SPECIAL REPORT-They sought temporary shelter from war. Twenty years later, Sudan’s refugees still can’t go home.

Ahmad Yahya was 9 years old when he fled a wartime attack on his village in North Darfur, Sudan. Separated from most of his family amid the chaos, he walked for days before reaching a dusty refugee camp outside this remote town in Chad.

Ahmad’s little brother Sadam Ismail also made it to ​the camp, as did a young cousin, Alhadi Saleh. Many of their other relatives scattered or were killed. That was in 2003. The brutal Darfur war that displaced the boys officially ended long ago, but conflicts continued to simmer, and a major civil war erupted in Sudan three years ago. Ahmad, Sadam and Alhadi are still living in the ​same houses where they grew up in the refugee camp, and Ahmad is now raising two boys of his own there.

They are among the vast numbers of Sudanese who have become perpetual refugees in one of the ‌world’s poorest countries. Since the latest Sudan ​war broke out – a clash between rival military factions – some 974,000 people have fled into Chad, bringing the total Sudanese refugee population to 1.4 million. A generation after the first of these people arrived, there is no path for them to return to Sudan, to build a stable life where they are, or to go anywhere else. “We don’t have work here,” said Ahmad, now 32. “We don’t have any money. We can’t stay like this.”

PERMANENCE AND IMPERMANENCE The Iridimi camp sprawls across roughly three square miles on a semi-arid plain in eastern Chad. Aid agencies deliver water once or twice a week. Food is scarce, with some families subsisting only on grain. Ahmad and his wife and children, along with his mother and two sisters who joined him at the camp, live in a sand-colored brick compound, with multiple rooms and a space to welcome guests. Each year, after the rainy season, they patch the walls.

The family’s carefully tended brick house and their single bag of sorghum with faded aid-agency labels reflect the sense of permanence and impermanence they have lived with since fleeing to Chad. Like about 300,000 others who escaped the Darfur ‌war, Ahmad, his brother and his cousin thought they would shelter safely for a brief time and return to Sudan when peace was restored. Instead, they have been stuck in limbo year after year. Their predicament is not unique to Chad. An estimated 70% of the world’s 36 million refugees at the end of 2025 were trapped in situations that have dragged on for five years or more with no resolution in sight, according to the UN refugee agency’s estimates.

In the 23 years since Ahmad, Sadam and Alhadi arrived in Chad, humanitarian aid to the country has fluctuated, unable to keep pace with an enduring – and worsening – emergency. Total humanitarian funding to Chad has doubled over the last 20 years, adjusted for inflation, according to ALNAP, a network of humanitarian groups that compiles data from the UN as well as other public and private sources. The refugee population has increased sixfold over the same period, according to UN data. The aid squeeze comes amid a broader global refugee crisis. The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes, including refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people, rose 33% in the last five years to 118 million, according to the UN. Meanwhile, global humanitarian funding dropped 20% to $33 billion, according to ALNAP.

Exacerbating the decline is the $7.4 billion in cuts to global humanitarian aid that ALNAP estimates the US government made in 2025, the year that Donald Trump began his second term as president. The US, the single largest donor to Chad, slashed its funding to the country last year. In 2025, the US gave Chad $117 million, a 65% drop from its peak the year before, according to data ‌from ALNAP. A spokesperson for the US State Department said the Trump administration has spent $100 million in fiscal year 2026 to respond to needs in Chad and that the “United States is committed to ending the horrific conflict in Sudan.”

DISPLACEMENT FOR DECADES For Ahmad, Sadam and Alhadi, the sputtering pipeline of humanitarian aid shows the limits of relief programs that were created to address temporary crises, not to sustain displacement that lasts decades.

There are not enough wells in the Iridimi camp to support its exploding population, and the semi-desert terrain yields little vegetation. Some of the longer term residents, including Ahmad and his relatives, started farming tiny plots of land near the dry bed of a seasonal stream several kilometers away, growing sorghum, millet and other crops. But ‌severe drought this year meant the family had no harvest at the end of the rainy season in September and October. That forced Ahmad and his extended family, like thousands of others, to rely almost entirely on handouts from a web of international agencies.

