Khartoum

When conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Force (RSF) had reached its peak in early 2024, Saleh Iliyas and Abdurrahim, his friend-turned-family member, were doing the math: staying could mean dying at home, and leaving could mean dying on the road. But what becomes of a man whose world is torn in halves?  

The conflict in Sudan had caught Saleh unprepared. He was just a tailor with steady hands when the violence came without warning. He could remember when he heard the first gunshot in April 2023. It sounded like a joke, “but Khartoum breathed its last quiet breath before the storm then.”

Saleh never thought the recent tensions between the RSF and local communities in Khartoum would escalate into a full-blown war. Here he was now, not only consumed by the violence but also considering moving out. 

Deciding where to go was easy since he had lived part of his childhood in Nigeria. The difficult question was how to move out with a sick and ageing father, a young wife, and two children, including a newborn. 

Then a turning point came.

As he sat in front of his house for Iftar, the evening meal during Ramadan, one day, a rocket passed over his head and landed a few meters away. The result was a huge blast, fire, collapsed buildings, and many dead bodies.

“It was as if Khartoum stood still for a second, and then the screams from the women, children, and men who were either terrified or affected, followed,” he told HumAngle. 

Saleh had to leave. He spoke to his father and his friend, Abdurrahim. A driver who knew his way to safety said he needed three days to arrange it. 

Within the three days of waiting, violence intensified in Khartoum. Power lines were severed, the internet was disrupted, and rumours replaced news. The RSF and SAF engaged each other, and the war was everywhere.

Saleh’s house, where his wife, father, two children, and Abdurrahim had found safety, became both a refuge and a prison. Food dwindled. The markets were looted, and many high-rise buildings were targeted or destroyed.

“Do you think this will end soon?” his wife asked one night, her voice trembling over the silence.

He didn’t answer. He was thinking of the absurdity of the war — blood brothers from SAF and the RSF fighting each other with pride. He thought of how men killed for mere symbols and a warlord who didn’t care.

They did not sleep peacefully in the three nights before the driver decided they had to leave. “We’ll go west,” he said, “through Omdurman. Maybe reach some safe villages, then south. There are routes people are taking.” 

That night, Saleh stepped outside to see Khartoum one last time. The mornings that began with laughter and the Nile’s breeze were all gone. He remembered the faith that tomorrow would always come. Now, tomorrow was a ghost. 

And so began their exodus, not as wanderers seeking land, but as souls, as resilient individuals who believed that there was a life to continue elsewhere.

On the torturer’s fork 

To understand Saleh’s ruin, one must first understand the men who lit the match.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudan Armed Forces, was a career soldier moulded by the doctrines of control and hierarchy. He rose through the ranks during Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule, loyal to the idea that the army was the soul of Sudan.

Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, was his ally. He is a former camel trader from Darfur who built his power on the backs of Janjaweed militias that were once accused of all sorts of war crimes. Hemedti’s RSF, which was an offshoot of the Janjaweed, became an autonomous force, commanding men who were not new to violence.

When al-Bashir fell in 2019 after months of civilian protests, the two generals joined forces to secure the transition, but peace was only a mask. The revolution that brought them together also planted the seeds of distrust.

By early 2023, tensions over integrating the RSF into the regular army had boiled over. Hemedti refused to dissolve his forces, fearing subjugation; al-Burhan insisted it was necessary for a unified state. And so, the generals who once shared a coup became rivals in a war that would tear their country apart.

Abdulrahim and Saleh could recall that during the revolution that brought El-Bashir down, many people were supporting the army, “and then just a year into the regime, everything changed for the worse,” said Abdurrahim. “Inflation rose and prices skyrocketed five times.” 

Saleh explained that the size of bread that once cost 1 SDG (Sudanese pound) rose to 3 SDG under El-Bashir and led to protests, but it became about 15 to 20 SDG under al-Burhan. 

“So you could see why people were angry with al-Burhan, and when squabbles started between him and Hemedti, people like us were supporting the RSF because we thought he was doing a great job, not pursuing any selfish interest,” Saleh said. 

Hemedti won the hearts of the Sudanese by calling for a democratic transition. But as the tension rose, said Saleh, many RSF trucks were positioned “almost everywhere in Khartoum.” 

According to him, Khartoum residents are administrative people and are not familiar with seeing weapons and military personnel stationed on every corner. That situation led to lots of skirmishes between civilians and the RSF, which made the paramilitary lose its popularity. 

And then the war broke out. 

The first weeks were chaos. Khartoum became a battlefield, its neighbourhoods reduced to rubble of what once were. Jets roared over the city as SAF bombarded RSF positions, while paramilitary men seized streets, looted markets, and turned homes into barracks. 

