Gedaref: Doctors in eastern Sudan say Mohammed Al-Juneid’s wife, displaced and diagnosed with cancer, needs treatment elsewhere in the war-torn country. But the road is long and dangerous, and the journey expensive.
“Even if we make it to Meroe in the north, who knows how long we’ll have to wait until it’s her turn,” the 65-year-old told AFP in Gedaref, where he and his wife have sought safety from the country’s raging war.
Since April 2023, fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has shattered Sudan’s already fragile health care system.
Fewer than 30 percent of hospitals remain functional, “and even so at a minimal level,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
For tens of thousands of patients with chronic illnesses, that has meant embarking on long, dangerous odysseys across front lines, often just to reach an overwhelmed and under-equipped health care facility.
Many have flocked to Gedaref in the east, where more than half a million people fled to escape the fighting.
In its single oncology facility — one of the country’s last — women draped in colorful traditional veils lie on beds, chemotherapy needles in their arms.
Among them is Juneid’s wife, who used to undergo radiation therapy at Wad Madani hospital in central Sudan before “it closed because of the war,” her husband said.
“Now the doctors say she needs radiation again, which is only available at Meroe hospital” — a 900-kilometer (560-mile) drive that is actually far longer if you want to avoid the fighters on the way.
The couple found a driver who agreed to take them on the bumpy, checkpoint-marked road. He would do it for $4,000 — a small fortune that Juneid cannot afford.
Lying on a nearby bed, schoolteacher Fatheya Mohammed said her cancer had become more aggressive “since the war began.”
“They give me chemo injections here,” she told AFP. But at bare minimum, she needs CT scans that are “only available in Kassala,” 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the northeast.
That might as well be half a world away. Over the past year, Mohammed has received only three months of her government salary, and can’t afford to go anywhere.
Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries even before the war, already had an under-funded and overwhelmed health care system before the war dealt the final blow.
Its two main oncology centers — in the capital Khartoum and just south in Wad Madani — have closed.
Smaller facilities, like the 27-bed East Oncology Hospital in Gedaref, have been overwhelmed by the influx.
In 2023 “we took in around 900 new patients,” the center’s director Motassem Mursi told AFP — up from their annual patient load of “around 300 to 400.”
In the first three months of 2024 alone “we’ve taken in 366 patients,” he said.
Of Sudan’s 15 oncology centers, only the one in Meroe still offers radiation therapy, an October article published in the online medical journal ecancermedicalscience confirmed.
The costs associated with treatment, transportation and accommodation are out of reach for many, “forcing them to confront their impending death without proper care,” wrote the authors, four doctors in Sudanese and Canadian hospitals.
“The limited access to oncology services during the current war endangers the lives of more than 40,000 Sudanese cancer patients,” they concluded.
Even if terminal patients were to accept their fate — at the hands of both disease and the war’s devastation — there is no respite from their daily physical agony.
Dire shortages of medicines, including painkillers, mean patients must “endure excruciating pain without recourse,” the authors wrote.
According to the WHO, “about 65 percent of the Sudanese population lack access to health care” entirely, in a country where upwards of 10 million people have been forced to flee their homes.
Shuttered hospitals and dire shortages place a “significant strain on and risks overwhelming the remaining facilities due to the influx of people seeking care,” the WHO has warned.
In Meroe, the last hope for patients in need of radiation treatment, the nightmare has come true.
“We have two radiation machines that work 24 hours a day,” a doctor at the Eldaman Oncology Center told AFP over the phone, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
“If one of them goes down, even just for maintenance, it causes an even bigger backlog of patients,” he said, exhaustion clear in his voice.
Costly odyssey for cancer care in war-torn Sudan
https://arab.news/weh89
Costly odyssey for cancer care in war-torn Sudan
- Fewer than 30 percent of hospitals remain functional
- Its two main oncology centers — in the capital Khartoum and just south in Wad Madani — have closed
‘People are suffering in a way you can’t even imagine’: Al Arabiya journalist recounts Sudan devastation
- Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar’s journey through Sudan exposes the brutal reality behind the headlines
- Millions are displaced, aid deliveries blocked, and camps are filled with traumatized women and children
RIYADH: Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar arrived in Sudan expecting to interview the de facto president. What she encountered along the way, over six harrowing days on the ground, reshaped her understanding of violence, survival, and the limits of language itself.
Speaking to Arab News after her return, Alekhtiar described what she witnessed not as collateral damage or the fog of war, but as something far more deliberate and systematic: a “gender-ethnic genocide.”
What she saw was a campaign of targeted killings of men and the mass rape of women that has shattered entire communities and displaced millions. “People are suffering, suffering in a way you cannot imagine,” Alekhtiar told Arab News.
“Firstly, I am speaking about the displaced people in the refugee camps. Fifty percent of the women who had arrived there had been raped. These are the women I encountered in the camps.
“For them (the militias), this is something they have to do to the women before allowing them to exit the war zone that they are in.
“Some of the women are much older, some of them are young girls, very young girls, 13, 14, 15, 16, and they have children who they don’t even know who the father is because they were raped by three or four, multiple masked men.”
Since the conflict erupted in April 2023, the civil war in Sudan — driven by a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces — has displaced millions and left a trail of murder and sexual violence in its wake.
