[Al Arabiya Latest] The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Thursday said it was scaling down relief work across Sudan's strife-torn Darfur region to protect its staff from a spate of kidnappings.The ICRC said it was cutting staff levels, keeping international workers in Darfur's main cities and avoiding field trips to underdeveloped rural areas.
"We used to concentrate on remote areas where hardly anyone else worked. We worked with farmers and agro-pastoralist groups. We inoculated their animals ... But we really can't do that anymore," ICRC spokeswoman Tamara al-Rifai said.
Gunmen have abducted at least 14 foreigners, including two ICRC staff, in Darfur and just over its border in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic in a new wave of abductions this year.
The kidnappings have raised fears for the security of humanitarian programs in all three underdeveloped countries where bandit groups can often move freely over porous borders.
"It is the people who need aid who are paying the price of these kidnappings," al-Rifai said, adding the group would keep funding emergency work in hospitals and other centers.
Armed men seized ICRC workers Gauthier Lefevre, a dual French-British citizen, from west Darfur in October, and Laurent Maurice, a Frenchman, from neighboring Chad in November.
Two members of Darfur's joint U.N./African Union UNAMID peacekeeping mission, a Nigerian man and a Zimbabwean woman, are due to start their 100th day in captivity on Sunday.
Two workers for French aid group Triangle were abducted in the Central African Republic in November.
Eight other foreign aid workers taken in Darfur and Chad since March were released unharmed after negotiations. Most abductors have demanded ransoms, which Khartoum says have never been paid, while some groups claimed political motives.
A group purporting to be behind the latest abductions in Chad and the Central African Republic this week threatened to kill their French captives unless Paris began negotiations on changing its policies in Africa.