Leaving Khartoum with four armed soldiers in the backseat

On what must be one of the last summer days of the year, Imad Babikir (68) is sitting outside at a table in the quiet, green village of Hagestein. There, among the meadows and livestock farms, he and his wife and daughter have been staying with a Dutch friend for three weeks. At the beginning of September, the family fled the war in Sudan, which continues for six months this weekend. Their house in Khartoum was occupied by soldiers and they lost their belongings.

On that early morning of April 15, when the war broke out, a bullet pierced a water reservoir at the family’s home. Things had been brewing in the background in Sudan for some time, and during difficult talks between army leaders and a coalition of civilian groups about a new transitional regime, things came to a head. The generals did not agree on the time frame within which the RSF would be integrated into the regular army. Less than two kilometers from the Babikir family home, street fighting broke out between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the government army in the last week of Ramadan. The violence in Sudan has since cost nine thousand lives, according to a conservative calculation by data research firm ACLED, and according to the United Nations the war is causing the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world.

Dutch passport

Imad’s wife Ghada (52) and daughter Aziza (13) also join the conversation. Some geese and roosters are walking around the yard around the table. Aziza, who was in the second year of secondary school, did not notice anything in the weeks before the war. “We had normal classes and prepared for our final tests,” she says in fluent English with an American accent. She wears her curls in a tight bun and pink slippers on her feet.

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“The first week I was able to go outside, buy food and water in local shops,” says Imad, dressed in a white and light blue striped shirt. Black sunglasses rest on his head. “There were soldiers walking on the street, but they did nothing to me. But soon the hostility turned on everyone,” he says.

As a human rights activist, Imad feared that he would run additional risks. In addition to the warring armies, fundamentalists joined the war. “They are anti-democracy, anti-activism. So then I became a target.” And so he decided to flee together with Ghada and Aziza. It was not the first time that the activist was forced to leave his home country. As a member of the small but influential Republican Brotherhood, a progressive Islamic movement whose leader Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was executed in 1985, Imad was also in danger under the Muslim fundamentalist regime of then President Omar al-Bashir. He fled Sudan in the 1990s and lived in the Netherlands for a number of years. Since then he has had Dutch nationality. Later Aziza got it too.

“On the third day of the war, a Sudanese friend who also has a Dutch passport called,” says Imad. “He asked if I had also received a phone call from the Foreign Office. But I hadn’t heard anything. A day later he asked if I had received the email from the ministry. ‘Neither,’ I replied.”

Imad’s wife Ghada was on a working visit to Ad-Damazin, about 530 kilometers south of Khartoum, when the war broke out. She worked there with refugees for the UN organization OCHA when she had to flee herself. “But the road remained too dangerous for a long time,” she says calmly. She was stuck there.

Six days after the first attacks in Khartoum was Eid-al-Fitr (Eid-al-Fitr). “The children tried to make something of it,” says Imad. Aziza was straightening her neighbor’s hair when a bomb hit fifty meters from their building. “We were alone at home and terrified, we ran to the floor below, to my neighbor’s house. We saw that almost all the buildings in the area had been destroyed,” she says distantly.

That day, Imad himself wrote an email to the Foreign Affairs with a request for help. He only received an automatic confirmation of receipt. A day later they decided to leave Khartoum themselves.

“We read stories in group apps that cars were being looted along the way,” says Imad. “Some advised you to take the road via the west, others the road via the east. Some advised against driving. But I decided to go anyway because we knew it would only get worse,” he says.

“It was exciting,” says his daughter, “because you don’t know what could happen along the way.” Imad: “We prayed.”

The two drove towards Wad Madani, almost two hundred kilometers from Khartoum, to Ghada’s mother’s house. At the first checkpoint they were stopped by RSF soldiers. When they heard where they were going, they asked if they could ride along. “Then suddenly there were two soldiers with Kalashnikovs in the back of the car,” says Imad. “I think they were deployed somewhere along that road, because after the next checkpoint there were four soldiers in the car.” With a double feeling of fear and security – they knew that the RSF soldiers on the street would certainly not harm them now – they sat in the car for half an hour.

