Sudan's Children Are Fleeing a War That Keeps Finding Them
Separated from their families amid the fall of El Fasher, thousands of children are navigating famine, sexual violence, and forced recruitment — carrying a war on their smallest shoulders.
SHEARYIA CAMP, South Darfur — Hana* Mohammed Omer was thirteen years old and six days into walking alone across Sudan when five soldiers on camels found her in the wilderness.
She had already watched her younger brother die in an airstrike. She had already returned to her house in El Fasher and found it empty, her family scattered by the shelling. She had already thrown her shoes into the dust somewhere on the road out of the city and started running barefoot — thirsty, she says, and hungry and afraid — with no destination in mind except away.
The men were wearing uniforms. After they raped her, she could not walk. A stranger found her and gave her water.
"Where is your mother?" he asked.
"I don't know where she is," she told him.
Hana* is now living with her grandmother in Shearyia, in South Darfur. She has found a school nearby. She cannot afford the books.
Her story — harrowing in its particulars, devastating in how familiar it has become — is one of thousands unfolding across Sudan's displacement corridor, where the fall of El Fasher last October sent tens of thousands fleeing southward on foot across one of the most punishing landscapes on earth. Among them: an unknowable number of children, alone.
El Fasher sits at the edge of the Sahara in North Darfur, a desert city that for centuries served as a waypoint for caravans crossing the continent. Temperatures regularly exceed 40 degrees Celsius during the hot season, and the landscape in every direction is parched scrubland, flat and exposed, broken by occasional acacia trees and wadis that run dry for most of the year. For most of the year, there is nothing to soften the sun. It was across this terrain — barefoot, without water, often without any adult — that thousands of children fled as El Fasher fell.
Sudan is now home to the largest displacement crisis in the world with more than 14 million people have been driven from their homes. More than 26 million Sudanese — roughly half the country — face acute hunger. Famine has been confirmed across multiple regions. The conflict has devolved into ethnic killing, siege warfare, and mass atrocity on a scale that has overwhelmed every institution meant to contain it.
El Fasher was the last major city in Darfur not under military control. For 18 months, the armed groups cut off food supply routes, blocking humanitarian access, and shelling civilian areas. The paramilitary built a 57-kilometre perimeter around the city, sealing in roughly 260,000 residents, including 130,000 children. By the final weeks, people were eating animal feed and cow skin. Community kitchens — the last fallback for the most vulnerable — had been bombed or emptied. Monitors estimated that starvation was killing between 200 and 300 people a day, a mortality rate five times above the formal famine threshold.
World Vision workers in Shearyia — a camp in South Darfur receiving arrivals from El Fasher and ZamZam — say the number of unaccompanied children presenting at intake is significant and rising. The number of children requiring humanitarian assistance in Sudan has doubled since the war began, from 7.8 million to more than 15 million. For unaccompanied girls, the road south carried a specific and documented danger. For boys, survival itself became a recruitment pitch.
'I Was Just Running Away'
Hana* was at the market when the shelling began. On her way home, a neighbor's daughter collapsed beside her, hit by shrapnel from an artillery strike. Hana lay flat against the ground, then got up and ran. When she reached her house, it was empty. Her family had scattered in different directions under fire. Her youngest brother, who had been running alongside her as they tried to leave the city together, was killed in a strike.
"I needed to leave him behind," she says. "It was too much."
She walked for six days across the open scrubland south of El Fasher, barefoot, without food, without knowing where she was going. "I was just running away," she says. On the second day, she was raped by five soldiers.
What happened to Hana is not an isolated incident. UNFPA estimates that more than 12 million women and girls across Sudan are at risk of gender-based violence. MSF data from South Darfur found that between 2023 and 2024 alone there was a 288% increase in survivors seeking support. The displacement routes between North and South Darfur are not neutral corridors. For unaccompanied girls like Hana, they are hunting grounds.
