About 300 children ranging in age from one month to 15 years have been rescued from an orphanage trapped in the middle of fighting in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, according to a spokesman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF. Seventy-one children had already died in the Al-Mayqoma orphanage from hunger and illness since mid-April when fighting began between the Sudanese military led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The children’s relocation followed an online campaign led by local activists and international charities, which intensified after the deaths of 26 children in two days at the orphanage in late May. The children had been trapped for weeks with dwindling food and other supplies in the orphanage, which had become inaccessible because of the war raging throughout the capital.
The children were taken from the orphanage to a “safer location” elsewhere in Sudan, where the Sudanese health and social development ministries had taken charge of them and UNICEF had provided humanitarian aid, including medical care, food, and educational and leisure activities, the UNICEF spokesman said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which helped with the evacuation, said the children were relocated together with 70 caretakers after securing a safe corridor to Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira province, about 100 miles southeast of Khartoum.
“They spent incredibly difficult moments in an area where the conflict has been raging for the past six weeks without access to proper healthcare, an especially hard situation for children with special needs,” said Jean-Christophe Sandoz, the head of the ICRC delegation in Sudan.