Trump’s aid cuts hit the hungry in a city of shellfire and starvation | The stark consequences of the rollback are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has combined with a staggering humanitarian catastrophe

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>The children died one after the other. Twelve acutely malnourished infants living in one corner of Sudan’s war-ravaged capital, Khartoum.

>Abdo, an 18-month-old boy, had been rushed to a clinic by his mother as he was dying. His ribs protruded from his withered body. The next day, a doctor laid him out on a blanket with a teddy bear motif, his eyes closed.

>Like the other 11 children, Abdo starved to death in the weeks after President Trump froze all U.S. foreign assistance, said local aid workers and a doctor. American-funded soup kitchens in Sudan, including the one near Abdo’s house, had been the only lifelines for tens of thousands of people besieged by fighting.

>Bombs were falling. Gunfire was everywhere. Then, as the American money dried up, hundreds of soup kitchens closed in a matter of days.

>“It was catastrophic,” said Duaa Tariq, an aid worker.

>The stark consequences of Mr. Trump’s slashing of U.S. aid are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has set off a staggering humanitarian catastrophe and left 25 million people — more than half of the country’s population — acutely hungry.

>Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades, aid groups say. Famine is spreading rapidly, with some resorting to eating leaves and grass. About 400,000 people were scattered and hundreds killed in Darfur in the past week alone, as paramilitary fighters overran the country’s largest camp for displaced people, the United Nations said.

>Last year, the United States gave $830 million in emergency aid, helping 4.4 million Sudanese, the United Nations estimates. That was far more aid than any other country provided. But after Mr. Trump halted that lifeline in January by dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, the effect in Khartoum was devastating.

>Within days, over 300 soup kitchens run by Emergency Response Rooms, a network of democracy activists turned volunteer aid workers, were forced to close. In Jereif West, the neighborhood where Ms. Tariq works, hungry residents roved the streets in search of food amid shelling and drone strikes.

>“People shared what they could,” she said. “But many went home empty-handed.”

>Any cut in aid can be deadly: More than 600,000 Sudanese people are already living in famine, and another eight million are “on the cliff edge,” according to a consortium of major aid groups.

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