They drove past a factory that the RSF had looted and burned a few days earlier. The smoke was still visible. Burnt out tanks and armored cars littered the road. “There are 3D films, but this was like a 4D film, because we were in it,” says Imad, apparently emotionless. After letting the soldiers out of the car at the end of the factory grounds, they drove at high speed to Wad Madani for three hours. It was safe there. But Ghada was still stuck on the other side of the country.

No marriage certificate

On April 27, when the war lasted a week and a half, Imad received the first telephone call from the Foreign Office about the evacuation. “The employee asked for our passports, Ghada’s Schengen visa and our marriage certificate. I said that we had run away from home and did not think about the marriage certificate at that time.” According to the employee, Ghada could not participate in the evacuation. “I thanked him and said: ‘Either we go together, or we stay here together,’” he says as a helicopter flies over Hagestein. All three of them look up for a moment.

When it was safe enough to leave by public transport at the end of April, Ghada – who was still in the south – decided to collect the marriage certificate in Khartoum after consultation with Imad. “I first stopped at Imad and Aziza in Wad Madani. There I picked up the keys and left my bag, because I might have to run. And I got back on the bus.”

Upon arrival in Khartoum, she asked the driver to drop her off earlier, closer to the house. “Then I had to walk another ten minutes, past a hospital that I had heard a few days earlier had been taken over by the RSF. I was terrified,” she says. “There was no one on the street. I came across a man who shouted: ‘What are you doing here? Run for your life! Run!’. When I got home I immediately put the marriage certificate in my handbag.”

There was no return bus, so Ghada spent the night in the abandoned building. “I heard bomb blasts and counted the hours. I told myself that morning would come and I would still be alive and I could go back.” She reaches out her hand to Aziza, who takes it.

On May 3, Ghada arrived at her family’s home in Wad Madani by bus and forwarded the marriage certificate to the Foreign Office. To their surprise, the ministry responded that the last evacuation flight had left on April 29. “So two days after they first called me!” says Imad indignantly. Subsequent requests for assistance were of no avail.

No education

The family would ultimately stay in Wad Madani for four months, where public life, like in other parts of Sudan, came to a standstill. To this day, all schools are closed. “That is the main reason we wanted to leave the country,” says Ghada, wiggling her legs restlessly. With the prospect of a war that may last for years, the parents did not want their daughter to miss out on years of education and overall development. With the help of friends, they eventually manage to cross the border into South Sudan by car, and from there they fly via Istanbul to Amsterdam.

An old friend of Imad’s, Carla van Os (55), with whom they are temporarily staying, offered help with Aziza’s registration at school and with the application for DigiDs. “But the Dutch embassy could do nothing,” says Imad. “No compensation for our flight from Sudan and no assistance upon arrival in the Netherlands.” “What would have been the alternative if we had no friends to stay with? On the street?” Ghada asks out loud.

“We don’t often have Dutch war refugees in the Netherlands,” says Carla, who does not understand that Imad does not receive help with his Dutch passport. “The system is not set up for that.”

“A friend of mine was evacuated with his Sudanese wife, whose passport had also expired,” says Imad. “They didn’t ask him about the marriage certificate. Does that mean the policy is arbitrary? This must be corrected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Especially after the failed evacuation from Afghanistan. Americans have even evacuated pets from Sudan.”

A spokesperson for the ministry does not want to comment on the case of the Babikir family, but does say that “if you leave the country on your own, the costs are for your own account.”

Aziza’s education is arranged thanks to Carla’s help. She goes to a bridging class in Utrecht with other children from conflict areas. She is learning Dutch and will probably be able to move on to regular education after a year. She gets along well with the students, she says as she sits on her mother’s lap. “Two new children are coming tomorrow.”

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