They fled fighting in Sudan, only to find a crisis at the Egyptian border

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They fled fighting in Sudan, only to find a crisis at the Egyptian border

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Khalid, 49, and his wife, Somia, pose for a portrait at a bus stop near Aswan, Egypt. Khalid and Somia from Khartoum North retell a harrowing escape when their house was surrounded by Rapid Support Forces and destroyed during fighting in Sudan. Their son, 20, is still stuck at the Egyptian-Sudanese border. April 27. (Sima Diab/for The Washington Post)

WADI KARKAR, Egypt – The Sudanese family hid under a bed as a rocket slammed into their roof — and again when militia soldiers stormed in and robbed their house. They rationed water, held their noses to avoid the stench of abandoned corpses on their street and said their goodbyes, fearing they wouldn’t make it out alive.

After more than a week of hellish conditions in Khartoum, they finally fled by bus to Egypt, hoping their ordeal would soon be over.

What they found at the border was more chaos.

For four nights, the family and other passengers slept on the street near the Argeen border crossing, first on the Sudanese side and then in Egypt, surviving with hardly any food or water in the scorching heat.

They had no access to electricity or a proper bathroom as they waited for their passports to be processed by Sudanese and Egyptian authorities. Several times, the border guards took long breaks from processing anyone at all, they said, even as more and more buses pulled in, carrying thousands of others running for their lives.

At least one person died on the Sudanese side while waiting and another went into labor, they said. Many others fell ill. The family’s 20-year-old son, who hoped Egyptian entry rules requiring visas for Sudanese men between 16 and 50 would be lifted due to the conflict, was denied entry. He had to travel to another part of Sudan to visit an Egyptian consulate and has still not received a visa.

“It was a disaster,” said the father, Khaled, 60, an engineer who fled without his phone or luggage and was one of many Sudanese civilians waiting at a bus stop in southern Egypt on Thursday. “So many people fainted.”

Like others in this story, he spoke on the condition that only his first name be used due to concerns over his safety in both countries.

People fleeing Sudan recount stories of fear and violence on the road

Khaled and his wife are among at least 14,000 Sudanese civilians who entered Egypt in the past week — tens of thousands of others have fled to South Sudan and Chad — braving dangerous roads and dozens of checkpoints, only to find themselves in another humanitarian crisis. Many here are from Sudan’s most elite families and own property in Egypt, which has deep social and cultural ties with its southern neighbor. Cut off from their bank accounts, though, they are already running out of money.

Millions of others are still trapped in Sudan as fighting rages between forces loyal to Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army chief and de facto head of state, and those backing his rival, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. Multiple cease-fires have been announced since the conflict erupted two weeks ago, but none has held. At least 450 people have been killed, though the true toll is likely much higher. As foreign countries and organizations have rushed to evacuate their citizens and employees, many locals have no way out.

Turkish evacuation plane shot at as latest cease-fire falters in Sudan

The bus to the border cost around $350 per seat, families said, up from $50 earlier this month, and prices are still rising. The vast majority of Sudanese can’t afford to escape the country, left to shelter in Khartoum or flee to rural areas.

The ones fortunate enough to make the journey north to the border with Egypt said there was no sign of the United Nations or any other refugee agency. The only humanitarian group on site was the Egyptian Red Crescent, which lent travelers phones and handed out water.

Christine Beshay, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency in Egypt, said “the U.N. is supporting those in need with life-saving relief items that will be delivered through the Egyptian Red Crescent teams at the borders.” A spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the situation at the border.

At the bus stop outside the Egyptian city of Aswan, some Sudanese travelers finally had a moment’s reprieve — napping on plastic chairs, sipping on tea and using makeshift bathrooms to freshen up before boarding new buses to Cairo or other cities.

Khaled’s relative, Aya, 21, an international relations student in Khartoum, said it had been four days since she last urinated, due to a lack of facilities at the border. Other women said the only choice was to go in the same streets where they slept.

Shahd, 33, an architect, fled with her husband and their three children, including an 18-month-old, after a rocket landed in front of their house.

When they finally reached the border, “there was no water, no food, nothing for the children,” she said. Her kids feared urinating in public and had not relieved themselves for several days. They ate nothing but chips.

“If this happened again, I would stay [in Khartoum,]” she said.

62-year-old Ali said one of his family members had fainted as well and had to be revived. The process was “not efficient at all,” he said, describing the conditions as dehumanizing. “I saw people eat from the trash.”

Witnesses said the long delays were caused by bureaucratic hurdles on both sides of the border. Exhausted and confused by the wait, some Sudanese got into screaming matches with Egyptian officials, they said.

Many young men secured their costly seats and made the lengthy trip only to learn Egypt would not be making exceptions to its visa rules.

Those men and boys would have to turn around, passengers recalled border officials saying, and apply for entry permits from other towns — a journey that at wartime rates could run several hundred if not thousands of more dollars.

The separations were wrenching for families who had survived intense violence in Sudan and could see Egypt just over the crossing, but had to leave their sons behind.

“Their mothers sobbed and sobbed,” Khaled said.

At least six members of his extended family, including his son and Aya’s brother, were among those denied entry to Egypt and told to apply for visas elsewhere in Sudan. “We don’t know if they’ll get them or not,” Aya said.

In Aswan, Ebtisam Babaker, 51, a single mom who traveled with another group that reached Egypt on Tuesday, wept as she described how her two sons, Youssef, 21, and Khaled, 19, were forced to turn back. She wanted to stay with them but they insisted she continue with the other passengers — she is diabetic and they could not guarantee her safety. Now they’ve run out of money and are still waiting for visas.

“I have no one else but them in the world,” she said. “We left everything behind.”

Esraa Bani, 39, a Sudanese-American based in the United Arab Emirates, waited at the bus stop in Wadi Karkar on Thursday, preparing to travel south toward the border to distribute food, water and diapers to new arrivals.

As the international community rushed to evacuate its citizens from Sudan, no one seemed to be thinking about the Sudanese, she said. “They literally left the whole nation [of Sudan] on its own,” she said. “The vulnerable people funded their own evacuation and they’re stuck at the border funding their own water.”

Aya, the student, is struggling to process her new reality.

She woke up in Khartoum on Apr. 15 to “bombs and fire.” Bullets struck her house. They had no water or electricity for five days. It would be different at the border, she hoped.

“I keep thinking it’s going to be done, but it’s never done — even until now,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”

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