A bus exodus from Sudan: sniper fire, desert travel and fear

ASWAN, Egypt – It was the middle of the night, but the first thing Mawahib Mohammed did was go to the shower, the first thing she had taken in a week. One of thousands of Sudanese who had crossed the border into Egypt in recent weeks, she had barely slept in six days and used a toilet only once, she said. There were no remotely decent toilets along the way.

When she got out of the shower, she still felt gross, she said. She immediately showered four more times. (“Praise God,” she said, describing her relief.)

When 47-year-old Ms Mohammed returned to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, from Dubai four years ago, she envisioned something else: helping build a modern, democratic society after a revolution toppled Sudan’s long-time dictator .

Instead, she and her family had been stampeding from Khartoum for the past week as it headed for civil war.

“I had hope for Sudan,” she said on Wednesday. “I never thought I would leave again.”

Egyptian officials say more than 52,500 Sudanese and nearly 4,000 foreigners have crossed the border into Egypt since the fighting broke out, en route to a country that shares a common language and deep historical and cultural ties with Sudan. They are generally wealthy people who have spent the last of their money on the journey north.

And they are at the forefront of what Egyptian and UN officials fear will be a growing influx of Sudanese refugees to their northern neighbour, as one ceasefire after another in Sudan is broken by the warring factions and fighting continues to rage .

The Egyptian government has relaxed border controls on Sudanese arrivals, allowing women, children and the elderly to enter without a visa, and has sent extra trains and buses to Aswan, the closest major city to the border, to help the refugees move further into Egypt . People there have welcomed the refugees, found them apartments and brought them food.

But officials are worried about what comes next, expecting busloads of poorer refugees to follow. Even these first, relatively wealthy newcomers have no idea what they’re going to do next.

“There are people who have made the decision to just go to Egypt and they will figure it out,” said Mahmoud Abdelrahman, 35, a Sudanese-Canadian volunteer who interrupted his vacation in Cairo to help out in Aswan. His own parents were stranded in Cairo and unable to return home to Khartoum. “Everyone is trying to figure out what plan B is.”

Ms Mohammed, her husband, Mohammed Hashim, 48, and their three boys – Firas, 14, Hashim, 11 and Abdallah, 6 – stumbled off the bus in Aswan around 1am on Wednesday.

For them and other refugees, it had been a difficult journey north, disorderly and exploitatively priced. Bus tickets on the Sudanese side cost more than five times the pre-war standard, workers and drivers at the bus stop in Aswan said.

Raised in the United Arab Emirates, Ms. Mohammed returned to Khartoum for college, where she studied medicine and met her husband. She worked for the United Nations on a campaign against hepatitis in Sudan, but they moved back to the Emirates before Hashim and Abdallah were born.

It was safer there, easier. Sudan struggled under sanctions, dictatorship and conservative restrictions on dress and behavior.

However, after the 2019 revolution, she returned with the boys, while Mr. Hashim stayed in Dubai for his job with Renault’s Sudanese agent. They wanted their children to learn about their roots and link their future to Sudan’s now that it was going somewhere.

Then a pair of military commanders hijacked the democratic transition, a coup that culminated in war last month when the two men turned on each other.

Mr. Hashim was home for the holy month of Ramadan. As the Eid holiday approached, snipers took over their neighborhood; a bullet fell at their feet as the family ventured outside to see what was going on.

They crouch down and bundle the food they had with their neighbors. Due to the blackout, a generator only pumped running water to the building for an hour a day. Gunshots and explosions became so constant that Ms. Mohammed was still unable to hear properly a week after she left.

Not wanting to leave her partially paralyzed, 80-year-old father behind, the family stayed. Mr. Hashim also had older parents and a disabled brother to think about. But when the Rapid Support Forces, one of the war’s two main combatants, looted a bank close to their building, they decided it was time to go.

Gas stations and bus companies were inflating prices and credit cards were useless. They borrowed money from friends to buy just enough petrol to get to the station and then for bus tickets to Egypt. From Khartoum to a border town, Wadi Halfa, they drove for about 18 hours, passing six checkpoints guarded by armed men. The boys lugged their PlayStation all the way.

But in overcrowded, chaotic Halfa, where they were given emergency passports and waited five days for a bus to Aswan, money hardly helped. Mr. Hashim and the boys slept on the street with their bags for two days, while Mrs. Mohammed slept on the bus. Eventually they found a hotel room to share with nearly 30 others. The next night, Mrs. Mohammed begged the manager to let her sons sleep in the office.

Six days after leaving Khartoum, they crossed the shadowless border and then took a ferry across the flat blue Lake Nasser. Aswan was a few hours away by bus.

An unknown number of Sudanese refugees are still waiting for buses at the two border crossings into Egypt, though traffic has slowed as Khartoum empties of people who can afford to flee. Some of those who cannot leave the country, whether they go to Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad or across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, seem to be going elsewhere in Sudan.

The Egyptian Red Crescent provides humanitarian aid and medical care on the Egyptian side of the border. But on the other hand, where food, water and working toilets are scarce and temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees, several people have died while waiting in the desert, according to a Sudanese doctor and a bus driver who made the trip to Aswan three times. has made. .

Armed gangs have also preyed on those waiting to cross, said the driver, Nader Abdallah Hussein, 51.

Bad as it may seem, the situation at the border is an improvement from the early days of the exodus, when some refugees waited in the desert for days at a time.

They included Allia Amin, 32, her half-sister, Hanaa Abdelwahed, 24, and their aunt Sara Saleh, 39. They said they had been trapped at the border for nearly a week, sleeping in the middle of nowhere, eating dried dates brought with them by local villagers and drinking water straight from the Nile as the sun scorched them.

They had no intention of fleeing to Egypt. In the chaos, they said, they had just followed all the other people piled into buses. They had been caught at work when the fighting started and had nothing with them except the dresses they wore on their backs and little money.

Their children – Ms Amin’s two sons and Ms Abdelwahed’s daughter – were somewhere in Sudan, they said. Shortly after the shots began to ring out, they lost contact.

Their husbands were also missing. “But the priority is to hear about the children. Husbands come second,” said Ms. Amin.

Some of the refugees, like these women, planned to stay in Aswan and look for work. The more affluent, such as Mrs. Mohammed, Mr. Hashim and their sons, moved on.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Hashim family were waiting again, this time at the Palestine Cafe near Aswan train station, where they would board the train for the 13-hour journey to Cairo. On the other hand: an apartment that the family had managed to find through friends, and a new life, whether in Cairo, Dubai or elsewhere.

Just before they boarded the train, Mrs. Mohammed received a phone call. RSF fighters had ransacked the family’s apartment in Khartoum, relatives told her. They’d left behind important documents, she said, and her jewelry, electronics—her eyes moved back and forth, and she took short, sharp breaths through her nostrils.

“Thank God,” she finally said simply, hoisting Abdallah’s Minions backpack on the train.

Hossam Abdellatif and Hagar Hakeem contributed to the reporting.