Caution: This piece includes information that certain readers may consider distressing
The mother has gone without food in several days. She sits silently, her eyes distant as she looks aimlessly across the hospital ward.
Held close, motionless and critically malnourished, lies her three-year child, Masajed.
She appears numb to the sounds of the remaining infants around her. "I wish she would cry," the 25-year-old mother tells the observers, looking at her daughter. "She has been silent in days."
The medical center is one of the last operational hospitals in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, devastated by the civil war which has been raging since April 2023. Many have journeyed hours to get here for specialist care.
The malnutrition unit is occupied with young patients who are insufficiently strong to combat illness, their parents by their bedside, helpless.
Distress calls here cannot be comforted and each one cuts deep.
Touma and her family were forced to escape after fighting between the national military and the armed group Rapid Support Forces approached their residence about 125 miles south-west of the capital.
"[The RSF] took all our possessions - our savings and our animals - directly out of our possession," she says. "We fled with just our lives."
Having no funds or food, the mother's offspring began to suffer.
She looks shocked as she recounts their previous existence. "In the past, our house was filled with plenty. We had livestock, milk and fruit. But currently we have no resources."
Humanitarian Emergency
Sudan is presently experiencing one of the global most severe relief emergencies.
According to the UN, 3 million minors under the age five are acutely malnourished. The hospitals that are remaining are overwhelmed.
The facility provides care and basic treatment without cost.
However, the lifesaving drugs needed by the young patients in the undernourishment ward must be paid for by their relatives.
The girl is a twin, she and her sister her sibling were transported to the medical center together. But the family could only afford medication for a single child.
Touma had to face the devastating decision – she chose Manahil.
"I hope they could both recover and develop," her grief-stricken tone cracks, "and that I could see them moving and enjoying with each other as they did before.
"I just want them both to get better," she says, cradling her failing daughter.
"I am alone. I have nothing. I have only faith."
Chances of recovery here are minimal. For the families on this unit the conflict has stolen everything. They have been left with no means and no means to purchase the medicines that would save their offspring.
As we leave, the doctor states not one of the children in this ward will recover.
Across the entirety of Khartoum, young people's futures have been rewritten by the internal conflict.
City Devastation
What started as an eruption of hostilities between loyalists supporting two generals – military commander Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and paramilitary chief Hemedti – soon consumed the city.
For two years – up to March of this year when the army retook control - the city was gripped by war as rival fighters fought.
The city, previously a hub of culture and commerce on the banks of the River Nile, transformed into a battlefield. Tanks rolled into neighbourhoods. Military aircraft flew overhead. Civilians were caught between exchange of fire, artillery bombardments and aerial attacks.
It is in this destroyed environment, within the quiet of destruction, that the delicate voice of a child rises from the rubble.
Twelve-year-old Zaher wheels himself through the wreckage, past destroyed cars, tanks, broken homes and forgotten bullets.
"I want to return home," he whispers softly to himself as his mobility device rolls over broken glass and shrapnel. "I cannot find my home. Where's my residence?"
Personal Tragedies
His words, vulnerable but resolute, contains both a sorrow for what has been destroyed and a subtle optimism that one day, he may finally go home.
Within a structure now being serving as a shelter, the boy's parent the woman describes observers about what existence was like under paramilitary control.
"The situation were extremely challenging," she says. "We were unable to use our electricity at night - it seemed like we were thieves. We didn't light fires. We didn't move at all at night."
She sits next to her son in a space lined with sleeping arrangements.
"At any moment, whether you were sleeping or taking a shower, standing or seated, you encounter them [the RSF] breathing down your neck."
Numerous residents fled the city, but the boy and his mother had no way to get out. To survive, they traded food items on the roads.
Then a particular day, as they worked side by side, a drone attacked.
"I looked at him and he was bleeding. There was the fluid all around," the mother recalls. "I was losing awareness. I compelled myself to stay awake because I knew if I passed out, I would lose him forever."
The boy's limbs were badly damaged. After hours of agony, they made it hospital.
"I continued praying: 'I beg God, take my life instead of his limbs,'" she cries.
However medical professionals could not preserve his lower limbs. Both had to be removed slightly under the joint.
"Upon awakening and ask: 'Why did you let them remove my limbs?'" She looks down, her expression showing regret, "I had no response."
Both the mother and her child cry, tormented by the recollection of what happened to them. The situation deteriorates by knowing that artificial legs could give Zaher a opportunity at his old childhood, but his mother cannot pay for them.
Regarding the boy, the memory of what happened is too painful to talk about.
He only shares one simple aspiration. "I wish I could have prosthetic legs so I can participate in soccer with my companions like I used to. That's all."
Lost Youth
Children in Khartoum have been robbed not only of their early years but of secure locations to play and be young.
Educational institutions, football pitches and recreation areas are now destroyed, with broken evidence of a life taken by war.
"It was quite pleasant here," states 16-year-old the teenager looking around a ruined amusement area and playground.
