Nowhere left to run: Sudan's Blue Nile State braces under the weight of two crises

Amira left Kurmuk locality in Blue Nile State on foot, in the dark, with her three children and nothing else.

"We heard the guns getting closer, people were running away," she says. "I did not wait. I took my children and walked before sunrise."

It took her a few days to reach Damazine - days on foot and on crowded trucks, through scorching heat and fear, with three children and no certainty of what was ahead of them. She arrived without her belongings, without money, without a plan. The Al Karama displacement sites were already crowded when she arrived, filled with families who had made the same difficult journey, carrying little more than the clothes they were wearing.

She is one of more than 73,000 people who fled Kurmuk, a strategic border town in Blue Nile State's southeastern corner - around 150 kilometres from Damazine - after successive waves of brutal fighting turned it into one of the conflict's most contested frontlines. Since March 2026, Kurmuk has changed control more than once, each takeover bringing fresh violence, destruction and displacement. Humanitarian aid workers and local authorities reported cases of looting, forced displacement and other forms of violence. As the fighting shifted from one area to another, more families were forced to flee their homes.

For UNHCR and its partners, the pace of the Kurmuk displacement left no room for delay. With timely funding from the Sudan Humanitarian Fund, UNHCR mobilised an emergency response across shelter, essential relief items, cash assistance and emergency protection services.

In Blue Nile, UNHCR managed to reach more than 3,000 families with emergency shelter kits and essential relief items: tarpaulins, blankets, jerry cans, cooking sets, mosquito nets, solar lamps and sleeping mats - the basic tools of survival for a family that has left everything behind. More than 1,200 families received cash assistance, giving them the flexibility to meet needs that a kit cannot cover. Over 5,500 individuals accessed vital protection services through individual case management, referral pathways, ad hoc assistance for children and survivors of gender-based violence, as well as psychosocial support.

For Amira, receiving a family tent was a turning point. Before it arrived, she and her children had been sheltering under a makeshift structure for weeks- scraps of cloth and whatever materials she had managed to gather near the site. It kept out little.

“That night, my children finally had a roof. It was not a small thing."

"We had been sleeping under the sky," she says. "When they brought the tent, I set it up with the help of other members of the community”.

Zainab is seven months pregnant. She arrived at Al Karama site with her children, her mother and her sister - displaced together, but in many ways each carrying their own fear alone. She did not know in what conditions she would give birth, whether there would be a doctor, whether there would even be a roof. The displacement had taken everything: shelter, stability, the ordinary certainties that a woman expects when she is about to bring a child into the world.

When the cash assistance reached her, she knew immediately what she needed.

"I am very happy to receive this money," she says. "It will help me buy clothes for my children, bedding materials, food and medicine."

She asks for what any mother would ask for - enough to prepare, enough to be ready, enough to give the child she is carrying a decent beginning in a place that has offered her very little. For Zainab, the cash is not just money. It is the possibility of being ready for what is coming.

"With the money, I can decide. After weeks of having nothing, deciding something makes me feel like being a person again," said Zainab.

The Kurmuk displacement is not only a humanitarian emergency. It is a protection crisis. Many of those who arrived in Damazine carried not only physical exhaustion but the weight of things they had witnessed and survived - things that do not fit inside a shelter kit or a cash transfer.

UNHCR's protection teams worked alongside distributions to identify the most vulnerable - women travelling alone, survivors of violence, families separated in flight, unaccompanied children - opening confidential spaces where people could speak privately and receive referrals to further support. Protection support included individual case management, referral pathways to specialised services, ad hoc assistance for children and survivors of gender-based violence, and psychosocial support for those carrying the heaviest emotional toll of displacement.

"I did not think anyone would listen," says Fatima, mother of five. "I had seen things I could not say out loud. When the case worker sat with me, I told her. She wrote it down. She told me what would happen next." She pauses. "It helped to know there was a next."

For Fatima, the psychosocial support she received in the weeks that followed became as important as any material assistance. Someone to talk to. Someone who checked back. A space that belonged to her, however briefly, in a site where privacy is a luxury few can afford.

"I am not forgetting what I lived. But I am not carrying it alone anymore."

Alongside the internally displaced from Kurmuk, the Al Karama sites are hosting another population - one whose story begins with a much longer journey.

The approximately 98,000 Sudanese returnees now living at the sites came from South Sudan in waves since last year, where they had lived for years after fleeing Sudan when the conflict broke out in April 2023. But as humanitarian funding is declining and South Sudan's own instability deepened, staying became untenable. Food rations were cut. Assistance dried up. Violence crept closer. So, they decided to come home.

Bathoul left Maban in South Sudan in March after food distributions were reduced to a fraction of what her family needed. Together with her sister, she sold the little their families had, boarded a boat along the Nile, then walked - for days - until they reached Renk and crossed the border at Joda. The journey to Damazine took weeks. When they finally arrived, exhausted and carrying almost nothing, they found a state still marked by conflict, with the Kurmuk crisis already unfolding around them. The home they had imagined - stable, familiar, theirs - was still a long way away.

"I thought Sudan would be better than what we had," she says, sitting in the shade of a tarpaulin at Al Karama. "In some ways, it is. In other ways, it is the same struggle, different ground."

At Al Karama, she received essential relief items - a small but vital gesture of support at the end of a journey that had taken everything she had.

Sudan remains the world's largest displacement crisis, with more than 11 million people internally displaced. Blue Nile State, already hosting South Sudanese and Ethiopian refugees alongside a growing returnee population, has been pushed to its limits by the Kurmuk emergency. The Sudan Humanitarian Fund's ability to move resources quickly has been critical - the Blue Nile response would not have happened at the speed it did without it. But the response is not finished. Families are still arriving. The situation in Kurmuk remains dangerously unstable.

Bathoul has found a small routine at Al Karama. She wakes up early, prepares what she has, and sends her children to the temporary child-friendly space on-site. When they come back, the food is ready. It is a modest rhythm - but it is hers, and for now it holds.

She still hopes to go back to her village one day. But, she is not ready to think about that yet.

"For now, we are here. We are alive. We are together. That is what I hold onto."

The Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF), managed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), is a rapid funding mechanism that supports national and international NGOs and UN agencies to respond to Sudan's most pressing humanitarian emergencies. In 2026, UNHCR received $15 million through the SHF to scale up its emergency response across Sudan, covering shelter, non-food items, protection and cash assistance for the most vulnerable displaced populations. The response in Blue Nile is part of this broader nationwide effort to deliver timely, life-saving support to an estimated 233,000 displaced, returnee and war-affected people, in an environment where needs continue to outpace available resources.

For Bathoul, who has been displaced twice and lost more than most people will ever know, one thing has never wavered.

"I have been displaced twice in my life. Once from Sudan, once from South Sudan. Both times I lost things I cannot get back. But I am still here. My children are still here. We are still Sudanese. That does not go away."