From Khaled Abdel Aziz and Al-Tayeb Siddiq

KHARTOUM, May 28 (Reuters) - Destroyed bridges, power outages, empty water stations and looted hospitals across Sudan bear witness to the devastating impact on infrastructure of two years of war.

Authorities estimate that hundreds of billions of dollars are needed for reconstruction, but the prospects for this are diminishing in the short term due to ongoing fighting and drone attacks on power plants, dams, and fuel depots.

In a world increasingly reluctant to provide foreign aid, the United States, the largest donor, has cut its aid.

The Sudanese army has been waging a war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since April 2023, killing and wounding tens of thousands of people and displacing some 13 million in what aid organizations have described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Residents of the capital, Khartoum, have been forced to endure power outages, unclean water, and overcrowded hospitals for weeks. Khartoum airport has also been attacked, and the remains of burned-out aircraft lie on its runways.

Most of the major buildings in central Khartoum were severely damaged, and once-upscale neighborhoods have become ghost towns, with destroyed cars and unexploded shells lining the streets.

Tariq Ahmed, 56, said that Khartoum was no longer habitable after it was destroyed by war, and expressed his feeling of being displaced despite the army's return to control of the situation.

Ahmed returned to his home in the capital briefly, where he found it looted, and then left again, after the military recently expelled the Rapid Support Forces from Khartoum.

One of the consequences of the collapse of infrastructure can be seen in the rapid spread of cholera, which has killed 172 of the 2,729 infected in the past week alone, most of them in Khartoum.

The war devastated other parts of central and western Sudan, including Darfur, but the widespread damage to Khartoum cast a shadow over the rest of the country, once a service-providing hub.

Sudanese authorities estimate reconstruction needs at up to $300 billion for Khartoum and $700 billion for the rest of Sudan.

The United Nations is currently preparing its own estimates.

Sudan's oil production has more than halved to 24,000 barrels per day, and its refining capacity has been shut down after the country's main refinery, El Jelei, sustained $3 billion in damage during the fighting, Energy and Petroleum Minister Muhieddin Naim told Reuters.

He added that Sudan, without the refining capacity, exports all of its crude oil and relies on imports while struggling to maintain the pipelines that South Sudan needs for its exports.

This month, drones targeted fuel depots and Port Sudan airport in an attack that Sudan blamed on the UAE, a claim the UAE denied.

Naeem said that all power stations in Khartoum were destroyed.

The Sudanese Electricity Company recently announced a plan to increase supplies from Egypt to northern Sudan. Earlier this year, it stated that repeated drone attacks on stations around Khartoum were straining its ability to maintain the grid's operation.

* Looted copper

Government forces recaptured Khartoum earlier this year. As residents returned to their homes, they found them looted. One notable finding was deep holes in walls and roads from which looters had extracted valuable copper wire.

On Nile Street in Sudan, once the country's busiest thoroughfare, a crack in the ground, one meter deep and four kilometers long, is devoid of electrical wires and shows signs of burns.

Khartoum State spokesman Al-Tayeb Saadeddin stated that the two main water stations in Khartoum stopped operating at the beginning of the war after Rapid Support Forces soldiers looted the machines and used fuel oil to power vehicles.

Those who remain in Khartoum have resorted to drinking water from the Nile or old wells, exposing them to waterborne diseases. Furthermore, the number of hospitals equipped to receive patients is limited.

Health Minister Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim said that hospitals are being vandalized by armed groups, and that medical equipment has been looted and destroyed. He added that the losses to the health system are estimated at approximately $11 billion.

Luca Renda, UNDP Resident Representative, said action is needed to prevent further humanitarian emergencies such as a cholera outbreak, at a time when some two or three million people are looking to return to Khartoum.

But the ongoing war and limited budgets are hampering the development of a comprehensive reconstruction plan.

"What we can do... with the capacity we actually have is look at small-scale infrastructure rehabilitation," such as solar-powered water pumps, hospitals, and schools, Renda said.

He added that in this way, the war may provide an opportunity to decentralize services away from Khartoum and seek more sustainable energy sources.

(Co-reporting by Nafisa Al-Taher - Prepared by Mohamed Ali Farag and Donia Hisham for the Arabic Bulletin - Edited by Ayman Saad Muslim)