After surviving weeks of fighting in Khartoum, Sanaa Mahmoud was finally able to get her family safely to Cairo but says her daughter continues to wake up at night screaming because of the gunfire and airstrikes that have rocked their neighborhood.

“They saw everything, the fire was falling on our house…they saw scary scenes”, said Mahmoud, speaking from a shelter in Cairo where she is with her two daughters. “He keeps screaming at night and yelling at me ‘why are these people coming to kill us?'”he said.

In Khartoum, Mahmoud describes how her daughter was running to her in a panic every time he heard fighter jets flying over them, fearing that they were in danger.

Her descriptions capture only part of the trauma suffered by hundreds of thousands of children in Sudan, where clashes between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force have erupted for weeks, leaving hundreds dead.

UNICEF estimates that 368,000 children have been forced to flee their homes in Sudan and a further 82,000 have fled to neighboring countries. He estimates that 190 children were killed in the first 10 days of the war and 1,700 were injured.

“Before the conflict, we already had 7 million children between the ages of 6 and 18 — of school age — out of school. We already had 611,000 children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition, with 3 million children under five suffering from malnutrition overall.”UNICEF Sudan official Madip O’Brien told Reuters. “With this conflict, we have seen the closure of schools and educational institutions across the country.”he said.

“Children are experiencing immense misery, especially in the heartlands of the conflict due to constant shelling and shooting. We have seen and experienced this first hand”he stated.

In Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where thousands of people have fled in the hope of fleeing the country, a group of artists are organizing voluntary activities for children to reduce the strain on their mental health.

“We have a number of cases of children experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder who have been taken to a psychiatric hospital. We have similar cases among adults as well,” said Rasha Mohamed Tahir, head of the mental health directorate at the Sudanese Ministry of Health. “What we can do now for the children is to support them and ease the psychological impact on them.”