Warning: This piece contains details that some readers may find distressing
Touma 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 traveled 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.
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. Touma's twin daughters Masajed and Manahil were brought to the hospital together, but her family could only afford antibiotics for one child. I had to make the impossible choice – I chose Manahil, she says grievingly.
I am alone. I have nothing. I have only God, she laments, revealing the emotional toll of her circumstances.
In the harsh reality of the civil war, survival rates here are low. For families like Touma's, the war has stripped them of everything that once was, leaving no means to purchase the medicines that could save their children.
Across Khartoum, the lives of children have been tragically rewritten by this ongoing conflict.
