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.
“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.
Read More: Sudan Aid Worker Details Harrowing Scenes as Thousands Missing
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…
