People fleeing fighting in Khartoum left waiting for days at sparsely staffed crossing after costly and dangerous journeys
Thousands of people have fled fierce street battles in central Khartoum for Sudan’s borders, waiting for days in the open air to enter Egypt or walking hundreds of miles to cross into South Sudan.
Rana Ameen, a 23-year-old engineering student, said she and five members of her family had paid the equivalent of £475 per person to travel to the border crossing with Egypt, almost 600 miles (1,000km) away.
To reach the bus station on the outskirts of Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city on the other bank of the Nile, the family were forced to make their way through the centre of the capital, where bitter fighting between two armed generals has caused thousands of people to flee the airstrikes and artillery fire. Once they reached the border, the situation worsened, as they waited to cross for three days in the desert.
“It was a deadly trip,” she said. “At the border crossing, there was barely food, water and no bathrooms. Babies were crying as they lay on the ground. Women were very tired. Thousands of men were standing in very long lines to get visas.”
Others reported that Egyptian security officials held up young men for hours, separating them from their loved ones, citing a need for extra security checks.
From time to time, a truck would bring water to the people gathered at the border crossing, but before it could even reach a small supermarket nearby, the water would run out. “People rushed to the truck, finishing all the water that was there,” she said. Food prices at the border were three times their usual prices elsewhere, she added.
As people fled the fighting and dispersed across the country, some to the city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea, thousands sheltered in the open in the border region with Chad, while others went east to Ethiopia.
A picture of Sudan’s rapidly developing humanitarian crisis began to emerge, one in which images of refugees holding Saudi Arabian flags after crossing the Red Sea to the port of Jeddah contrasted with stories of people waiting days to cross into Egypt.
The Egyptian government, long preoccupied with militarising its southern border area in a bid to tamp down migration flows, appeared either unprepared or unwilling to accommodate thousands of desperate people attempting to cross.
The UN’s International Organisation for Migration estimates that at least 75,000 people have been newly displaced by the fighting, although this number may not encompass the thousands who have fled to Sudan to in surrounding countries.
Terrified refugees found little welcome on the border with Egypt, where just a few local police officers had been dispatched to process thousands of exhausted people. “Thousands of people were there at the crossing, but very few border employees,” said Ameen.
The Egyptian ministry of health announced that it had deployed teams to two border crossings with Sudan to aid new arrivals in need of care, almost two weeks after fighting began. Staff from the Egyptian Red Crescent were visible at the border, according to those who crossed, while the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said it was still waiting for permission to access the area. The Egyptian state has long sought to militarise its border region with Sudan as a way to crack down on migration, impeding access to civil society and aid groups from the Egyptian side in order to worsen an already harsh environment for arrivals.
“UNHCR, along with other UN agencies in Egypt, have requested to deploy at the border, and we are on standby to do so,” said UNHCR spokesperson Rula Amin. “This has not happened yet as the UN is still waiting for a final authorisation from the authorities to deploy teams and core relief items. In the meantime, UNHCR and UN country team are prepositioning much-needed supplies and are supporting Egyptian Red Crescent with relief items to be delivered to those crossing the border into Egypt, often in dire need for water hygiene items, transportation and medical assistance.”
Moneer Abdel Mohsen, a Sudanese citizen who fled across the Egyptian border and took a flight back to the United Arab Emirates after a trip to Sudan to see friends, said he waited a day and a half at the border crossing.
“It was chaos at the border,” he said. “There were just so many people coming from Sudan, and very few Egyptian officers stationed there. The place was very crowded. People were sitting on the floor. I spent those one and a half days without sleep, food or water.”
He added that prices for bus tickets, which cost him the equivalent of almost £200, were increasing every day. “I felt so sad leaving my friends behind. But only those who have money can leave the country,” he said.
Egypt was already home to an estimated 4 million Sudanese people, many of whom had relocated for study or work. Ties between Egypt’s military-led government and Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads the Sudanese armed forces as well as being the country’s de facto ruler, have become closer in parallel with abuses of Sudanese dissidents at the hands of Egyptian security forces, as well as forced deportations of some who fled Khartoum for Cairo.
Human Rights Watch reported last year that Egyptian security forces arbitrarily detained at least 30 Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers and subjected them to forced labour and beatings after they organised protests outside the UNHCR offices in Cairo over racist harassment by Egyptians, a lack of protection and resettlement delays.
Amin said some Sudanese nationals, as well as refugees of other nationalities, had arrived at the UNHCR offices in Cairo to register. “They spoke of gruelling, dangerous journeys in Sudan to reach the border, as well as vicious fighting in the areas they fled,” she added.
At the Joda border crossing into South Sudan, Charlotte Hallqvist of UNHCR said 13,500 people had arrived, but that this was probably an undercount as some were so frightened that they had rushed past without stopping. Most, she said, were fleeing conflict a second time after they previously escaped fighting in South Sudan, to which they were now forced to return.
“They are ending up at this border crossing after many of them walked very long distances, used donkey carts, or paid for some form of transportation. They are arriving in very difficult conditions, tired and hungry,” she said. “One woman I spoke to sat down and said, ‘I can’t walk any further, I have been walking for so long.’”
Many of the most vulnerable were unable to move away from the border, Hallqvist said. “Our number one priority is to try to get people to travel inwards; there is nothing for them at the border. Services are limited; there are shortages of water. Even we were looking for water, and there was none to be found,” she said. “We had to bring some in via trucks, but it was a seven-hour drive.”
However, for those refugees trying to return to their communities in South Sudan, reaching the places they once fled could also prove difficult. “They will go back to communities that are already very fragile. South Sudan has a large and dire humanitarian crisis; 75% are in need of humanitarian aid,” said Hallqvist.
Ameen said her unfriendly welcome at the border made her think she may not be welcome in Egypt, but that she had no choice but to leave Sudan.
“It is a war with the only victims being the innocent Sudanese people,” she said. “It felt terrible to leave everything behind: my memories, the home where I grew up. I didn’t even say goodbye to my friends and other family members.”
Menna Farouk contributed reporting