Since the brutal takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher by militia forces in late October, aid workers in the closest safe town have reported a disturbing sight: the arrival of hundreds of unaccompanied children, many of them emaciated and hungry.
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“We spoke to a small girl of 13 years old who was carrying a five-month-old baby, and she had no clue where her mother, her four brothers, her older sister were, because they had been separated,” Arjan Hehenkamp, Darfur crisis lead for International Rescue Committee (IRC), tells TIME.
“That’s a horrible anecdote, but that’s representative of the stories of all those […] people who came only with part of their families, and very often with a severe under-representation of adult men,” he adds.
Estimates of the number of children who have arrived in Tawila without their parents in the last few weeks range from 450, according to Save the Children, to 800, according to MedGlobal. Hehenkamp says around 5,000 people came to Tawila with only part of their family.
Those numbers tell the story of what happened when El Fasher fell. The city, which was seen as the last holdout in Darfur of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in late October. The RSF, a paramilitary group descended from notorious Janjaweed militias that led the 2003–2005 Darfur campaign in which some 300,000 people were killed, has been fighting the SAF for the past three years in a brutal civil war in which both sides have been accused of war crimes.
Witnesses and local reports described sexual violence, massacres and executions of civilians by the militia as tens of thousands fled the takeover of El Fasher. Videos from the immediate aftermath of the city’s fall showed RSF soldiers rounding up large groups of men and executing them.
Many of the children in Tawila arrived on their own after their parents had been killed in the takeover of the city. Some were sent away by their family who paid for their passage but were unable to afford their own. Some children left El Fasher with their parents but were separated on the dangerous road along the way, where kidnappings, killings and extortion are rife.
Umran, a 52-year-old Save the Children staffer, was one of few to see first-hand how children were separated from their parents when El Fasher was overrun by the RSF.
“People realized they had to flee— it was chaotic and horrific. Artillery fire, gunshots, and shelling were extremely intense, leaving people terrified,” he said, according to an account provided by Save the Children.
“I also saw children running alone, most likely separated from families. In this situation, no one was able to offer support because everyone was running away from the artillery coming from all directions, along with drones attacking from above,” he said.
A dangerous journey
Aman Alawad, the country director for MedGlobal, an aid group providing on-the-ground support to Sudanese migrants, says the journey out of El Fasher is riddled with danger for children.
Even before they left, the children would likely have been suffering from hunger. El Fasher was officially declared to be in famine conditions on November 3, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). In conflict zones, famine declarations are often delayed because they require specific data on mortality, malnutrition rates, and food shortages, which are difficult and dangerous to collect amid blocked humanitarian access and security threats. The city would have likely been in famine for months.
“Most people are very weak,” Alawad says, especially children, who have turned up in hundreds to places like Tawila and Al Dabbah camp, 480 miles northwest of El Fasher, without their parents, having been fed and cared for by others along the way.
Everyone who came to Tawila from El Fasher would have been at risk of confrontations with armed individuals who intercept migrants and often extort them for money or cause harm. Most have resorted to traveling at night.
Francesco Lanino, Deputy Country Director of Programming with Save the Children Sudan, says women have been arriving in Tawila with stories of how they picked up children along the way. Some were found lost on the streets in El Fasher in the chaos of the takeover, some wandering in the no-man’s land between El Fasher and Tawila. The women told Lanino, “now they are part of my family.”
Lanino suggests the number of unaccompanied children may be even higher than the number they currently have because younger children are taken in by other families along the way and not always registered as unaccompanied.
Part of Save the Children’s work is family tracing, which means trying to find out whether a relative is already in the camp or has arrived from a different route to a nearby area.
‘Will they take revenge?’
Tawila, once a small village with a few thousand people—a “satellite village” as Lanino calls it—now swells with hundreds of thousands of displaced people, and aid groups say they have only been able to ensure 50% of basic needs for those arriving, including water and shelter. Tawila now faces severe logistical and security challenges.
The United Nations migration agency has warned that humanitarian efforts in North Darfur may come to a complete halt unless immediate funding and safe delivery of relief supplies are ensured.
“There is no economy as such, with no job opportunities. There [is no] functioning school system. There is no functioning health system,” Lanino says. “We have to somehow scale up life-saving activities, or like humanitarian activities, from an existing population of around 30,000 people to almost half a million people.”
Many of these children are arriving with extreme trauma, having lost relatives, suffered abuse or violence on the way to Tawila. As a result, they need access to more than just short-term aid.
“They need access to drugs, to education. They need access to mosquito nets or any other hygiene kits,” Lanino says. He explains that cholera and malaria have spread rapidly in Tawila, “killing children and vulnerable people on a daily basis.” There had been 120,000 suspected cases of cholera in the country by the end of October, according to the U.N., resulting in more than 3,000 deaths, and UNICEF reported back in August that children in Tawila were at high risk.
Lanino says the fear of further violence is something that haunts survivors.
“What will be of my children one day?” a woman who reached Tawila asked his team. “Will they try to take revenge for their relatives that were killed? What will be their future?”
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