kulbus? The answer is not complicated, only urgent. The belligerents must allow unrestricted humanitarian access to Kulbus, Wadi Bardi, Raham Drama and every outlying location, with aid convoys protected rather than taxed or blocked. Water sources must be tested, backed up with contingency supply and protected from contamination before the rains fail. Latrines must be built near the wadis before the next outbreak, not after the first funeral. Kulbus Rural Hospital needs immediate funding for staff, medicines and equipment, and its outreach points must be restored. The UN and the African Union should publish monthly, independently verified data on aid delivered per household, so that the 97% failure rate becomes a public scandal that forces change.

The African Union has a tool it has rarely used for Sudan. Article 4(h) of its Constitutive Act gives the Union the right to intervene in grave circumstances, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Use it, or explain publicly why Darfur does not qualify. The Peace and Security Council should convene on Kulbus specifically, not in general terms about "the Sudan crisis." The Security Council should demand humanitarian corridors with teeth and sanctions on any commander found obstructing aid. Donors should stop funding projects that cannot show where the water goes and who drinks it.

And we, the people of this continent, have a role too. Demand that your government name the crimes and stop treating Sudan's generals as partners in stability. Push your media to report on Kulbus with the same urgency it gives to the stock market. Support African organisations and local Sudanese civil society groups that are documenting abuses and delivering help when nobody else will. Refuse the lie that these deaths are inevitable.

Kulbus does not need another report that is read once and forgotten. It needs a continent that refuses to accept hunger as normal, thirst as weather and open defecation as a way of life. Two generals fought this war. Two-thirds of Kulbus's families are paying for it. How long will the rest of us keep calling that a tragedy instead of a choice?

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB