Since the brutal takeover of the Sudanese city of El Fasher by militia forces in late October, aid workers in the closest safe town have reported a disturbing sight: the arrival of hundreds of unaccompanied children, many of them emaciated and hungry.

“We spoke to a small girl of 13 years old who was carrying a five-month-old baby, and she had no clue where her mother, her four brothers, her older sister were, because they had been separated,” Arjan Hehenkamp, Darfur crisis lead for International Rescue Committee (IRC), tells TIME.

“That’s a horrible anecdote, but that's representative of the stories of all those [...] people who came only with part of their families, and very often with a severe under-representation of adult men,” he adds.

Estimates of the number of children who have

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