In Chad, food aid is distributed mostly in the form of cash payments from the UN World Food Programme, which operates in the area along with other humanitarian groups that primarily provide medical and other support. The WFP uses a combination of electronic transfers to refugees’ mobile accounts as well as more traditional vouchers and paper money. Some agencies also hand out food directly. These aren’t percentages on a spreadsheet. They mean meals not delivered. Shelters not built. Children not treated.

The WFP was forced to start reducing disbursements at the start of 2026 due to funding shortages, according to interviews with agency staff in Chad. A full monthly ration for a household in Chad is 8,000 Central African francs (USD$14); Ahmad said his family of four now gets the equivalent of $7 and cannot afford to buy anything at the market. The falloff in food aid combined with the drought and swelling population have battered the refugee camp’s informal economy. Staples like sugar, oil and sorghum can still be found at the local market, some of it trucked in from neighboring Niger and Libya. In the past three months, Ahmad said, prices in the market have soared. A gallon of cooking oil is 3,000 CFA, or about $5, twice what it was in the summer and unaffordable for his family, he said.

In the camp’s market, a once-profitable card-playing shop has stopped charging people to play and now only asks them to pay for tea, the owner said. Fewer residents have money for shops that sell cell phones, Starlink access, and bread, according to interviews with people at the camp. Ahmad’s cousin Alhadi, 33 and newly married, has tried to make ends meet with part-time work repairing cell phones ⁠or driving people on a motorized rickshaw he borrows ​from a friend. But with less cash in the system, there is little work to be had, he said.

“We used to rely only on ourselves, but this year is different,” said Alhadi, who lives with ⁠his wife in a house not far from Ahmad’s. Because the family’s shared farm plot produced nothing this year, they subsist on a stew made from the bag of sorghum that an aid agency delivered last month. “There is nothing to give to our kids, no good food to give them,” Ahmad said.

ONLY THE MOST VULNERABLE The rows of structures that make up the camp tell the history of the Sudan conflict and the struggle of humanitarian agencies to keep up: Most of the original Darfur refugees, like Ahmad and his relatives, have built houses of brick. Refugees who fled the current war live in evenly-spaced wood or metal buildings with shiny tin roofs, constructed en-masse by aid organizations. But at the camp’s edges, many new arrivals are given only plastic-covered shelters that offer little protection against the relentless sun.

In September 2026, a UNHCR database of refugees at Iridimi and its adjacent camp Goudrane registered a population of 94,718. Iridimi, which lies about ⁠50 miles from the Sudan border, was established in 2004 by the UN refugee agency and non-governmental organizations. It is the fourth oldest of about 30 refugee camps scattered across the four eastern Chad provinces that border Sudan.

Relations between the two countries have been complex for decades, and people on both sides of the border share deep tribal connections and close family ties. Soon after the 2023 war broke out, Chadian President Mahamat Déby formalized legal protections for all refugees and asylum seekers, including the right to work and move within the country. The Chadian government did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how it is addressing the challenges of the refugee crisis.

The WFP has been forced to slash the number of refugees who receive food support in Chad, an agency spokesperson said. The agency as of October is providing full monthly rations only to about 200,000 people it ​classifies as “extremely vulnerable,” the spokesperson said. That is less than 15% of Chad’s Sudanese refugee population. Another “highly vulnerable” category will receive full rations, but only once every three months, the spokesperson said. In all, about 600,000 refugees in Chad will get any aid at all, down from 1 million earlier this year, the spokesperson said. Marc Sekpon, head of programs for WFP’s Chad office, said the organization is working with the government to try to increase agricultural production and livelihood programs to help address what he called a “drastic decrease” in humanitarian assistance.

In April, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which coordinates with the Chadian government to respond to the Sudanese refugee crisis, said it and other UN agencies ⁠are able to help only four in 10 refugees in Chad. “These aren’t percentages on a spreadsheet,” said Tom Fletcher, UN aid chief, of the cuts. “They mean meals not delivered. Shelters not built. Children not treated.”

In Chad’s Wadi Fira province, where Iridimi is located, nearly three-fourths of Chadian children under age 5 and almost half of refugee children suffer from malnutrition, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s famine monitor. Earlier this year, Ahmad’s family was receiving full monthly rations, even though he first arrived from Darfur more than 20 years ago, he said.

