Pregnant 23-year-old Zamzam Adam was trapped, in labour, and alone as armed militias raided and pillaged her hamlet near the town of El Geneina in Sudan’s western Darfur area, and neighbours fled over the border into Chad.
The battle between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has not spared her town Ayatine in western Darfur, where the fighting has reignited a two-decade-old feud and simmering bloodshed.
Looting, ethnic retribution assaults, and skirmishes between the army and the RSF, which emerged from the janjaweed militias, have been recorded by residents and sources in western Darfur.
According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, at least 96 people have been murdered in Darfur since Monday in intercommunal violence sparked by the war.
“In our village, armed people came and burned and looted houses, and we were forced to flee,” Adam said.
Adam found herself alone as her neighbours frantically packed things to flee amid detonations and gunshots. Her spouse had moved to the east of the nation in quest of employment and had not been heard from in a long time.
Her sister and mother learned that she was going to give birth via a neighbour. They raced to her aid.
“When we arrived, she had already given birth, and everyone had abandoned her.” “I cut the child’s umbilical cord and we cleaned her up,” Adam’s 27-year-old sister Souraya Adam told reporters.
The ladies wrapped the newborn and started off immediately for the 30-kilometer (18-mile) walk over parched scrubland into Chad, where they joined an estimated 20,000 other Sudanese refugees who have left western Darfur for Chad since the conflict began.
“We let her rest for a while, and then we continued on to here,” Souraya Adam said at Chad’s Koufroun refugee camp.
Zamzam Adam sat on a mat beneath a tree, cradling and feeding her 13-day-old child, who had wept for five days, according to her sister.
“He is much better now; he does not cry as much as he used to.” “I know the child and his mother are both sick,” Souraya Adam claimed, adding that her sister had gotten rashes.
Large groups of women and children walked about them at the camp near the Sudanese border, while others slept in homemade shelters made of logs and rushes glued together with pieces of fabric.
The influx adds to Chad’s already-stressed resources, which were previously stretched by housing 400,000 refugees from earlier turmoil in Sudan.
