Global Courant 2023-04-27 14:24:07
Sudanese families have gathered at a border crossing with Egypt and at a Red Sea port city, desperately trying to escape their country’s violence and sometimes waiting for days with little food or shelter, witnesses say.
In the capital, Khartoum, the intensity of fighting eased on the second day of a three-day truce, and the army said it had “initially” accepted a diplomatic initiative to extend the current ceasefire by extend for another three days after it expires on Thursday.
With the possibility of a future ceasefire uncertain, many people took the opportunity during the lull of fighting to join the tens of thousands who have poured out of the capital in recent days, trying to break out of the crossfire between the armed forces of Sudan’s two top generals.
It has become more difficult to obtain food and electricity has been cut off in much of the capital and other cities. Several aid organizations have had to suspend their operations, a heavy blow in a country where a third of the 46 million inhabitants depend on humanitarian aid.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said only one in four hospitals in the capital is fully functional and the fighting has disrupted aid to 50,000 acutely malnourished children.
Many Sudanese fear the two sides will escalate their battle once the international evacuations of foreigners that began on Sunday are completed. The British government, whose airlift is one of the last still underway, said it has evacuated about 300 people on flights and is planning four more on Wednesday, promising to continue as long as possible.
Large numbers of other people have made the exhausting day-long drive across the desert to access points outside the country – to the city of Port Sudan on the eastern coast of the Red Sea and to the Arqin Crossing into Egypt on the northern border.
Crowds of Sudanese and foreigners have been waiting in Port Sudan to sign up for a ferry to Saudi Arabia. Dallia Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese political commentator, said she and her family arrived on Monday and tried to get a seat. “Priority was given to foreigners,” she said.
She and part of her extended family, mostly women and children, took a 26-hour bus journey to reach the port, passing through military checkpoints and small villages where people offered them cold hibiscus juice.
“These people have very little, but they offered every passenger in all these buses and trucks something to improve their journey,” she said.
At the Arqin crossing, families have spent nights outside in the desert, waiting for admission to Egypt. Buses queue at the intersection.
“It’s a mess – long queues of elderly, patients, women and children waiting in appalling conditions,” said Moaz al-Ser, a Sudanese teacher who arrived at the border a day earlier with his wife and three children.
Tens of thousands of Khartoum residents have also fled to neighboring provinces or even to pre-existing camps in Sudan housing survivors of previous conflicts.
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