“Nahed managed to escape, but she said it was terrifying,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, who described Nahed’s story on Tuesday. “The chilling memories remain.”
Sudan is in the midst of the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis since conflict broke out in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which now control the devastated capital of North Darfur, El Fasher, after more than 500 days of siege.
Ms Russell on Tuesday called for urgent action to safeguard children and essential services after visiting the country, where an estimated 10 million people have been displaced, half of them children.
“Relentless violence”
During her visit to Kassala, in the east of the country, Ms Russell met women and adolescent girls receiving psychosocial support and skills training at a UNICEF-supported centre.
Many fled the violence and found care and safety at the center, but similar services are extremely limited in Darfur and Kordofan states due to current insecurity.
“Children in Sudan live in relentless violence, hunger and fear,” Ms Russell stressed. “Women and girls bear the brunt of the crisis, including horrendous levels of sexual violence.”
Briefing journalists in Sudan on Tuesday, the country’s representative for the UN reproductive health agency (UNFPA), Fabrizia Falcione, said she met El Fasher survivors who had lost everything, including a 17-year-old girl with a 40-day-old child born from rape.
None of the women she spoke to had received a single prenatal care visit before giving birth.
“They told me that they would rather not go to the hospital than risk their lives trying to get there..”
We need baths and bread.
When Falcione asked the displaced women what they needed most, they answered baths and bread. In third place was the way of making a living.
“There are no bathrooms near their tents, no lights in the camp at night,” Falcione said. “And these are pregnant women without men in their homes.”
In North Darfur, fighting in and around El Fasher has forced more than 106,000 people to flee since the end of Octoberoverwhelming reception sites and turning areas like Tawila into vast informal settlements.
Among other assistance measures, UNFPA is providing maternal care and psychosocial services to survivors of gender-based violence, while UNICEF is identifying and registering unaccompanied children, restoring access to clean water and more.
Ms Russell said everywhere she went during her visit to Sudan, children told her the same thing.
“’The only thing we want for Sudan is peace.’ The world must do better to fulfill that wish.”