For Sudanese Refugees, Egypt Is Barely a Refuge

CAIRO, Egypt—On the top floor of an apartment block towering over Cairo’s bustling Faisal district, Hassan, a 24-year-old Sudanese refugee, held up his phone, which showed a photograph of scars laced across his friend’s back. Less than two weeks earlier, in mid-October, Hassan had fled his home in the Sudanese city of Omdurman, escaping a country that has been devastated by war since Sudan’s army began fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last April.

Hassan decided to leave after the RSF detained him and his friend simply for living near a spot where three RSF soldiers had been killed. (Some names in this article have been changed to protect sources and their families.) The RSF held and tortured the pair for two days alongside dozens of other detainees, until one soldier took pity on them and let them go. Hassan took a smuggling route to Egypt; his friend stayed behind. “His condition is very bad, but they haven’t got the money to leave,” Hassan said.

Like Hassan’s friend, many civilians have struggled to find the funds to flee Sudan amid economic collapse and widespread looting and armed robberies. Still, the intense fighting, the breakdown of the health care system, and a looming famine have already compelled more than 7 million people to seek refuge in safer locations within and outside of Sudan’s borders.

As of the end of January, around 450,000 Sudanese refugees had fled to neighboring Egypt since the outbreak of war. Although they are safe, they face dire economic conditions, shortages in aid funding from international organizations, and a lack of opportunities to earn a living and settle in Cairo. With little prospect of returning home soon, the growing Sudanese refugee population, largely ignored by the international community, is stuck in limbo.

An Eritrean man has his hair cut at a barbershop in Jureif Gharb, a district of Khartoum that for decades hosted the majority of the city’s Eritrean and Ethiopian refugee communities, on March 10, 2023.

Upon reaching Cairo, Hassan moved into his father’s small apartment. (Hassan’s father had been living in Egypt for three years already to receive medical treatment.) As the situation in Sudan deteriorated, more family members escaping the turmoil joined them under one roof. By November, the two-bedroom apartment housed more than a dozen people, including two of Hassan’s uncles who had also been captured and tortured by RSF soldiers.

Another uncle, Qasim, found temporary accommodation in another part of the city. A 47-year-old single father, Qasim worked as a taxi driver in Khartoum before the war. Four months before he fled to Egypt, he had gone out to get dinner for his two children, aged 11 and 8, and returned home to Sudanese Army soldiers pointing rifles at his daughter’s head. He was bound, blindfolded, and taken to a makeshift prison where soldiers subjected detainees to “severe torture, electric shocks, threats at gunpoint, beatings, even depriving us from sleep,” he said.

Left: Qasim* poses for a portrait in an apartment in Cairo on Oct. 23, 2023. Right: He shows two of his broken fingers after he was subjected to beatings by the Sudanese military in a makeshift detention center in Omdurman.

The army, Qasim said, held him for 31 days in an illegal detention site, one of many that Sudan’s warring forces have set up across the cities of Khartoum, Bahri, and Omdurman. Reports by the Sudanese grassroots group Emergency Lawyers have detailed instances of arbitrary killings and torture, including starvation and sexual assault, within these centers.

Qasim believes he was targeted because he was a member of his neighborhood resistance committee, which is part of a decentralized network of activists opposing dictatorship and military rule in Sudan. Before the war, these committees were pivotal in organizing rallies, sit-ins, and strikes in defiance of an encroaching military governance. But Qasim said that civilians with no political affiliations who are simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time” frequently face interrogation, threats, and violence.

Shortly after his release, Qasim was arrested again for just over a day, this time by the RSF. Then, despite having only an expired passport and little cash, he began making arrangements to take his mother and two children out of the country. The evening before their departure, Qasim said, his mother fell into a diabetic coma and died after a missile hit their building. In Sudan’s war, “the citizens are the victims of both sides,” he said.

Sudanese artist Salah Abdelhay lays out a collection of his paintings at his apartment in Cairo on Oct. 19, 2023.

“I took some of my artwork out of their frames, rolled them up like this, and brought them with me,” he said in late October, sitting beside his daughter and her 9-month-old son. “Most of my work is in galleries in Khartoum, but I was told that it had all been looted or burned down.”

“My artwork is about culture,” he said, unraveling cuts of canvas to reveal vibrant paintings. “I try to paint elements of Sudanese identity.” Several of Abdelhay’s works depict Sudanese women veiled in distinctive patterned fabrics known as tobes. They also incorporate scenes such as Nubian wrestling, socializing at tea stalls, and the country’s wildlife. “The two sides that are fighting each other, they don’t have an understanding of what art is, what culture is, or what museums are,” Abdelhay added. “They can simply destroy these things with ease.”

The conflict has also dashed the hopes of Sudanese people who had been involved in civil society movements that strove to establish a civilian leadership and exclude military factions from politics after Sudan’s transition to democracy began in 2019. Even after military leaders toppled the transitional government in an October 2021 coup, activists continued to stage demonstrations and other acts of peaceful resistance until the outbreak of the current conflict.

When 24-year-old Omdahab Omer fled Omdurman alone in late May, she felt that she had lost her identity as a student and activist. “When the revolution started and we headed out [to protest], we were dreaming of building a good country for ourselves, a safe country, one that is independent and gives us all our freedoms,” she reminisced on a quiet cafe balcony in Cairo. “It was a war against old ideas and old ways of thinking.”

When we met in November, Omer had not been able to contact her relatives back home for a week. Omdurman has become one of the main centers of fighting as the warring factions attempt to control supply routes into nearby Khartoum. Omer learned from social media that the RSF had besieged her neighborhood, cutting off its residents from internet, running water, and electricity.

Because the war interrupted her education, Omer spends her days in Cairo searching for scholarships so that she can finish a degree in development studies. “As displaced people, we no longer have stability in our lives,” she said. “The future looks foggy and uncertain.”

Tewelde* poses for a photo on the balcony of a small school in Cairo where he teaches refugee children from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, on Oct. 31, 2023.

Egypt’s existing Sudanese community, which had grown to an estimated 4 million before the war, helps to provide support for the newcomers. On a narrow street in Cairo’s Boulaq district in November, Sudanese women congregated in a ground-floor office where Amal Rahal Bouda runs Hopes for the Future, an initiative that offers refugees community, education, and support for struggles such as domestic violence and homelessness. Bouda, a 39-year-old woman from Sudan, launched the program in 2020, two years after she had claimed asylum in Egypt.

After Sudan’s abrupt descent into conflict, Bouda suspended classes at the initiative’s community school so that she could convert it into a temporary shelter for refugees. But Bouda and her volunteers still run workshops and entertainment programs to teach Sudanese women and children skills such as handicrafts and computer literacy. The initiative is funded by individual donations, and families with greater needs are referred to partner organizations.

An even greater challenge than international funding, Bouda said, will be finding longer-term solutions to support and integrate refugees as the conflict rages on. She is especially worried about the shortage of jobs and access to education as well as the “very bad mental state” of Sudanese children. “When they first arrive, they are still sleeping under their beds in fear of missiles,” she said. “Some of them don’t go outside; they hear the loud noises from cars and think that it’s the same as what was happening in Sudan.”

As Sudan’s humanitarian crisis worsens, it seems unlikely that refugees in Egypt will go home anytime soon. Eighteen million Sudanese face acute food insecurity, and hostilities have now spread to the country’s breadbasket.

“I do want to return,” Abdelhay said, “but what I hear from my children is that no one is thinking about going back again. They are all thinking about moving forward.”