The desert wind carries more than sand across eastern Chad. It carries the sound of children crying for water that does not come, and the silence of those who have stopped crying altogether. In camps stretching across the Wadi Fira region, more than one million Sudanese refugees — 87 per cent of them women and children — are trapped in a humanitarian catastrophe that has deepened with every passing month since war erupted in Khartoum in April 2023. Aid agencies warn that without immediate, sustained funding, the coming rainy season will transform a crisis of thirst into an epidemic of disease.
The anatomy of survival in Goudrane
Inside a six-square-metre shelter in Goudrane camp, Maymauna cradles her two-year-old son, Mayamat. The boy’s head lolls backwards when she moves her hand from the nape of his neck. At five months old, he had learned to hold his head up, to track movement, to respond to his mother’s voice. Then the artillery began falling on El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and his body simply stopped obeying him.
“After the bombs hit our neighbourhood, his body just went limp,” Maymauna says, sweat beading on her brow. “And here, there is nobody who can help us.”
The regression is neurological, consistent with acute trauma-induced motor neuron disruption — a condition that requires specialist paediatric neurology, physiotherapy, and ongoing monitoring. In Goudrane, there is a single health post staffed by two nurses and a visiting doctor once a fortnight. Maymat has been seen once. He was given vitamin supplements.
Maymauna’s story is not exceptional. It is the baseline. Across four camps visited by this publication, every family interviewed had lost relatives. The violence they describe bears the hallmarks of targeted ethnic cleansing: public executions, the burning of civilians alive, systematic rape deployed as a weapon of war. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group battling the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of the country, stand accused by the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the United States of genocide against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities in Darfur. The RSF denies all allegations, attributing atrocities to local militias.
But the trauma does not end at the border.
When thirst becomes a death sentence
Twenty miles from Goudrane, in Touloum camp, Sheikh Abdul Aham, the camp president, speaks quietly about last month. Three mothers buried their children alive in the sand.
“For them, suffocation stops the slower, more painful death from thirst and starvation,” he says.
The camps sit in one of Chad’s poorest regions, where summer temperatures reach 45°C and groundwater is a gamble. Most days, Hawa Idriss Adan, 66, waits alone in her shelter for her daughter to return from the water point — a 30-minute walk each way that Hawa cannot make since a vehicle struck her during the family’s flight from El Fasher. She does not know where her 13-year-old grandson is. He vanished during an RSF attack two years ago. A Reuters investigation this year alleged the paramilitary group has been abducting children for forced labour in El Fasher. The RSF denies this, too.
When water trucks arrive, hundreds charge the distribution points. Fights break out. Jerry cans — mouldy, cracked, precious — are clutched like weapons.
“When people know their children might not have water, they do anything to get it,” one refugee says, standing in the burning sun beside an empty tap stand in Iridimi camp.
Racing the aquifer, losing the clock
Solidarités International, the French NGO leading water infrastructure across eastern Chad, is drilling boreholes, laying pipelines, erecting water towers and pumping stations. Last month, they drilled 128 metres into the eastern edge of Goudrane. They found nothing but dust.
“There’s a stark need for water across Wadi Fira,” says Paulin Kitungwa, the organisation’s project manager. “We need to create long-term solutions quickly because the need right now is so great in the camps.”
The clock is ticking toward the rainy season. When the downpours come, access roads will flood, cutting off water trucks. Contaminated runoff will seep into storage tanks. Termite-ridden shelters will collapse. Stagnant pools will breed mosquitoes, and with them, malaria and dengue fever — diseases that kill children with compromised immune systems first.
A war that follows refugees home
The instability is not contained. In August, an air strike hit a Chadian military convoy 62 miles inside Chadian territory. Days later, a strike on a border fuel market killed at least 12 people. Chadian officials blame the Sudanese Armed Forces; Khartoum denies responsibility. The United States has condemned the strikes. Chad’s military is on its highest alert.
Meanwhile, in New York, world leaders gathered for the UN General Assembly. Sudan, Chad, and the United Arab Emirates traded accusations. Sudan says the UAE arms the RSF. The UAE dismisses the claim. Mona Rishmawi, an expert member of a UN investigative mission, told this publication: “The moment the supply of weapons stops, the war would effectively stop, too.”
But weapons keep arriving. Drone attacks in western Sudan edge closer to the Chadian border. The ICC warns of further mass atrocities in El Obeid, a city of 500,000. And in the camps, the funding gap yawns wider.
Why it Matters
This is not a crisis of nature. It is a crisis of neglect. The mothers digging graves in the sand are not statistics — they are the living evidence of a global system that treats the survival of African children as optional. Every day the international community delays full funding for water, healthcare, and protection in eastern Chad, more children like Maymat lose the few milestones they have left. The rainy season will not wait for pledges. Disease will not pause for diplomacy. And the border will not hold back a war that has already crossed it.
