ADRE, Chad: Fatima Omas Abdullah wakes up every morning with aches and pains from sleeping on bare ground for almost two years.

She did not expect Sudan’s civil war to displace her for so long into neighboring Chad.

“There is nothing here,” she said, crying and shaking the straw door of her makeshift home.

Since April 2023, she has been in the Adre transit camp a few hundred meters from the Sudanese border, along with almost a quarter-million others fleeing the fighting.

Now the US-backed aid system that kept hundreds of thousands like Abdullah alive on the edge of one of the world’s most devastating wars is fraying.

Under the Trump administration, key foreign aid has been slashed and funding withdrawn from United Nations programs that feed, treat and shelter refugees.

In 2024, the US contributed $39.3 million to the emergency response in Chad.

So far this year, it has contributed about $6.8 million, the UN says.

Overall, only 13 percent of the requested money to support refugees in Chad this year has come in from all donors, according to UN data.

In Adre, humanitarian services were already limited as refugees are meant to move to more established camps deeper inside Chad.

Many Sudanese, however, choose to stay.

Some are heartened by the military’s recent successes against rival paramilitary forces in the capital, Khartoum.

They have swelled the population of this remote, arid community that was never meant to hold so many.

Prices have shot up.

Competition over water is growing.

Adre isn’t alone.

As the fighting inside Sudan’s remote Darfur region shifts, the stream of refugees has created a new, more isolated transit camp called Tine.

Since late April, 46,000 people have arrived.

With the aid cuts, there is even less to offer them there.