Peace continues to elude Sudan’s Darfur region 11 years after the start of a many-sided conflict that has affected “almost all Darfuris,” the United Nations Security Council was told last week.

In a report on the status of the UN/African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described a deteriorating security situation that is compounding “one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.”

An estimated 300,000 Darfuris have died as a result of fighting between and among three main rebel groups and assorted militias supported by the government in Khartoum.

Some 400,000 of the region’s nine million residents were forced to flee their homes last year — more than the total for the previous two years combined. In all, more than two million Darfuris have been internally displaced.

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“Unamid itself has been subject to increasingly hostile action,” Mr Ban reported. Sixteen UN soldiers were killed last year, with the 19,000-strong force also experiencing “a significant loss of vehicles, weapons and ammunition.”

Unamid should be acting “more aggressively,” Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council on March 12.

“The United States calls upon the government of Sudan to stop obstructing the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur, and we call upon Unamid to carry out its mandate more aggressively to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access throughout Darfur,” Ms Power said.

South Sudan’s breakaway has had the indirect effect of worsening conditions in Darfur due to Sudan’s loss of three-quarters of its oil production and half of the government’s revenues, the UN report said.

That has constrained Khartoum’s ability to finance “the mainly pastoralist tribal militias from which it draws the paramilitary units that supplement its military operations.”

The loss of pay, Mr Ban added, has “led elements of those units [the Popular Defence Forces, the Central Reserve Police and border guards] to seek alternative sources of revenue.”

Tribal conflicts and criminal activity are meanwhile intensifying in Darfur due to heightened competition over scarce resources.

Climate change is exacerbating a host of “pre-existing root causes” of the conflict, the UN leader said. He cited “the loss or severe disruption of traditional livelihoods, weakened traditional dispute resolution mechanisms, impunity and weak rule of law, weak or absent state administrations in rural areas, the prevalence of arms and armed militias, a lack of trust between and within communities, the manipulation of social divisions and cycles of retaliatory violence.”

The US State Department also recently expressed alarm over escalating violence in a region that, it said, has “suffered insecurity, violence and atrocities for far too long.”

Ms Power added that “despite the presence of one of the largest peacekeeping operations in the world, civilians in Darfur continue to be targeted, terrorised, displaced and killed.”