Sudan: 200,000 forced to flee abroad while 700,000 more internally displaced

Some 200,000 people have now fled Sudan to neighboring countries and hundreds of thousands more have been displaced inside the country, trying to escape bloody fighting that has been ongoing for almost a month, the United Nations said on Friday (12 May).
“As violence in Sudan continues for a fourth week, nearly 200,000 refugees and returnees have been forced to flee the country, with more crossing borders daily seeking safety,” the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) spokeswoman Olga Sarrado said. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is operating under the UN system, reported earlier this week that more than 700,000 people have also been displaced within Sudan. Humanitarian response to deal with the plight of the people fleeing the country will be “challenging and costly,” Sarrado warned. Some 30,000 refugees had arrived in Chad in just recent days, she said, bringing the total number who have arrived from Sudan in recent weeks to 60,000, with almost 90% of them being women and children.

As talks between the two warring sides continue in the Saudi port city Jeddah, in a separate but related development, the head of Russia’s Wagner Group Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Thursday that its mercenaries are not operating in Sudan. ”Wagner is not in Sudan,” Prigozhin, who founded the private military contractor in 2014, said, adding that ”Wagner never got involved in the domestic political affairs in Sudan after the departure of Omar al-Bashir.” Prigozhin also denied a claim expressed by army general Yassir al-Atta that Wagner was operating in Sudan, at the Jebel Amer gold mine in Darfur.