Children of Sudan .. when gunpowder is innocence

Ahmed Fadl-Khartoum

At the foot of the "black" mountain, grief gripped the village of Fath 3 (far north-west of Khartoum state), where a heavy artillery shell killed eight children, who thought it was a treasure and wrote their last moments in life.

And from the mountain overlooking the houses of the village as a majestic guard they carried, until they entered a simple room in one of their homes; it brought them some drifts, but carried them to death without touching their ears again calls "scrap" dealer.

Eight children - four of them brothers of two families - were killed by a bomb in the open area of ​​Omdurman last Saturday, and the blast was heard two kilometers away.

The room where the shell exploded did not bear the strength of the shrapnel. The force of the explosion opened up a large slit on the other side. The rest of the walls were not spared from fragments that penetrated the bodies of the young. The remains are stuck.

Three iron beds where the children were sitting, trying to dismantle an oval metal body in the back of a thin copper ring, turned into a pile of scraps filled with holes that extended to the door of the house outside.

Disaster Day
It was a harsh Saturday for the people of Al-Fath 3, and they are bringing eight of their sons to the modern cemetery as the place they moved to years ago, without the water and electricity networks.

Hassan Abdullah Adam seems to suffer double the loss of two of his sons, Fares 12 years and ten years, tells Al Jazeera Net that he works as a porter in the popular market in Omdurman for between two hundred and three hundred pounds a day (about 4.2 and 6.3 dollars.

"I left them sleeping," he said. "I do not see them playing until Friday because I work every day from morning till evening."

Adam blames the scrap dealers who roam the area in the evening looking for vendors, prompting the boys to look crazily for iron, copper and aluminum across the mountain previously used by the army for shooting training.

Along the ring road north of Omdurman and even the neighborhoods of Fatah, military areas are scattered. The army has already moved to these areas, but its vacancy in those far-flung areas has greatly affected the steady expansion of the capital and the heavy immigration from other states.

Piles of grief
Like Adam, Thuraya Khamis suffers from a double sadness. The shell transformed her two sons, Tamer and Atta Al-Mannan, into pieces. She was the first to enter Hell's room, according to what she told Al Jazeera Net.

"When I entered, some children found a pile of meat, but my son Tamer and another named Mohammed Hassan were alive. I spoke to them and I asked Tamer about his brother. He pointed to a torn body under the bed and to his left a child named Nader." Tamer and Muhammad were carried to my hospital. I have only the certificate. "

Thuria recounts that she found Fares and Yasin Mittin, both of them knit. In one corner, a boy named Izzat lay lying bloodstained, and another named Mustapha was muzzled on one of the beds.

Zahra Abdel Rahman accompanied the house that witnessed the tragedy. She was outside the moment of the accident and says with tears that she could not see her son Nadir (12 years old) after her neighbors prevented her from collapsing because of the severity of his pain.

And the father of "Nader" Mohammed Ishaq - like his wife, he was traveling to Port Sudan - almost self-sufficiency and says he does not have a picture of a small to remember him.

"The house is still mine, but I do not think I can stay there any longer," he said.

Scrap and Candy
Nour al-Din Ibrahim told Al-Jazeera Net how his son Ezzat, 10 years old, died on Saturday morning for his work in Al-Nasr neighborhood (south of the capital Khartoum) and his heart tells him that something will happen and he will call at ten o'clock to reassure himself.

He says he arrived to find Ezzat covered with gauze. He uncovered the cover to find an injured wound on his stomach, while one of the victims was divided in half, the other with his head and hands separated from his body.

"They were dying for nothing, they sold a kilogram of scrap for between 10 and 15 pounds (less than half a dollar) to buy a piece of candy or anything small they wanted."

It turns out that a ninth partner of the children survived the inevitable death after the victims removed him and closed the door of the room to spoil their bloody treasure.

Government promises
The parents of the two brothers, Faris and Yasin, said residents of the area called on the Interior Minister, the governor of Khartoum and the police chief during their visit to the village on Sunday to organize awareness campaigns targeting mothers and children to avoid foreign objects.

The General Administration of Criminal Evidence confirmed in Sunday's bulletin that the children of Al-Fath were victims of a "85 mortar" shell from the remnants of old shooting exercises, and field teams found another Dana in the area and were dealt with during extensive sweeps on Sunday.

It seems that the incident of the children of the village of conquest is not the first of its kind in the region, and the official in the People's Committee Khamis Adam of Al Jazeera Net that a similar incident occurred in 2012 in the west of the mountain and killed several people.

Khamis hopes that the government officials who visited them will keep their promises to conduct a survey to clear the area of ​​any possible unexploded ordnance. He also calls on humanitarian organizations to pay attention to the grim reality of the region because children are selling scrap for poor economic status.

Interior Minister Bichara Juma Aour told Al Jazeera.net that a joint team of the army, other security forces and the mine action agency will begin a comprehensive survey of the area and all areas similar to clearance of weapons remnants.

To keep the children's memories alive, the minister confirmed that the government would set up a school to honor their names, as well as the government's commitment to pay the victims' debts.