Parents Deported from Sudan Reunited with Children

24 de October de 2025

Location of Upper Nile state, South Sudan. (Ivan25, Creative Commons)

JUBA, South Sudan (Morning Star News) – South Sudanese children separated from their parents in deportations from the capital of Sudan, Khartoum, have been reunited with their families in South Sudan, according to media reports.

At least 71 children have been reunited with their families in the South Sudan town of Renk, Upper Nile state, Radio Tamazuj reported. Officials from Upper Nile state carried out the unification with coordination from their counterparts in Sudan.

The children were left behind when police deported their mothers in a crackdown in various parts of Khartoum as the government views the predominantly Christian South Sudanese as a threat to Islam and to security, though most of the deported women had lived in the country for decades.

Church leaders told Morning Star News that arrests in crackdown were ongoing.

“Of course, there are still arrests and crackdown in different parts of the capital,” said one church leader whose name is withheld due to security reasons.

The move comes as rights and civil society groups criticized the Sudanese government over the deportation earlier this month of more than 100 South Sudanese women without due process and legal aid.

Civil society organizations welcomed the step while urging Sudan to respect human rights and adhere to international law when deporting refugees to South Sudan.

“We thank the authorities in Renk and in Sudan for making this possible,” Solana Jeremiah, head of civil society organizations in Upper Nile state, told Radio Tamazuj. “Next time, people and governments should respect the law.”

Many South Sudanese remained in Sudan after South Sudan became an independent state on July 9, 2011, following civil war dating back to 1983. South Sudan’ population is 56 percent Christian, according to the Joshua Project; 34.1 percent of citizens practice ethnic traditional religion, and 9.4 percent are Muslim.

Sudan is 93 percent Muslim, with adherents of ethnic traditional religion 4.3 percent of the population, while Christians constitute 2.3 percent, according to Joshua Project.

The deportations came amid a civil war that broke out between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in April 2023.

Both the RSF and the SAF are Islamist forces that have attacked displaced Christians on accusations of supporting the other’s combatants.

The conflict between the RSF and the SAF, which had shared military rule in Sudan following an October 2021 coup, has terrorized civilians in Khartoum and elsewhere, killing tens of thousands and displacing more than 11.9 million people within and beyond Sudan’ borders, according to the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR).

The SAF’s Gen. Abdelfattah al-Burhan and his then-vice president, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, were in power when civilian parties in March 2023 agreed on a framework to re-establish a democratic transition the next month, but disagreements over military structure torpedoed final approval.

Burhan sought to place the RSF – a paramilitary outfit with roots in the Janjaweed militias that had helped former strongman Bashir put down rebels – under the regular army’s control within two years, while Dagolo would accept integration within nothing fewer than 10 years.

Both military leaders have Islamist backgrounds while trying to portray themselves to the international community as pro-democracy advocates of religious freedom.

Sudan was ranked No. 5 among the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian in Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List (WWL), down from No. 8 the prior year. Sudan had dropped out of the top 10 of the WWL list for the first time in six years when it first ranked No. 13 in 2021.

Following two years of advances in religious freedom in Sudan after the end of the Islamist dictatorship under Bashir in 2019, the specter of state-sponsored persecution returned with the military coup of Oct. 25, 2021. After Bashir was ousted from 30 years of power in April 2019, the transitional civilian-military government had managed to undo some sharia (Islamic law) provisions. It outlawed the labeling of any religious group “infidels” and thus effectively rescinded apostasy laws that made leaving Islam punishable by death.

With the Oct. 25, 2021 coup, Christians in Sudan feared the return of the most repressive and harsh aspects of Islamic law.

The U.S. State Department in 2019 removed Sudan from the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) that engage in or tolerate “systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom” and upgraded it to a watch list. Sudan had previously been designated as a CPC from 1999 to 2018.

In December 2020, the State Department removed Sudan from its Special Watch List.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.