Crowds of exhausted Sudanese and foreigners are growing at Sudan’s main seaport as they wait to be evacuated from the chaos-stricken nation.
After more than two weeks of fighting, areas of the capital, Khartoum, appear increasingly abandoned.
Civilians have packed on buses and trucks going tor the northern border with Egypt. Many have also headed to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
The relative calm of the port city, from which many foreign governments have evacuated their citizens, seemed the safer option.
“Much of the capital has become empty,” said Abdalla al-Fatih, a Khartoum resident who fled with his family to Port Sudan on Monday. He said they had been trapped for two weeks, and that by now, everyone on his street had left.
When they arrived in Port Sudan after a 20-hour journey, they found thousands, including many women and children, camping outside the port area. Many had been in the open air for more than a week with no food or basic services in the sweltering heat. Others crowded into mosques or hotels in the city.
The fighting has displaced at least 334,000 people inside Sudan and sent tens of thousands more to neighbouring countries like Egypt, Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, according to UN agencies. Aid workers are increasingly concerned about lack of basic services in these areas.
Almost 1,000 people arrive daily at the border with Ethiopia, Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said at a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.
At least 20,000 people have crossed into Chad, whose border is near the Darfur city of el-Geneina, where fighting last week killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds.