By Amina Ismail, Nafisa Eltahir and Renee Maltezou
CAIRO/ATHENS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Bahr el-Din Yakoub fled Sudan to seek sanctuary in Egypt after a missile ripped through his home in Khartoum and killed four of his friends.
But economic hardship and a crackdown on refugees in Egypt pushed him onwards, first along dangerous desert smuggling routes into northeastern Libya, and then on the perilous sea crossing to the Greek island of Crete.
Yakoub, 25, is one of a small but growing number of Sudanese refugees who are giving up on Egypt and taking their chances in Libya, rather than returning home where civil war has been raging since April 2023, according to migrants, smugglers, aid workers and activists.
While the flight of tens of thousands of Sudanese to Libya via their common border has been documented, the trend of Sudanese nationals feeling they have no option but to take the northern route out of Egypt has not previously been reported.
For this story, Reuters spoke with 32 Sudanese refugees. While a few are still in Egypt, most described how they had moved on due to the difficult conditions there, making it to Libya, Greece and France.
And as more Sudanese head to Libya, where the situation can be precarious for refugees, more are boarding boats for Europe.
In the first five months of 2025, the number of Sudanese nationals arriving in Europe jumped 134% from a year earlier, even as overall numbers of people crossing from North Africa declined, according to preliminary figures from the U.N.’s refugee agency UNHCR.
“The sea was rough and it was a very difficult trip, but we were exhausted by all that we endured in Libya. We had no other choice, either we cross or die,” Yakoub said, adding that he had been detained, arrested and ill-treated by Libyan authorities and militias.
Europe has supported the Libyan coastguard, which returns migrants stopped at sea to detention centres, and has funded Libyan border management programmes. A U.N. fact-finding mission concluded in 2023 that crimes against humanity had been committed against migrants in some Libyan detention centres.
Major General Ibrahim Al-Arbd, head of Libya’s Department to Combat Illegal Migration in the eastern Libyan district of al-Butnan, said as of January, 20,000-25,000 Sudanese had crossed into Libya via Egypt since the Sudan war started.
He said many of them held refugee status in Egypt but had struggled to settle there due to economic hardship. He said in May that 200-250 Sudanese were crossing per week and, as summer approaches, he expected the number to rise.
‘SAFETY BEYOND EGYPT’
Since the war between Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces started, more than 4 million Sudanese have been driven into neighbouring countries, according to UNHCR.
By far the largest number, 1.5 million, fled north to Egypt.
Although Egypt initially allowed visa-free entry for all but working-age Sudanese men, it limited entries after a surge in arrivals, leading to more refugees using smuggling routes to reach the country, according to migrants, migration lawyers and aid workers.
Securing residency in Egypt – a crucial step for obtaining access to basic services such as health and education – also became increasingly difficult, with significant delays and financial barriers, they said.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry and State Information Service (SIS) did not respond to requests for comment.
Mahmoud Fawzi, Egypt’s Minister of Parliamentary and Legal Affairs and Political Communication, denied any restrictions had been placed on issuing residency permits to Sudanese migrants.
For many, the process, which required a deposit of about $1,000 under an August 2023 decree, was unaffordable, leaving them living on the fringes of society. Some instead undertook the lengthy project of acquiring U.N. refugee status.
But a government crackdown last year put those who had not paid at risk of being rounded up or deported, regardless of their refugee status, according to three migration lawyers in Egypt who have handled hundreds of such cases.
Rights groups and migration lawyers said there has been an increase in deportations from Egypt since the passage of a new asylum law at the end of 2024 which placed refugee approval and registration under government control instead of the UNHCR.
“The sense of insecurity created by this new situation among refugees and asylum seekers, combined with their inability to return to their own country, has led them to seek safety beyond Egypt, facing the perils of further migration,” said Mohamed Lotfy, director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, a non-governmental organisation in Egypt.
Fawzi said there was no bias against Sudanese nationals and they receive all their rights. He said no deportations happen unless people violate the law, or choose to return home.
‘NO WAY I COULD STAY’
After leaving Khartoum a few weeks into the war, Yakoub moved three times in search of safety within Sudan. When he couldn’t find refuge, he paid smugglers to take him to Egypt. He believed the three-day journey across the desert would lead him to safety and stability, but life in Egypt proved difficult.
