ASWAN, Egypt: Thousands of people fleeing war in Sudan have taken refuge in the Egyptian city of Aswan on the Nile, where families are helping to keep the tourism industry afloat.
“We finally got to Aswan,” said Hisham Ali, 54, who reached Egypt after an odyssey that took his family south from the fighting in Khartoum before heading more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) north again to the Egyptian border.
Thousands of people have been stranded since Egypt tightened visa rules in July.
“Aswan is beautiful, its people are kind,” a former government employee told AFP from a rest stop in the popular holiday destination.
During the winter months, the city is full of Egyptian and international travelers – attracted by the abundance of Pharaonic monuments, the views of the Nile River and the warm weather.
When Sudanese families began arriving in April, many of the city’s boat captains and business owners were ending their off-season in the summer heat.
They didn’t expect the influx of refugees or the much-needed business they brought to Egypt’s struggling economy.
“I took my family for a fun day, I want them to forget as much as possible the days of war and bombs and airstrikes and gunshots,” Ali said as the sound of children playing echoed around him. .
Around 310,000 people have crossed from Sudan to Egypt since the outbreak of war on April 15 between the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
“We fled Khartoum three months ago,” said Zeinab Ibrahim, 30, after two months of sheltering from constant airstrikes, artillery fire and street battles.
“I was pregnant and there were no hospitals left where I could give birth,” she told AFP of the situation in Sudan, where the UN says 80 percent of hospitals are out of order.
After crossing the Egyptian border, many continued north to the capital Cairo, while others like Ali and Ibrahim stayed in Aswan, Egypt’s southernmost major city and one of its most popular tourist destinations.
Amid an early September heat wave, when many ship captains would have docked in years past, their flat-bottomed vessels instead weaved through the Nile islands, blasting music and daring teenagers plunging into the water from the upper decks.
Families cooled off from the sweltering heat on the sandy shore, where guides told visitors to take a dip in the river between sips of Nubian coffee.
“I’ve been doing this for five years,” said Mahmoud Al-Aswany, 19, sitting on the deck of his boat.
“Since our Sudanese brothers came from the war, work has started to improve and there has been more work in the tourism industry.”
Egypt is currently going through its worst economic crisis in history, which has devastated purchasing power across the country.
Inflation hit a record 39.7 percent in August and the pound has lost half its value against the US dollar since the start of last year.
Reaction to the influx of Sudanese refugees has been mixed. In Cairo, people fleeing the war complained of housing discrimination, soaring rents and racism.
In Aswan, where local Nubian communities have strong historical ties across the border, early arrivals were met by volunteers offering hot meals and warm messages of welcome at bus and train stations.
But many arrive from arduous journeys in dire need, only to find aid operations limited. Cairo does not operate refugee camps and insists that new arrivals instead have the right to work and move freely.
According to the United Nations, those seeking some relief in the Aswan sun are among the one million people who have fled across the border and the four million internally displaced in Sudan.
As the violence shows no signs of stopping, the UN anticipates that these figures will continue to climb.
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project’s conservative estimate states that by September, the fighting had claimed at least 7,500 lives.