Hospitals were shelled, schools attacked, buildings destroyed, and corpses lay unburied in the heat. Humanitarian corridors were promises that dissolved under fire.

“Every high-rise building, every mall, bank, or any empty building became a hideout for snipers or a target of bombs,” said Abdurrahim. “Lots of people were killed while attempting to run away.”

Despite that danger, more than 10 million Sudanese fled their homes, spilling into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and beyond. Refugee camps rose overnight. The United Nations called it “the world’s largest displacement crisis.” Families were separated, and in the chaos of the roads, mothers buried children without names. 

Saleh knew the stories before becoming one. He heard of those who died on the road to Port Sudan, those who drowned in the Nile trying to escape, and those who vanished into the desert.

And then foreign actors got involved. 

Egypt, with its close ties to the army, threw its weight behind al-Burhan’s forces, seeking a stable ally along the Nile. UN investigators accused the United Arab Emirates of backing the RSF, funnelling weapons through Chad and the Central African Republic, an allegation it has denied. 

Russia’s Wagner Group, long embedded in Sudan’s gold trade, was reported to have supported Dagalo’s men in securing mining sites. Countries condemned both sides, but diplomacy also took a bullet in the crossfire.

Long road to Nigeria 

One night in early 2025, Saleh, his father, his friend Abdurrahim, his wife, and their two children joined a small group of neighbours, eighteen in all, mostly women and children, to begin their escape.

They had been warned about the dangers. Snipers perched on rooftops, looters prowled the streets, and militias set up unpredictable checkpoints. 

“We had to move as one,” Saleh recalled. “If we walked separately or rode in a car, we might never make it out.”

They moved silently through the alleys of Khartoum. Behind them, the echoes of shelling rolled like distant thunder. Ahead lay uncertainty, hundreds of kilometres of dust, hunger, and fear. “But anything was better than staying,” said Saleh.

Abdurrahim, his childhood friend, walked beside him. “You know where you are going,” he said, “but you don’t know the road to follow. You just keep moving along the direction and stepping carefully to avoid danger.”

They reached the outskirts of the city by dawn, where they met the driver, a middle-aged man who had turned his pickup into a vessel of salvation amidst a war. He took what little they carried: documents, a few clothes, and “some stuff my father said was important,” recalled Saleh.

The drive southward revealed the full reality of the war. Buildings Saleh once admired — the glass towers, the university Abdulrahim attended, the small tea shops that once lined the streets — lay in ruins. Skeletons of burned cars littered the roads. 

They zigzagged across Sudan, avoiding the territories of warring factions, surviving on bread, water, and anything their small money could buy. The journey that should have taken days stretched into weeks. 

“We knew it wouldn’t be easy,” Saleh said, “but we didn’t imagine it would be this hard.”

When they finally reached the border with South Sudan, they rested for a day. They had thought they wouldn’t be welcomed, especially due to the recent history of conflict between North and South Sudan, “but were really supported there.”

“My son was even given water by one of their soldiers,” Saleh said. 

From South Sudan, they moved again, passing through the Central African Republic into Chad. They met others moving in the same direction on foot. One group of about ten told Saleh they had started the journey as more than thirty. “They looked haunted,” he said. “Their faces told stories the mouth could not.”

It rained the day they arrived in Chad. They were temporarily registered as refugees, yet Saleh felt restless after a few weeks. “You cannot live waiting for mercy every day,” he said softly. “You begin to forget who you are.”

Nigeria, where his late grandfather hailed from, seemed the next logical destination. Though Saleh himself was born in Saudi Arabia, he spent some of his childhood years in Nigeria.  

“I thought we could come here and start afresh before the war ended,” he said.

Now in Nigeria, the dust of the journey still clings to his eyes, the eyes of a man who has seen too much of the evil humans can do to one another.

Safety and its aftermath 

From the Chadian border, through Maiduguri, in Nigeria’s North East, they finally arrived in Kano, in the country’s North West. Saleh and Abdurrahim found a city that looked energetic, but beneath it ran a quiet struggle. They rented a small shop in Rimin Auzinawa and waited for customers who rarely came.

“The economy is choking everyone,” Saleh said. “People rarely bring new clothes, and when they do, the amount they pay is too small.”

They had imagined Nigeria as a place of opportunity, where hard work would bring dignity. But the naira’s fall made everything expensive. “You open the shop from morning to night,” Abdurrahim said, “and at the end, you barely earn enough for bread.”

Saleh and Abdurrahim told HumAngle that the money they had come with was about to finish, and they were not earning enough to sustain life. Now, as evening fell over Kano, Saleh and Abdurrahim sat outside their shop, their machines silent, their thoughts elsewhere.

