Talks aimed at ending Sudan's shattering 16-month-old civil war began on Wednesday in Switzerland although the absence of the military dampened hopes for imminent steps to alleviate the country's humanitarian crisis.

UN officials warned this week that Sudan is at a "catastrophic breaking point" and that there will be tens of thousands of preventable deaths from hunger, disease, floods and violence in the coming months without a larger global response.

Who's participating in the talks

The U.S. special envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, has led the push for the talks but has said direct mediation would be impossible without the Sudanese army present. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations, the African Union, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional body, and other experts would consult on road maps for a cessation of violence and carrying out humanitarian aid deliveries.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has seized broad swathes of the country, sent a delegation to Switzerland, but its enthusiasm for the talks is unclear.

The army has said its absence from the talks arises from the failure to implement previous U.S.- and Saudi-brokered commitments to pull combatants out of civilian areas and facilitate aid deliveries. Mediators say both sides disregarded that accord.

"Military operations will not stop without the withdrawal of every last militiaman from the cities and villages they have plundered and colonized," Sudanese armed forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said late Tuesday.

The current talks will also focus on developing an enforcement mechanism for any deal.

How we got here

Sudan was already struggling before the latest round of fighting erupted, dragged down by sanctions and isolation under former leader Omar al-Bashir.

To put down a rebellion in the Darfur region in the early 2000s, the Bashir government used the so-called Janjaweed militias, a precursor to the RSF. An estimated 2.5 million people were displaced and 300,000 killed in the conflict, and the International Criminal Court prosecutors accused government officials and Janjaweed commanders of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Bashir was toppled in a coup in 2019 after weeks of pro-democracy protests with scores of activists killed in demonstrations by government forces. Bashir was imprisoned and in 2023 Sudanese officials said he had been moved to a prison medical facility, though specific details were not given. Now 80, he's still wanted by the ICC.

Sudan was removed in 2020 from the United States list of state supporters of terror, opening the door for badly needed foreign loans and investment. But late the following year, Sudan's army and the RSF toppled the embryonic civilian government.

War erupted in April 2023 between the army and the RSF, amid disputes over how to transition from military rule to free elections.

The RSF has continued operations in several areas of Sudan, heavily bombarding the cities of Omdurman,  El Obeid and  Al Fashir, as well as pushing through into the southeast, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, has denied many accounts of fighters attacking civilians.

Famine at northern refugee camp

The Sudanese face myriad longstanding issues. The rainy season is in full swing, damaging homes and shelters across the country and threatening a wave of waterborne diseases. Over the last week, 268 cases of cholera were reported in Sudan, the health ministry said.

The world's worst humanitarian crisis has ensued since war erupted last year with half the 50 million population lacking food, and famine taking hold in part of the North Darfur region.

Aid agencies say they have faced huge logistical, security and bureaucratic problems. They say the army has blocked humanitarian aid, and the RSF has looted it in areas it controls. Both have denied impeding humanitarian operations. 

Local volunteers have tried to fill the gap, but have often been treated with suspicion, targeted, or struggled to raise donations.

A global hunger monitor — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — said in July that restrictions on aid deliveries have caused famine in North Darfur's Zamzam camp for internally displaced people.

"Without treatment, children with severe malnutrition are at risk of dying within three to six weeks [at Zamzam camp]," Médecins Sans Frontières added on Aug. 4.

Sudan's government has rejected the characterizations of famine at the camp.

Massive displacement

More than 10 million Sudanese, or 20 per cent of the population, have been driven from their homes since the war there began, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in July.

More than 2.2 million people have fled to other countries since the war began.

"All refugees I met said the reason why they fled Sudan was hunger," Dr. Shible Sahbani, the World Health Organization's representative for Sudan, said while visiting a refugee camp in Chad.

Almost 7.8 million Sudanese have fled to other parts of the country, the IOM said in its latest bimonthly report. An additional 2.8 million people were already displaced by previous conflicts in the country.

As the RSF has expanded its reach in the southeast of the country in recent weeks, more than 150,000 people were displaced from Sennar state — many for the second or third time — after RSF raids on markets and homes in the state's small towns and villages, the IOM said.

Many displaced are now in Gedaref state, which hosts 668,000 people who face heavy rains with limited shelter, and where RSF units have staged incursions.

The conflict and displacement have left women particularly vulnerable, Human Rights Watch said in a report in late July.

The RSF have committed widespread acts of sexual violence in the capital Khartoum, including gang rape and forced marriages, the report alleged. It cited accounts of the RSF holding women and girls in conditions that could amount to sexual slavery.

The Human Rights Watch report said some attacks had also been attributed to the army.