Khartoum, Sudan – In 2021, volunteers opened a small sanctuary for lions south of the capital, Khartoum, relocating them from a rundown zoo. But just two years later, it had become a conflict zone between regular troops and the paramilitary Rapid Response Forces (RSF).

“The reserve was attacked, the infrastructure was destroyed and animals were injured,” Osman Salih, founder of the Sudan Animal Rescue Centre, told AFP.

Now, with the help of Austrian animal protection group Four Paws, Saleh has finally begun the rescue mission, which involves 15 lions and 50 other animals, including hyenas and birds, evacuating them through a maze of military checkpoints.

The death toll in the conflict, which began in April last year, had risen to more than 10,000 by early November, according to the US NGO Armed Conflict Locations Incident Data Project (ACLED), while the number of displaced people has risen to 6.3 million, according to the United Nations.

Sudan’s already fragile infrastructure has collapsed, and animals are suffering from an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

“We’ve lost seven lions, all of them from disease except one killed by a stray bullet,” Salih said, because they could not provide the treatment they needed.

Lions eat five to ten kilograms of meat every day, but the lions rescued from zoos were malnourished, and before the conflict, volunteers sometimes had to pay for their food out of their own pockets.

However, when the conflict began, the lions became so hungry that they began cannibalizing the lionesses killed by stray bullets.

Four Paws veterinarian Amir Khalil said this was “abnormal behaviour” and evidence the lion was “physically weak and psychologically traumatised”.

■ Sedatives

No one can now enter or leave Khartoum without permission from the army and the RSF, who have surrounded the city in concentric circles, questioning and detaining people traveling to and from the capital and confiscating goods.

Four Paws has previously rescued animals from war-torn areas including Libya, the Gaza Strip and Mosul in Iraq, and this time their mission is to evacuate the animals to eastern Sudan.

The key is “security measures,” Khalil told AFP, especially “communication with both sides to the conflict.”

The sedated animals were then placed into transport cages and driven some 140 kilometres (85 miles) along roads dotted with checkpoints to reach Um Barona National Park in Wad Madani in the south of the country.

The plan is to spend a few days here “resting and rejuvenating from the journey” before heading to Dinder National Park, a UNESCO biosphere reserve on the Ethiopian border.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), lion populations across the continent fell by 43 percent between 1993 and 2014, with just an estimated 20,000 left in the wild. (AFP/Sofiane Alsaar)