After arriving in Cairo in January 2024, he slept on cold streets for days, waiting to register with UNHCR. Eventually, he gave up, saying the waiting time was too long.
He moved into a small apartment with eight other Sudanese men and worked sporadically as a day labourer. Still, without proper documentation, he risked arrest as authorities began rounding up migrants without papers and deporting them.
“The conditions there were not suitable for a refugee … I did not have the proper documentation, and I was running from the authorities all the time. There was no way I could stay,” he said, speaking to Reuters from a migrant camp outside Athens.
“I was afraid of getting arrested and being sent back to Sudan, so I went to Libya,” he said, “But I found the situation there much worse.”
Critics of the asylum law say its criteria for determining refugee status are vague and it jeopardises the legal protection of those already recognised as refugees – including those with UNHCR documentation.
Lotfy, whose organisation provides legal support to migrants, said the new law appeared to have emboldened security forces further, with a rise in police reports and cases against Sudanese and sub-Saharan Africans. His organisation has documented dozens of cases where police confiscated UNHCR papers before deporting refugees, he said.
Egypt’s Fawzi denied any refugees or asylum seekers registered with UNHCR had been deported.
Numbers of deportations are not made public but according to two Egyptian security sources speaking on condition of anonymity, the security services had deported nearly 21,000 Sudanese, as of the end of March 2025, for their illegal presence or for violating Egypt’s laws.
Rights group Amnesty International has also documented the detention of migrants in Egypt in what it called cruel and inhuman conditions ahead of such deportations, which it says violate international law.
‘USING THE MIGRATION CARD’
Egyptian officials say the government has shown generosity by absorbing so many Sudanese despite economic pressures such as double-digit inflation and a dollar crunch. Fawzi said everyone benefits from national subsidy schemes.
Migrants in Egypt who spoke to Reuters disputed this, as did an internal EU commission report in 2024 seen by Reuters.
It said about 1.5 million of the 9 million migrants Egypt says it has taken in were in vulnerable situations. Of them, nearly 1 million were registered as refugees and asylum seekers as of May 2025, according to the UNHCR.
“Migrants and refugees are not entitled to domestic subsidy schemes or social protection programs and a large number of them have become food insecure,” the report said, adding that this had prompted many to move onwards.
Five Western diplomats and EU officials said Cairo has attempted to pressure Brussels into increasing financial aid – in exchange for stopping migrants from heading to Europe.
Tineke Strik, a member of the European Parliament and rapporteur for Egypt, said during a visit in December she met Fawzi and he asked her, “Imagine if our border guards took a four-week holiday. What would happen then?”
“They are really using the migration card to get money from the EU,” Strik said.
Fawzi declined to comment.
In March, the EU announced a 7.4 billion euro funding package for Egypt as part of a push to stem migrant flows.
Anti-immigration rhetoric has surged throughout the EU since more than a million people, mainly from Syria, arrived via the Mediterranean in 2015. This hostility has been exploited by right-wing and nationalist parties, pushing governments to adopt increasingly restrictive migration policies focused on returns.
In recent months, the EU and member states have proposed policies criticised by human rights group to accelerate deportations and send migrants to hubs in third-party countries with which migrants have no connection.
Two months after arriving in Libya, Yakoub boarded a dinghy bound for Crete with about 50 other people, mostly Sudanese.
The Eastern Mediterranean route he took was the second most active route into the EU from January to April, with 12,228 people crossing, the EU’s border agency Frontex said. The Central Mediterranean route to Italy and Malta was the most active.
Though the Eastern route has seen a year-on-year decline in traffic, the number of Sudanese has surged to among the top three nationalities from January to May, totalling about 1,469 people, according to Frontex. This represents a significant rise from 361 during the same period last year and 237 the year before.
Yakoub said he was relieved to be safe finally in Greece, and to start thinking about the future.
“If Greece offers me safety and stability, I will stay.”
(Reporting by Amina Ismail in Brussels and Calais, Nafisa Eltahir and Aidan Lewis in Cairo, and Renee Maltezou in Athens; Editing by David Clarke)
Comments