Warning: This piece contains details that some readers may find distressing
Touma hasn't eaten in days. She sits silently, her eyes glassy as she stares aimlessly across the hospital ward.
In her arms, motionless and severely malnourished, lies her three-year-old daughter, Masajed.
Touma seems numb to the cries of the other young children around her. I wish she would cry, the 25-year-old mother tells us, looking at her daughter. She hasn't cried in days.
Bashaer Hospital is one of the last functioning hospitals in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, devastated by the civil war which has been raging since April 2023. Many have travelled hours to get here for specialist care.
The malnutrition ward is filled with children who are too weak to fight disease, their mothers by their bedside, helpless.
[The RSF] took everything we owned - our money and our livestock - straight out of our hands, she says. We escaped with only our lives. With no money or food, Touma's children began to suffer.
Sudan is currently experiencing one of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies. According to the UN, three million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished. The hospitals that are left are overwhelmed.
The lifesaving medicines needed by the children in the malnutrition ward must be paid for by their families. Masajed is a twin; she and her sister Manahil were brought to the hospital together. But the family could only afford antibiotics for one child.
Touma chose Manahil, recounting the decision that haunts her, I just want them both to get better, she says, cradling her dying daughter. I have nothing. I have only God. Survival rates here are low. As we leave, the doctor says none of the children in this ward will survive.
Across the whole of Khartoum, children's lives have been rewritten by the civil war, where conflict has not only taken lives but has obliterated futures.