After the assault, unable to walk, she was found by a stranger who gave her water. She eventually reached Dar Alsalam, sheltered at a school, and through a slow chain of chance encountered people who knew her aunt in Shearyia. The aunt sent money for the final leg of the journey.
She is now living in a small household with her aunt and grandmother, both of whom are struggling. Her father went missing the day the war started. Her mother fled in a separate direction and has not been found. Of her four siblings, three went with her mother. The youngest died on the road with her.
"I feel that I miss my mother and the rest of my family," she says. A school has opened nearby. "I don't have money to buy school stuff. Sometimes I don't even have money to buy soap."
She has spoken with staff at a support center about what happened to her. When asked if it helped, she is direct: "No."
It is an honest answer that points to the gap no aid organization has yet closed — between the scale of what was done to girls like Hana on the road, and the threadbare support waiting for them at the end of it. She was thirteen years old when she left El Fasher. She is still thirteen now.
'They Were Hungry. That's Why They Joined.'
Yusuf* Abullgasim was fourteen and playing PlayStation with friends when El Fasher fell.
He had already been inside a city under siege for months. He had watched the food run out. He had watched neighbors die. He had eaten animal fodder — "umbas," the dry grain fed to livestock — mixed with water to keep it down, for two and a half months straight. He had learned to move at midnight with a jerry can, sneaking past checkpoints to reach a small pool of water before dawn. "At midnight," he says, "if they saw you, they would shoot you."
Women and children died of hunger in his neighborhood. Those who were already sick — too weak to eat solid food — went first. The 57-kilometre wall had cut off every supply route. The last community kitchens shut on 11 October 2025, some bombed, others simply emptied. By monitors' estimates, starvation was killing between 200 and 300 people a day inside the city. Among Yusuf’s neighbors, it was women and children who died first — those too ill to eat hard food, surviving on next to nothing until they couldn't.
When El Fasher finally fell, Yusuf was with a group of fifteen boys. "We had to start running without any shoes," he says. As he fled through the streets, he saw bodies. People shot in front of him. Others looting. "I felt like I was about to die. I thought that was my last day in life."
The fifteen boys dispersed in the weeks that followed, walking exposed roads south through the heat, finding shelter where they could, moving between checkpoints staffed by the same forces that had destroyed the city. Some found family. Some made it to relatives. And some, Yusuf says quietly, joined the armed groups.
"They said because they were hungry and thirsty, they joined so that they can find food and water," he says. "And they now have clothes. We were suffering a lot."
The UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons has explicitly documented this pipeline: unaccompanied boys and children from poor families are specifically targeted by the armed groups along displacement routes in Darfur, where the collapse of food, family, and basic infrastructure leaves them with almost no alternatives. Sudan's military intelligence has estimated the armed group's child recruit count at between 8,000 and 10,000. The UN Human Rights Council's Fact-Finding Mission found the armed group has "systematically recruited and used children in hostilities," including in combat and at checkpoints.
For Yusuf, the choice was close. He had no food, no shoes, no family. His friends were making the same calculation in front of him.
"This was their choice," he says. "Because they were suffering from hunger and water and no clothes and shoes, and the ground was so hot."
He did not join. Not out of moral certainty, he implies, but because he was sick and weak from months of near-starvation, and because some part of him was still looking for his mother. He found his grandmother in Khazainga Jedid. His parents and siblings were last known to be somewhere inside El Fasher when it fell. He has heard nothing since.
"I didn't want to join the army," he says. "I wanted to go find my mother."
He does not want to return to El Fasher. He says this with a finality that sounds like it cost him something to arrive at. "I lost a lot of things. I miss my school. I want to study."
Working to Survive
Khalid* Mohammed Omer, seventeen, left El Fasher after a bomb hit his house in January 2025. His father was in the market when it landed; his siblings were sheltering next door. Everyone survived. His father came back with a car, loaded what they could carry, and drove toward ZamZam camp, twenty kilometres south — at the time one of Sudan's largest displacement settlements, home to hundreds of thousands already driven out by earlier waves of violence.