Men are killed before reaching aid sites while women and girls are often raped so violently they require surgery. Mothers are found dead, still clutching their children. Pregnancies from gang rape are widespread.
This was not abstract reporting for Alekhtiar. It was what she saw.
She travelled to Port Sudan on Dec. 2 to interview Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Sudan’s de facto president.
However, at the request of his office, the interview was to take place in Khartoum — a city without functioning airport infrastructure and retaken from the RSF only in March.
With a small team — a videographer, producer and driver — Alekhtiar undertook the gruelling 12-hour drive from Port Sudan to the capital.
“Looking from one area to another area, you see the difference, you see the depression, you see it on the faces, you see it on the street, you see it everywhere, and you see the effect of the war,” she said.
The destruction was physical as well as psychological. “We saw so many cars and even RSF trucks that were scorched and burned on the side of the road.”
What unsettled her most was not only the scale of the devastation, but the fact that it was inflicted by Sudanese on Sudanese.
“What I have heard from them, there is no way someone can be a human being and can do that. No way. It’s impossible,” she said.
“And the way the city, the way Khartoum is destroyed, no way a person in their own country would do something like this. It’s crazy.”
Along the journey, Alekhtiar spoke to locals wherever she could, asking what they wanted from a war that had consumed their lives.
“They don’t want war. Definitely, they want peace. All of them want that. But at the same time they will not accept being under the leadership of the RSF. For them, there’s no way. And this is something I have heard from all of the people I have spoken to. I did not hear otherwise.”
From outside Sudan, the conflict is often reduced to brief news alerts. Alekhtiar says those accounts fall far short. When asked whether the coverage reflects reality on the ground, she replied without hesitation: “No, not at all, not at all.”
Nearly everyone she met had lost everything — homes destroyed, savings wiped out when banks were looted and burned. According to UNHCR, nearly 13 million people have been forced from their homes, including 8.6 million internally displaced.
On the road from Port Sudan to Khartoum, the scale of death was impossible to ignore. Alekhtiar recalls seeing clouds of flies everywhere, drawn by bodies buried hastily or not at all along the route.
During her six days in the country, her team stopped in Al-Dabbah, where UNHCR tents shelter displaced civilians. What she saw there still stays with her. “I want to emphasize one thing and it is very alarming,” she said.
“What I was witnessing in the camps was only women and children; there were no men. The only men I saw were very old in age. It’s a genocide. They are killing all men. They cannot go out.
“What we saw in the videos, it was real,” she said, referring to the graphic footage of atrocities circulating on social media. “It’s not true that it was one video and the reality is different than that. No, it was real.
“It’s a gender-ethnic issue. It is really a genocide. I’m not just using the word genocide for the sake of using the word. This is actually a genocide.”
Life in the camps was defined by scarcity. There were no spare clothes, almost no supplies, and most people slept directly on the ground. The UN was scrambling to respond, Alekhtiar said, but had never anticipated displacement on this scale.
She watched buses arrive packed with women, screaming babies in their arms. When she asked why the infants were crying, the answer was devastatingly simple.
“Because they are hungry … they are breastfeeding and we cannot feed them because we have not eaten,” they told her. The women’s bodies, starved and exhausted, could no longer produce milk.
UN staff told Alekhtiar they lacked resources as funding was insufficient. RSF fighters were also blocking the main roads, preventing aid from reaching those who needed it most.
Alekhtiar wished she had more time in the camps because this — bearing witness and amplifying suffering — is the core purpose of journalism, she said.
What the women told her there continues to haunt her. Rape survivors said they were treated as slaves, stripped of humanity by their attackers. “They need help, on a psychological level, human level, all levels,” Alekhtiar said.
“These women, I don’t know how they will live later. Some of them cannot talk. They are sitting and looking at me; they cannot talk. Some of them keep crying all day long. Some of them don’t go out of the tent.
“Some of them have kids with them. They don’t know who these kids are, because they found them on their way, and they took them, because they were children alone.
“One woman told me she took a child from his mother’s arms who was murdered, and the child doesn’t speak, even at his age of 3 years, he stopped being able to speak. So many stories, so many stories.
“The problem is the war is still ongoing, and they will come from other cities in their millions. We are not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands. We are talking about millions.”
Alekhtiar does not believe placing further sanctions on Sudan is necessarily the solution.
“The international community, countries, right now are announcing sanctions on Sudan, but that’s not enough,” she said.
“What people need there is support, humanitarian support, and they need real support from the whole world to stop this war because it’s not a normal war.
“A whole race is being killed. Being killed because they want to change the identity of one region. It’s a genocide.”
International sanctions have targeted individuals accused of mass killings and systematic sexual violence. The UK has sanctioned senior RSF commanders over abuses in El-Fasher.
The US, meanwhile, has sanctioned the Sudanese Armed Forces over the use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon that can cause fatal respiratory damage.
Asked about her own experience in the field, Alekhtiar said the availability of clean water was among the biggest challenges she faced.
“Showering was not an option,” she said, as most water came out black, contaminated, its contents unknown.
She barely ate, overwhelmed by what she was witnessing.
“I was crying all the time there, to be honest. I was sick for two days when I arrived back,” she said.
“After you leave, you become grateful for what you have when you see the suffering of others. They changed my whole perspective on life. It changed me a lot.”
