More than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting in Sudan have headed home, the United Nations said Friday, pleading for greater international aid to help returnees rebuild shattered lives.
Over a million internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned to their homes in recent months, UN agencies said.
A further 320,000 refugees have crossed back into Sudan this year, mainly from neighboring Egypt and South Sudan.
While fighting has subsided in the "pockets of relative safety" that people are beginning to return to, the situation remains highly precarious, the UN said.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The fighting has killed tens of thousands.
The RSF lost control of the capital, Khartoum, in March and the regular army now controls Sudan's center, north and east.
In a joint statement, the UN's IOM migration agency, UNHCR refugee agency and UNDP development agency called for an urgent increase in financial support to pay for the recovery as people begin to return, with humanitarian operations "massively underfunded".
Sudan has 10 million IDPs, including 7.7 million forced from their homes by the current conflict, they said.
More than four million have sought refuge in neighboring countries.
- 'Living nightmare' -
Sudan is "the largest humanitarian catastrophe facing our world and also the least remembered", the IOM's regional director Othman Belbeisi, speaking from Port Sudan, told a media briefing in Geneva.
He said 71 percent of returns had been to Al-Jazira state, with eight percent to Khartoum.
Other returnees were mostly heading for Sennar state.
Both Al-Jazira and Sennar are located southeast of the capital.
"We expect 2.1 million to return to Khartoum by the end of this year but this will depend on many factors, especially the security situation and the ability to restore services," Belbeisi said.
With the RSF holding nearly all of the western Darfur region, Kordofan in the south has become the war's main battleground in recent weeks.
He said the "vicious, horrifying civil war continues to take lives with impunity", imploring the warring factions to put down their guns.
"The war has unleashed hell for millions and millions of ordinary people," he said.
"Sudan is a living nightmare. The violence needs to stop."
- 'Massive' UXO contamination -
After visiting Khartoum and the Egyptian border, Mamadou Dian Balde, the UNHCR's regional refugee coordinator for the Sudan crisis, said people were coming back to destroyed public infrastructure, making rebuilding their lives extremely challenging.
Those returning from Egypt were typically coming back "empty handed", he said, speaking from Nairobi.
Luca Renda, UNDP's resident representative in Sudan, warned of further cholera outbreaks in Khartoum if broken services were not restored.
"What we need is for the international community to support us," he said.
Renda said around 1,700 wells needed rehabilitating, while at least six Khartoum hospitals and at least 35 schools needed urgent repairs.
He also sounded the alarm on the "massive" amount of unexploded ordnance littering the city and the need for decontamination.
He said anti-personnel mines had also been found in at least five locations in Khartoum.
"It will take years to fully decontaminate the city," he said, speaking from Port Sudan.
