No fewer than 300 infants, toddlers and older children of the Al-Mayqoma orphanage have been rescued from Sudan’s capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, aid officials said on Thursday.
The evacuation came after 71 children died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April which highlights the heavy toll inflicted on civilians since mid-April when the clashes erupted between Sudan’s military force loyal to Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, force led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.
About 300 children at the Al-Mayqoma orphanage in Khartoum were transferred to a “safer location” elsewhere in the northeastern African nation, the spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, Ricardo Pires said.
Sudan’s ministries of social development and health have taken charge of the children, while UNICEF has provided humanitarian support including medical care, food, educational activities and play, Pires said in an email to The Associated Press.
He said the children had received medical checks following their long journey to their new location, adding that “any child requiring hospitalization will have access to healthcare”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, which helped with the evacuation, said the children, aged between 1 month to 15 years, were relocated after securing a safe corridor to Madani, the capital of Jazira province, about 135 kilometers, about 85 miles, southeast of Khartoum.
ICRC added that seventy caretakers have been transferred with the children.
“They spent incredibly difficult moments in an area where the conflict has been raging for the past 6 weeks without access to proper healthcare, an especially hard situation for children with special needs”, the head of the ICRC delegation in Sudan, Jean-Christophe Sandoz said.
An activist who heads the local charity Hadhreen, Nazim Sirag said in a phone interview that the children were ferried late Tuesday to a newly established facility in Madani.
Sirag, whose charity led humanitarian efforts to help the orphanage and other nursing homes in Khartoum, said at least 71 children died at the Al-Mayqoma since the war in Sudan began on April 15.
Local volunteers evacuated 77 other children earlier this week from separate foster homes in the coastal, he said, adding that the children have temporarily sheltered along with 11 adults in a school in the town of Hasahisa, also in Jazira province.
Among the dead were babies as young as three months, following death certificates obtained. The certificates listed circulatory collapse as a cause of death, but also mentioned other contributing factors such as fever, dehydration, malnutrition, and failure to thrive.
Their relocation followed an online campaign led by local activists and international charities, which intensified after the death of 26 children in two days at the orphanage in late May. The children had been trapped in the fighting for over seven weeks as food and other supplies dwindled. The facility was inaccessible because of the war had turned the capital and other urban areas into battlefields.
“The safe movement of these incredibly vulnerable children to a place of safety offers a ray of light in the midst of the ongoing conflict in Sudan. Many millions of children remain at risk across Sudan”, UNICEF Representative in Sudan, Mandeep O’Brien said in a statement.
The fighting has inflicted a heavy toll on civilians, particularly children. More than 860 civilians, including at least 190 children, were killed and thousands of others were wounded since April 15, following Sudan’s Doctors’ Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties.
The conflict has forced more than 1.9 million people to flee their homes, including around 477,000 who crossed into neighboring countries, according to the U.N.’s migration agency. Others remain trapped inside their homes, unable to escape as food and water supplies dwindle. The clashes have also disrupted the work of humanitarian groups.
There have been reports of widespread looting and sexual violence, including the rape of women and girls in Khartoum and the western Darfur region, which have seen some of the worst fighting in the conflict. Almost all reported cases of sexual attacks were blamed on the RSF, which didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