“We will leave the families here,” Saleh said, his voice low. “Let them have stability, even if we don’t. Algeria is not home, but maybe there, a man can at least feed those he loves.”

And so, once again, the journey calls — not for safety this time, but for survival.

Explosions were heard in the vicinity of Khartoum International Airport amid uncertainty over its reopening.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have targeted Sudan’s capital Khartoum and its main airport with drones for a fourth consecutive day, as the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) attempts to resume air traffic after regaining control of the city several months ago.

Drones and surface-to-air missiles were heard above the capital in the early hours of Friday morning, residents living close to the Khartoum International Airport told Al Jazeera, before loud explosions went off.

It is unclear whether the capital’s main airport was successfully hit and the extent of the damage.

The attack marks the fourth consecutive day of attacks that began on Tuesday, a day before the airport was scheduled to become operational after at least two years of war.

A single plane operated by the local Badr Airlines landed on Wednesday, before an airport official told AFP on condition of anonymity that the airport’s reopening has been postponed “under further notice” because of incoming attacks.

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, said that “despite authorities saying that operations are scheduled to start on October 26, there are concerns that this will not happen”.

The war, which started in April 2023, has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced about 12 million more and left 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, making it the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Return to Khartoum

The Sudanese military retook the capital from the paramilitary force in March. Since then, residents have been tentatively returning to their homes, often to find them destroyed.

Alfatih Bashir’s house in Omdurman, which he built using all his savings, has collapsed ceilings and damaged walls. “I built it when I was working abroad,” Bashir told Al Jazeera, adding that now he did not posses the necessary funds to repair the damage.

“I’m not working, I’m just sitting idly with my wife and two children. We sometimes barely have enough to eat. How can I even start to rebuild?” he said.

Authorities are still assessing how many houses have been damaged in the conflict, but the scars of the battle between the military and the RSF are visible across the capital.

Another resident, Afaf Khamed, said she fainted when she saw the extent of the damage.

“This house is where we were born, where all our family members got married. I now live here with my sister, and we can’t rebuild because we don’t have anyone to help us,” she told Al Jazeera.

The collapse of the local currency makes reconstruction an impossible feat even for those who have retained a job during the war. While salaries have remained stable, the Sudanese pound spiked from 600 pounds to the US dollar in April 2023, when the conflict started, to 3,500 pounds.

Goods are also hard to come by in the war-torn country, hampering reconstruction. Shop owner Mohammed Ali said materials take too long to arrive because of security checks, and that makes them more expensive. As a consequence, “fewer and fewer people are coming to buy building materials”, he said.

Sudan’s government has pledged to rebuild the capital, but its focus as so far has been on state institutions, while residents are left to figure out how to rebuild on their own.

In Shambat al-Aradi, a tight-knit neighbourhood in Khartoum North once known for its vibrant community gatherings and spirited music festivals, two childhood friends have suffered through confinement and injustice at the hands of one of Sudan’s warring sides.

Khalid al-Sadiq, a 43-year-old family doctor, and one of his best friends, a 40-year-old musician who once lit up the stage of the nearby Khedr Bashir Theatre, were inseparable before the war.

But when the civil war broke out in April 2023 and fighting tore through their city, both men, born and raised near that beloved theatre, were swept into a campaign of arbitrary arrests conducted by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The friends were detained separately and tortured in different ways, but their experiences nonetheless mirrored one another – until they emerged, physically altered, emotionally broken and forever bound by survival.

Imprisonment and ransom

Al-Sadiq’s ordeal began in August 2023 when RSF forces raided Shambat and arbitrarily arrested him and countless other men.

He was crowded into a bathroom in a house that the RSF had looted along with seven other people and was kept there for days.

“We were only let out to eat, then forced back in,” he explained.

During his first days of interrogation, al-Sadiq was tortured repeatedly by the RSF to pressure him for a ransom.

They crushed his fingers, one at a time, using pliers. At one point, to scare him, they fired at the ground near him, sending shrapnel flying into his abdomen and causing heavy bleeding.

After three days, the men were lined up by their captors.

“They tried to negotiate with us, demanding 3 million Sudanese pounds [about $1,000] per person,” al-Sadiq recalled.

Three men were released after handing over everything they had, including a rickshaw and all their cash. Al-Sadiq and the other remaining prisoners were moved to a smaller cell – an even more cramped toilet tucked beneath a staircase.

“There was no ventilation. There were insects everywhere,” he said. They had to alternate sleeping – two could just about lie down while two stood.

