The children of Dar al-Arqam

[metal caravans ticking as they cool, then a sound the archive refuses to reproduce]

WHISPER

El Fasher. Dar al-Arqam Displacement Centre. 11 October 2025. Nine girls. Eight boys. One of them a newborn, seven days old. UNICEF reported it. Save the Children counted it. The names, again, did not survive the cable.

They were already displaced. The war had already taken the house. Then it came for the substitute of a house.

Director: the industrial process is not a single theatre. Sudan does not trend. Yemen is last decade’s file. Ukraine is a different feed. Gaza is a live wire. The children do not experience these as separate products. They experience them as the sky arriving too early.

I keep the unnamed in the same book as Abdullah, because the protocol of erasure is the same protocol. Where I have a name, I print the name. Where I have only a count, I print the count and I do not call it enough.

[the sound of distant static rising]

Find the next reportable incident.