Displaced Sudanese women caught up in war suffer wretched Ramadan

In Al-Sarraf camp, families who fled el-Fasher lack food, medicine and even cooking utensils, during the holy month.Published On 25 Feb 2026After fleeing the inferno of war in el-Fasher in North Darfur State and travelling more than 1,600km (9,995 miles) to safety, Sanaa Ahmed thought the worst was behind her. But in the Al-Sarraf camp in eastern Sudan, she has faced suffering of a different kind.“We fled here with nothing,” Sanaa told Al Jazeera Mubasher. “Now Ramadan has come, and we don’t even have a pot to cook in or a cup to drink from. If you have a bucket or a jug, that’s it.”Sanaa is one of thousands of displaced people who have sought refuge in Al-Gedaref state, far from the front lines of the war in the west. But safety has come at a steep price. The camp, intended as a sanctuary, has become a site of deprivation.“The water is available, but there is no food,” she said. “They give us a meal, but it’s not a real meal, and it’s not enough.”A Ramadan of hungerFor Muslims, Ramadan is traditionally a month of community, prayer and shared meals. For the displaced women of Al-Sarraf, it has become a daily struggle to find enough scraps to feed their children at sunset.Majd Abdullah, another survivor from el-Fasher, described the stark contrast between her past life and her current reality.“Back home, Ramadan was perfect. You would prepare everything a month or two in advance,” she recalled. “But here, we fasted the first day, not knowing what we would break our fast with. We ended up eating with neighbours because we had nothing.”A recent United Nations report said the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) atrocities in el-Fasher bore all the hallmarks of genocide.