They're desperate to flee violence in Sudan. But their passports are stuck, so they are, too

BEIRUT -- It took a bullet for Ashraf Malik to start panicking. For the first three days of Sudan's latest eruption of armed conflict, the 23-year-old dental student bunkered in his apartment in Khartoum, watching the fighting rage close to his neighborhood in the Sudanese capital but feeling relatively unconcerned.

"I didn't take it seriously. I thought it would be a minor conflict and resolve itself within a couple of days, as usual," he said in an interview via WhatsApp.

But then a .50 caliber slug smashed through a window, chomping out an iPhone-sized chunk in the wall above where his cousin was sleeping.

"That's when we decided to leave," he said.

There was just one problem: Malik couldn't get his passport. Two days , he