For most of their marriage, Ahmed Hendika and Noralsham Mansur have been on the move.
It was 2014 when they were first forced from Sudan, fleeing government threats to find safety in Jordan. They were displaced a second time in December 2015, when Jordanian authorities sent them back to Khartoum in a mass deportation following a protest by Amman’s Sudanese community. Now they are in Cairo, escaping persecution in Sudan a second time. From this sprawling, often hostile city, they are contemplating their next move.
“We feel our life is in danger here. We don’t have any protection from Egypt,” Hendika told Al-Monitor. “Because they deported us from Jordan, we do not have a place to stay, we do not have any work and even [Egyptian] society is not accepting us.”
Hendika and Mansur are two of around 600 Sudanese refugees forcibly returned to Khartoum by Jordanian authorities in December. Around 145 of that group are now thought to be in Cairo. For a month before the mass deportation, Sudanese refugees had demonstrated at the UNHCR offices in Amman against the hardship and hopelessness of life in Jordan. They were deported in violation of the non-refoulement law, which forbids returning people to where they are in danger of persecution; now, they are contemplating an even tougher situation.
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