Marked, and still struck: WFP driver killed in attack on UN aid trucks in Sudan

The trucks were marked. The route was known. The cargo was food. None of it mattered. A strike on two United Nations food aid trucks in Sudan's South Kordofan state killed one of their drivers, the World Food Programme said on Sunday, without specifying who was behind the attack. The trucks were travelling between the two army-controlled cities of Dilling and Kadugli on Saturday when they came under attack, despite being "clearly marked as humanitarian vehicles", the agency said. The WFP called for a prompt investigation into the incident. It was the second attack on the agency's operations in two days. Just the day before, a WFP truck struck an explosive device in Dilling after delivering lifesaving food assistance. The attack comes as fighting intensifies in Kordofan, a strategically important region where Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are battling for territory more than three years into a war that has devastated much of the country. Both the army and the RSF have increasingly deployed drones in recent months; the high-tech weapons killed more than 1,100 people in the first half of this year alone, according to United Nations figures. The numbers of this war defy comprehension. Aid workers estimate more than 200,000 people have been killed. More than 11 million have been displaced. Sudan is the site of the world's largest hunger and displacement crises. Famine was confirmed last year in South Kordofan's Kadugli, and in El-Fasher in the western Darfur region, as fighting and access restrictions continue to hamper aid deliveries. And the convoys themselves have become targets. Days earlier, a 15-truck UN convoy bound for famine-stricken El Fasher was struck in the Al-Koma area of North Darfur; five humanitarian workers were killed and several injured, the WFP and UNICEF said. Sudan's warring sides traded blame for that attack, each accusing the other. Under international humanitarian law, the deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers is a war crime. Whether these strikes are deliberate targeting, reckless indifference, or the chaos of drone warfare, the effect is identical: food does not reach the hungry, and the people who risk their lives to deliver it are killed. The driver who died between Dilling and Kadugli had a name, a family, and a job that consisted of driving food through a war zone. The WFP has not released his identity. He joins a lengthening list of the war's invisible dead: the local staff, the drivers, the loaders, the people without whom no aid operation functions and whose deaths rarely make headlines. The world has largely looked away from Sudan. The war grinds into its fourth year with no serious international pressure for a ceasefire, no accountability for the siege of cities, and now the systematic endangerment of the aid lifeline itself. A strike on a marked food truck is not just an attack on the driver. It is an attack on the last thread connecting a starving population to the outside world.