An 85-year-old British citizen was shot by snipers and his wife died of starvation after they were left behind in Sudan as two factions of Sudan’s government waged a bloody conflict against each other. Sudan is Africa’s third-largest country.
Abdalla Sholgami, who owns a hotel in London, lived with his 80-year-old wife, Alaweya Rishwan, who is disabled, close to the British Embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Sholgami was not offered support to leave Sudan and was instead told to go to an airfield 25 miles outside Khartoum to board an evacuation flight. But this would have meant crossing a war zone.
Faced with starvation and with no water, Sholgami left his wife to seek help. While he was away he was shot three times – in his hand, chest and lower back – by snipers. He survived after being taken to a relative in another part of Khartoum, a big city with more than 5 million people in its metropolitan area.
Sholgami’s wife was left to fend for herself and it was impossible for his relatives to reach her in an area surrounded by snipers. As a result she died of starvation.
Sholgami’s granddaughter Azhaar says the embassy was a “maximum four steps away” from her grandparents’ home. She complains that “What happened to my grandparents was a crime against humanity, not only by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), not only by the [Sudanese army], but by the British embassy, because they were the only ones that could have prevented this from happening to my grandparents.”
Abdalla Sholgami later managed to escape to Egypt, where he is receiving medical treatment after he was operated on without anesthetic in Khartoum by his son, who is a physician.
A conflict between two factions of Sudan’s government — the army and the Rapid Support Forces militia — has killed tens of thousands of people over the last several weeks. That includes over 1000 in the regional capital of Geneina, a city in Sudan’s West Darfur province, where fighting left tens of thousands homeless.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries in Africa, such as to Egypt, Sudan’s northern neighbor, and to Sudan’s western neighbor Chad, even though Chad is one of the poorest and most backward places on Earth (so backward that countless people die of diarrheal diseases there, and much of the population goes hungry). Countless thousands of people in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, a desert city with over 5 million people in its metro area, have now run out of clean water and food.
Many people would like to leave Sudan, where thousands of civilians have died, and many people have run out of food as shops close.
But some can’t leave, for an odd reason: because Western Embassies that had their passports fled the country without returning their passport. For example, two months ago, Ahmad Mahmoud submitted his passport and visa application to the Swedish embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. He never imagined they would not give him back his passport, which he needs to travel even to neighboring countries like Egypt.
But when fighting broke out between the Sudanese army and air force on one side, and the Rapid Support Forces militia on the other, Swedish diplomats suspended consular services and fled Sudan without warning.
Street battles in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, have left patients and doctors trapped in hospitals for days without supplies, or even water, despite intense heat. Weeks ago, the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors and Sudan’s Doctors Union said 70 percent, or 39 out of 59 hospitals, in Khartoum and nearby jurisdictions had already had to cease operations. The World Health Organization warned then that the remaining hospitals were rapidly running out of blood, medical equipment and supplies.