ZamZam did not hold. In April 2025, armed forces launched a coordinated three-day assault with artillery, drones, and ground troops. More than 400 civilians were killed, including aid workers operating a field hospital. Nearly 400,000 people — 99 percent of the camp's population — fled in days. Khalid’s family, already displaced once, had to run again.
They kept moving through the flat semi-arid scrubland south of El Fasher — open terrain where the sun is unbroken and the heat in the dry season sits above 40 degrees. Near a village called Gozbaina, caught in crossfire, the family split apart. Khalid was playing football in a field when soldiers attacked. Khalid ran with the other children. "Everyone went in separate directions," he says.
Khalid found his grandmother and made his way on foot to Dar Salam, where he spent four months. During that time, he worked. First driving a cart in the market. Then renting a donkey to haul goods and people along the displacement routes between towns — other children riding while Khalid walked alongside, earning enough to buy himself a change of clothes. He wore them for the entire journey.
The particular vulnerability of unaccompanied children in informal labor is this: without a parent or guardian, there is no one to ensure fair wages, no one to refuse exploitative conditions, and no recourse if they are cheated or harmed. The displacement corridors are lined with informal labor — children hauling water, driving carts, loading trucks — and in the camps and towns flooded with traumatized arrivals, there is almost no oversight of any of it. Khalid's situation was not unusual. It is increasingly the norm.
He has heard that his mother may be in Chad. He is not certain. His father, last seen at a checkpoint with a broken arm, has not been in contact. Khalid has been separated from his parents since March 2025 — Ramadan, he marks it by, the month when the world broke in a particular direction.
He arrived at Shearyia roughly six months ago, the oldest person in a household of his grandmother's family. He says he met another boy in the camp, someone his age, in the same situation. They found each other.
"Right now we are together," he says, as if the phrase itself is a form of relief.
A Place to Rest
All three children have passed through World Vision's child-friendly space at Shearyia camp — a bare-bones facility for children who have nowhere else to be. There are toys. There is staff trained in psychosocial support. There are other children who also survived the road from El Fasher and ZamZam, who also know what it meant to run barefoot through the heat, who carry the particular exhaustion of the unaccompanied.
Salah Musa, a World Vision protection officer at the center, describes what arrival looks like. "We are seeing children arrive who have been moving for months alone. Twelve years old, thirteen. They have injuries they haven't told anyone about. We don't always find out in the first conversation, or the second. You have to earn it. And we're trying to do that while intakes are increasing and our capacity isn't."
For children without any adult caregiver, the center provides an additional tier: case registration, follow-up, active attempts to locate family. Staff sit with children while they talk. Khalid calls it a place to spend free time. Yusuf mentions the mat and the lentils and the toys. Hana says she has spoken with staff about what happened to her on the road, but that it has not helped — which is not a failure of the center so much as a measure of what happened to her. No child-friendly space was built to hold what soldiers did to a thirteen-year-old girl in the wilderness. The center can offer proximity and consistency and a trained ear. It cannot undo the horror.
What the space seems to offer, above all, is this: the company of other children who also survived. In a crisis where children have been made to carry the weight of decisions and dangers that belong to adults and armies — where a fourteen-year-old's friends join a militia because it is that or starvation, where a thirteen-year-old girl walks six days across burning ground, where a seventeen-year-old boy works a donkey cart through four months of displacement — the act of simply sitting together, resting, being known as a child rather than as a survivor, may be the most foundational form of relief available.
The children coming off the road from El Fasher are arriving into a response that is already thinning. The question is not whether Shearyia's child-friendly space can heal what Ghalia, Muhammad, and Ahmed survived. It is whether it will still be there next month.
For now, it is. A mat. A meal. A room full of other children who understand, without being told, exactly what the road here cost.
— Reporting from Shearyia camp, South Darfur. Names are used with consent, obtained through the World Vision safeguarding process. Some interview material has been lightly condensed. Age and family details are as stated by the children. Names changed to protect the identity of the children.
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