11 hours agoShareSaveNawal Al-MaghafiSenior international investigations correspondent, Khartoum andScarlett BarterBBC World Service, KhartoumShareSaveWarning: This piece contains details that some readers may find distressingTouma hasn’t eaten in days. She sits silently, her eyes glassy as she stares aimlessly across the hospital ward.In her arms, motionless and severely malnourished, lies her three-year-old daughter, Masajed.Touma seems numb to the cries of the other young children around her. “I wish she would cry,” the 25-year-old mother tells us , looking at her daughter. “She hasn’t cried in days.”Bashaer Hospital is one of the last functioning hospitals in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, devastated by the civil war which has been raging since April 2023. Many have travelled hours to get here for specialist care.The malnutrition ward is filled with children who are too weak to fight disease, their mothers by their bedside, helpless.Cries here can’t be soothed and each one cuts deep.Touma and her family were forced to flee after fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) reached their home about 200km (125 miles) south-west of Khartoum.”[The RSF] took everything we owned – our money and our livestock – straight out of our hands,” she says. “We escaped with only our lives.”With no money or food, Touma’s children began to suffer.She looks stunned as she recounts their old life. “In the past, our house was full of goodness. We had livestock, milk and dates. But now we have nothing.”Sudan is currently experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies.According to the UN, three million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished. The hospitals that are left are overwhelmed.Bashaer Hospital offers care and basic treatment free of charge.However, the lifesaving medicines needed by the children in the malnutrition ward must be paid for by their families.Masajed is a twin, she and her sister Manahil were brought to the hospital together. But the family could only afford antibiotics for one child.Touma had to make the impossible choice – she chose Manahil.”I wish they could both recover and grow,” her grief-stricken voice cracks, “and that I could watch them walking and playing together as they did before.”I just want them both to get better,” Touma says, cradling her dying daughter.”I am alone. I have nothing. I have only God.”Survival rates here are low. For the families on this ward the war has taken everything. They have been left with nothing and no means to buy the medicines that would save their children.As we leave, the doctor says none of the children in this ward will survive.Across the whole of Khartoum, children’s lives have been rewritten by the civil war.Liam Weir / BBCWhat began as an eruption of fighting between forces loyal to two generals – army chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti – soon engulfed the city.For two years – until last March when the army retook control – the city was gripped by war as rival fighters clashed.Khartoum, once a hub of culture and commerce on the banks of the River Nile, became a battlefield. Tanks rolled into neighbourhoods. Fighter jets roared overhead. Civilians were trapped between crossfire, artillery bombardments and drone strikes.It is in this devastated landscape, amid the silence of destruction, that the fragile voice of a child rises from the rubble.Twelve-year-old Zaher wheels himself through the wreckage, past burnt-out cars, tanks, broken houses and forgotten bullets.”I’m coming home,” he sings softly to himself as his wheelchair rolls over broken glass and shrapnel. “I can no longer see my home. Where’s my home?”His voice, fragile but determined, contains both a lament for what has been lost and a quiet hope that one day, he may finally go home.In a building now being used as a shelter, Zaher’s mother Habibah tells me about what life was like und …
