ABOUT 300 infants, toddlers and older children have been rescued from an orphanage in Sudan’s capital after being trapped there while fighting raged outside, aid officials said today. 

The evacuation came after 71 children died from hunger and illness in the facility since mid-April.

The deaths have highlighted the heavy toll inflicted on civilians since clashes erupted between forces loyal to General Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan and Rapid Support Force (RSF) forces led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.

About 300 children at the al-Mayqoma orphanage in Khartoum were transferred to a “safer location” elsewhere in the north-east African nation, said Ricardo Pires, a spokesman for the United Nations children’s agency Unicef.

The International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) which helped with the evacuation, said the children, between a month and 15 years old, were relocated after securing a safe corridor to Madani, the capital of Jazira province, about 85 miles south-east of Khartoum. 

Jean-Christophe Sandoz, the head of the ICRC delegation in Sudan, said: “They [the children] spent incredibly difficult moments in an area where the conflict has been raging for the past six weeks without access to proper healthcare, an especially hard situation for children with special needs.”

Nazim Sirag, an activist who heads local charity Hadhreen, said that the children were ferried late on Tuesday to a newly established facility in Madani.

Mr Sirag, whose charity led humanitarian efforts to help the orphanage and other nursing homes in Khartoum, said at least 71 children died at the Al-Mayqoma since the war in Sudan began on April 15, including babies as young as three months.

The children had been trapped in the fighting for over seven weeks as food and other supplies dwindled. 

“The safe movement of these incredibly vulnerable children to a place of safety offers a ray of light in the midst of the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” Mandeep O’Brien, Unicef representative in Sudan, said in a statement. 

Local volunteers, meanwhile, evacuated 77 other children earlier this week from separate foster homes to a temporary shelter along with 11 adults in a school in the town of Hasahisa, also in Jazira province.

More than 860 civilians, including at least 190 children, have been killed and thousands of others wounded since April 15, according to Sudan’s Doctors’ Syndicate which tracks civilian casualties. 

The conflict has forced more than 1.9 million people to flee their homes, including around 477,000 who crossed into neighbouring countries, according to the UN’s migration agency.