UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Tuesday said advances by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan could trigger another exodus across the country’s borders.

The RSF took over Darfur’s city of al-Fashir in October in one of its biggest gains since the war started with Sudan’s army.

In December, advances continued eastward into the Kordofan region, and they seized the country’s largest oil field.

Most of the estimated people that the United Nations said have been displaced by the latest violence in Kordofan, a region comprised of three states in central and southern Sudan, have sought refuge within the country.

Mr Grandi said things could change if violence spreads to a large city like El Obeid.

“If that were to be not necessarily taken but engulfed by the war, I am pretty sure we would see more exodus,” said Mr Grandi in an interview from Port Sudan.

“We have to remain very alert in neighbouring countries in case this happens,” he said.

Already, the war has uprooted nearly 12 million people, including 4.3 million who have fled across borders to Chad, South Sudan, and elsewhere, in the world’s biggest displacement crisis.

However, some have returned to the capital, Khartoum, which is now back in Sudanese army control.

Mr Grandi, who met with survivors who fled mass killings in al-Fashir, said humanitarian workers lack resources to help those fleeing, many of whom had been raped, robbed or bereaved by the violence.

“We are barely responding,’’ said Mr Grandi, referring to a Sudan response plan, which is just a third funded, largely due to Western donor cuts.

He said UNHCR lacks resources to relocate Sudanese refugees from an unstable area along Chad’s border.

Most of those who trekked hundreds of kilometres from al-Fashir and Kordofan to Sudan’s al-Dabba camp on the banks of the Nile north of Khartoum, which Mr Grandi visited, were women and children. Their husbands and sons were killed or conscripted along the way.

Some mothers said they disguised their sons as girls to protect them from being abducted by fighters, Grandi said.

“Even fleeing is difficult because people are continuously stopped by the militias,” he said.

Mr Grandi said he began his UNHCR career in Khartoum in the 1980s, when Sudan sheltered refugees from other African wars.

(Reuters/NAN)