Pregnant Sudan woman forced to flee fighting in Khartoum

A heavily pregnant woman who was shot at and had to walk for hours to reach a border crossing with her three-year-old daughter, her husband has said.

The woman had been trapped in Khartoum, the capital of the war-torn Sudanese capital, after fighting broke out last month, and her husband, who works as a carer in Wolverhampton, tried to get her a UK visa.

The couple, both 25 - 25 - are Eritrean refugees who can't be named for security reasons. The husband received refugee status after seeking asylum in the UK, and applied for a refugee family reunion visa in February 2022 at the Home Office.

The president's wife and daughter were waiting in Khartoum before the fighting started, as it was safer there than in Eritrea. The couple became pregnant in the autumn of last year when their husband visited their daughter in Khartoum.

When the fighting began in Sudan, she was hit by shelling when the ship hit her. The woman chose Egypt because there was little access to medical care, and food and water were scarce, making it difficult for her to make her way to Egypt.

We didn t tell our daughter about the war in Khartoum, he said, because we didn t want to frighten her. She could hear the sound of gunfire in Khartoum, but my wife told her not to worry because it was just fireworks. My wife and daughter were forced to leave everything behind when they escaped from Khartoum. My wife just took our marriage certificate and my daughter took a small bear with her she called Mohammed. She arranged for her daughter to name her baby boy after her teddy bear. The group, from Khartoum to Egypt's border via the city of Medani, began a worrying four-day journey, using various forms of transport, including lorry, bus and taxi.

At one point, the wheel came off the car they were travelling in and the vehicle overturned, injuring some of the passengers. The woman and her daughter were unharmed and were able to negotiate a price to continue their journey in another car.

The journey culminated in a walk of several hours from Port Sudan to an Egyptian border crossing in the middle of the night. The wife was told she was pregnant, and other refugees helped the wife to carry her daughter on the final leg of their search for safety.

Against all the odds, the baby, a boy, was born healthy on May 24 in the peaceful setting of a hospital in Cairo. The birth went so well that the mother and baby were released within hours.

The husband is determined to move his family to the UK in a hurry. He said the Home Office put the family's lives at risk because of the long delays.

While the government is encouraging refugees to use safe and legal routes instead of crossing the Channel in small boats, resettlement numbers have dropped by 75% since 2019 and family reunion visas are 40% lower than pre-pandemic levels.

The Home Office processing standard for a family reunion visa was 12 weeks at the time the couple applied for a family reunion visa. When the family's UK lawyer asked about the delay in February of this year, 12 months after the application was submitted, an official said that the Home Office was experiencing considerable delays in family reunion decision making and would not be able to provide an updated timescale for a decision.

I hope that the family reunion visa application will be processed very soon, he said. Our baby's safe arrival is a sight of hope for the future, and he shows hope for the future. He had to pay a lot of money for the journey to bring my wife and daughter to safety but money comes and money goes only life matters.