Sudan civil war: Nowhere else on Earth are so many children on the run

Mahmoud is a cheeky teenager who beams the biggest of smiles even though he lost his front teeth in the rough and tumble of kids’ play.

He is a Sudanese orphan abandoned twice, and displaced twice in his country’s grievous war – one of nearly five million Sudanese children who have lost almost everything as they are pushed from one place to the next in what is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Nowhere else on Earth are so many children on the run, so many people living with such acute hunger.

Famine has already been declared in one area – many others subsist on the brink of starvation not knowing where their next meal will come from.

“It’s an invisible crisis,” emphasises the UN’s new humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher.

“Twenty-five million Sudanese, more than half the country, need help now,” he adds.

In a time of all too many unprecedented crises, where devastating wars in places like Gaza and Ukraine dominate the world’s aid and attention, Mr Fletcher chose Sudan for his first field mission to highlight its plight.

“This crisis is not invisible to the UN, to our humanitarians on the front line risking and losing their lives to help the Sudanese people,” he told the BBC, as we travelled with him on his week-long trip.

Most of the people on his team working on the ground are also Sudanese who have lost their homes, their old lives, in this brutal struggle for power between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Mr Fletcher’s first field visit took him to Mahmoud’s Maygoma orphanage in Kassala in eastern Sudan, now home to nearly 100 children in a crumbling three-storey school-turned-shelter.