PORT SUDAN, Sudan, March 10, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Nearly 400,000 Sudanese have returned to their homes over the past two and a half months after being displaced by the ongoing conflict, the United Nations migration agency said on Monday.

Between December and March, "approximately 396,738 individuals" returned to areas retaken from paramilitary forces by the army, which has advanced through central Sudan in recent months, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Since April 2023, Sudan has been locked in a brutal conflict between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Nearly all of the returnees moved back to their homes in the central Sudanese states of Sennar, which the army largely recaptured in December, as well as al-Jazira after it was retaken the following month.

Thousands more have returned to the capital Khartoum, where the army last month regained large areas, and appeared on the verge of expelling the RSF.

Displaced families have headed back in droves, even to looted and burned homes, after more than a year of displacement.

Across the country, 11.5 million people are internally displaced, many of them facing mass starvation in what the UN calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

A further 3.5 million people have fled across borders since the war broke out.

Parts of the country have already descended into famine, with another 8 million people on the brink of mass starvation.

On Monday, the UN's resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said only 6.3 percent of the funding necessary to provide life-saving aid had been received.

Nationwide, nearly 25 million people are suffering dire food insecurity.
The conflict has divided the country in two, with the army controlling the country's north and east while the RSF holds nearly all of Darfur and parts of the south.