A driver working for the United Nations’ World Food Programme was killed on Sunday when an air strike hit a convoy of trucks carrying food aid in Sudan’s South Kordofan region, the agency said.
The WFP said the trucks were “clearly marked as humanitarian vehicles” at the time of the attack. It did not say who carried out the strike.
That last part is worth dwelling on, quietly. Sudan’s war has been running since April 2023, pitting the national army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and both sides operate aircraft-adjacent capabilities and both have reasons to deny almost everything, and so international agencies often arrive at the default position of stating the fact and declining the attribution. The trucks were marked. The marking is supposed to be the thing that protects them: that is the entire premise of the system, the reason aid convoys paint their roofs and fly their flags. When a marked truck is hit anyway, the statement of the obvious — clearly marked as humanitarian vehicles — is the entire complaint.
The strike came amid escalating violence in South Kordofan, a region that has seen intensifying fighting as the wider conflict has ground on. The WFP’s job there is one of the grimmest logistical problems in the world: moving food into areas where people are starving, along roads controlled by people with guns and, apparently, under skies controlled by people with aircraft. Each convoy is a bet that the markings will hold. On Sunday, in South Kordofan, one of those bets did not, and the man driving the truck paid for it.