Radwan Hisham Wahba fled to neighboring Sudan in quest of a new beginning after being shot when his own country of Syria fell into civil war in 2012. As the violence in his adopted country of Syria worsens, he and many of his fellow Syrian refugees are forced to relocate once more.
Wahba has been camped out on the streets of Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast for days, seeking for passage to safety and a fresh start after escaping the massacre in Khartoum when military factions turned on one other in a new conflict.
“Let’s just say that wherever the Syrian goes, he will have to live through war,” Wahba, a resident of Zamalka, a town near Damascus, said.
You had no concept of how ordinary people and immigrants felt. The assaults were not directed at particular individuals. He characterized the combat in Khartoum as “rockets were fired, and you didn’t know where they would land.”
According to UN figures, almost 66,000 Syrians have fled to Sudan since 2011, where they have been welcomed with open arms.
In recent days, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of persons wishing to flee Sudan. Some Syrians are stranded between two conflicts and are afraid to return to their devastated homeland.
“We were very afraid because of the shelling and clashes, as well as the lack of electricity and water,” Sham al-Darzi, 45, said, explaining why she, her two sons, and her pregnant daughter hid in their home for a week before fleeing.
As the country’s economy crumbled and hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in the battle, more than half of Syria’s pre-war population fled their homes, and millions more set out for other lands.
We came to Sudan expecting some mental relief. So that we might acquire jobs and begin over. Mahmoud Suweidan, 33, fled Syria last year in search of work, but the conflict that has erupted here has come as a tremendous shock to him.
The ferocity of the fight astounded him. We fought for an entire decade. “In Khartoum, 12 days are like 12 years,” he remarked.