That’s because newer refugees are often classified as needier, and Ahmad’s refugee identification card is stamped 2023 – not 2003, the year of his flight from the Darfur war. Ahmad left Iridimi to return to Sudan in 2018, part of a voluntary UN-backed resettlement program that paid each participant $600 upon crossing the border. But when the latest war broke out, the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group attacked the city where he was living, Nyala, and he ⁠was forced to ​return in 2023 to the very home in Iridimi that he had left.

Magatte Guisse, the UNHCR representative in Chad, said the country needs a “paradigm shift” away from purely emergency relief toward an approach that combines humanitarian aid, longer-term development and peacebuilding efforts. “You cannot feed people for 20 years,” Guisse said. “You cannot provide health for 20 years. After 20 years, you should have a mechanism for adapting.”

THE WORLD'S ATTENTION Ahmad, Sadam and Alhadi first arrived at Iridimi at a time when the world’s attention was fixed on the Darfur war. The Sudanese government, then led by President Omar al-Bashir, deployed local, largely Arab militias known as Janjaweed (often translated as “devils on horseback”) to help crush a revolt by rebels who accused the government of neglecting the region. The US accused the Janjaweed of genocide, and foreign aid flowed as the George W. Bush administration tried to broker an end to the civil war. Angelina Jolie, then a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, visited Iridimi and other refugee camps in Chad and met with a US team studying malnutrition there. George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, Mia Farrow and other celebrities raised millions for Sudan’s displaced. The wave of attention from the celebrities, whose spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment on this story, helped keep money flowing into the region in the years just after Ahmad and his brother and cousin arrived. The stories that emerged from Darfur were horrific: By the end of 2010, according to UN estimates, 300,000 people had died and more than 2 million were driven from their homes. The Janjaweed wreaked havoc on non-Arab communities like ⁠Kornoi, Ahmad and Sadam’s hometown in North Darfur, and Alhadi’s village. Ahmad and Sadam do not know how their father died in the attack, only that he did not survive. Alhadi lost an uncle and nine other family members when Janjaweed fighters raided their village and set fire to his house. By the time he reached the Chad border, he had been twice displaced and lost his animals to thirst and cold. At Iridimi, humanitarian aid kept the boys fed, and they attended school. But the world’s interest in Darfur’s refugees waned over the years, along with funding for schools and other initiatives. In 2004, the year funding first took off in response to the Darfur war, government and private donors provided $1,257 per refugee, ⁠according to a Reuters analysis of historical UN and ALNAP figures, adjusted for inflation in 2024 dollars. By last year, the figure had fallen to $371. The International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization that has supported refugees in Chad for ⁠more than 20 years, said declines in both public and private funding has forced it to scale back services, including at Iridimi camp. “Every year we have less and less,” said Alain Rusuku, IRC’s Chad director. “Meanwhile there are more refugees and more camps.” Sudanese families continue to flee across the border to Chad as the fighting rages on. The Sudanese army, which controls the government, is battling the RSF, an Arab-led militia that grew out of the Janjaweed. The war, a power struggle over control of the country and its financial resources, has become a regional flashpoint with combatants on both sides accused of atrocities. Spokespersons for the Sudan government and the RSF did not respond to requests for comment. SEEKING A BETTER LIFE Ahmad, Sadam and Alhadi have pursued different strategies to try to cope with their long-term displacement. Alhadi said he will continue to try to find work. Sadam, 28 and unmarried, has made several dangerous and high-risk attempts to find a new life elsewhere. He tried twice to journey to Europe and was arrested by Egyptian authorities both times, he said. After one arrest, he spent 10 months in an Egyptian jail. He ‌knows chances are slim for a successful crossing, which requires a dangerous journey by boat across the Mediterranean. “It’s a journey of death,” he said. This ‌spring, he traveled 1,200 km (700 miles) across the country to the border with Libya and Niger to work as a laborer, mining and digging trenches. Ahmad, the only one to ever attempt a return to Sudan, says he would not go back again – even if the war ended tomorrow. He has already tried once, lost what he built and does not intend to lose a second ​time. But, he said: “If I found any other place to go, tomorrow I would go with my family.”