A few kilometres away, al-Sadiq’s friend, the musician, who asked to remain anonymous, had also been arrested and held at the Paratrooper Military Camp in Khartoum North, which the RSF captured in the first months of the war with Sudan’s military.

That would not be the only time the musician was taken because the RSF had been told that his family were distantly related to former President Omar al-Bashir.

“They said I’m a ‘remnant of the regime’ because of that relation to him even though I was never part of the regime. I was against it,” he said, adding that he had protested against al-Bashir.

Months into the war, his family’s Shambat home was raided by the RSF and his younger brother was shot in the leg. To keep everybody safe, the musician quickly evacuated his family to Umm al-Qura in Gezira state, then went home to collect their belongings. That was when he was arrested.

During his time at the military camp, he told Al Jazeera, the RSF fighters would tie him and other prisoners up and lay them facedown on the ground in the yard. Then they would beat them with a “sout al-anag” whip, a Sudanese leather whip traditionally made of hippo skin.

The flogging lasted a long time, he added, and it was not an isolated incident. It happened to him several times.

In interrogations, RSF personnel fixated on his alleged affiliation with al-Bashir, branding him with slurs like “Koz”, meaning a political Islamist remnant of al-Bashir’s regime, and subjecting him to verbal and physical abuse.

He was held for about a month, then released to return to a home that had been looted.

He would be detained at least five more times.

“Most of the detentions were based on people informing on each other, sometimes for personal benefit, sometimes under torture,” al-Sadiq said.

“RSF commanders even brag about having a list of Bashir regime or SAF [Sudan armed forces] supporters for every area.”

Forced labour

While he was held by the RSF, the musician told Al Jazeera, he and others were forced to perform manual labour that the fighters did not want to do.

“They used to take us out in the morning to dig graves,” he said. “I dug over 30 graves myself.”

The graves were around the detention camp and seemed to be for the prisoners who died from torture, illness or starvation.

While he could not estimate how many people were buried in those pits, he described the site where he was forced to dig, saying it already had many pits that had been used before.

Meanwhile, al-Sadiq was blindfolded, bound and bundled into a van and taken to an RSF detention facility in the al-Riyadh neighbourhood.

The compound had five zones: a mosque repurposed into a prison, a section for women, an area holding army soldiers captured in battle, another for those who surrendered and an underground chamber called “Guantanamo” – the site of systematic torture.

Al-Sadiq tried to help the people he was imprisoned with, treating them with whatever they could scavenge and appealing to the RSF to take the dangerously sick prisoners to a hospital.

But the RSF usually ignored the pleas, and al-Sadiq still remembers one patient, Saber, whom the fighters kept shackled even as his health faded fast.

“I kept asking that he be transferred to a hospital,” al-Sadiq said. “He died.”

Some prisoners did receive treatment, though, and the RSF kept a group of imprisoned doctors in a separate room furnished with beds and medical equipment.

There, they were told to treat injured RSF fighters or prisoners the RSF wanted to keep alive, either to keep torturing them for information or because they thought they could get big ransoms for them.

Al-Sadiq chose not to go with the other doctors and decided to cooperate less with the RSF, keeping to himself and staying with the other prisoners.

Conditions were inhumane in the cell he chose to remain in.

“The total water we received daily – for drinking, ablution, everything – was six small cups,” al-Sadiq said, adding that food was scarce and “insects, rats and lice lived with us. I lost 35kg [77lb].”

Their captors did give him some medical supplies, however, when they needed him to treat someone, and they were a lifeline for everyone around him.

The prisoners were so desperate that he sometimes shared IV glucose drips he got from the RSF so detainees could drink them for some hydration.

The only other sources of food were the small “payments” of sugar, milk or dates that the RSF would give to prisoners who they forced to do manual labour like loading or unloading trucks.

Al-Sadiq did not speak of having been forced to dig graves for fellow prisoners or of having heard of other prisoners doing that.

For the musician, however, graves became a constant reality, even during the periods when he was able to go back home to Shambat.

He helped bury about 20 neighbours who died either from crossfire or starvation and had to be buried anywhere but in the cemeteries.

The RSF blocked access to the cemeteries without explaining why to the people who wanted to lay their loved ones to rest.

In fact at first, the RSF prohibited all burials, then relented and allowed some burials as long as they were not in the cemeteries.

So the musician and others would dig graves for people in Shambat Stadium’s Rabta Field and near the Khedr Bashir Theatre.

He said many people who were afraid to leave their homes at all ended up burying their loved ones in their yards or in any nearby plots they could furtively access.

The friends’ ordeals lasted into the winter when al-Sadiq found himself released and the RSF stopped coming around to arrest the musician.

Neither man knows why.

Both al-Sadiq and the musician told Al Jazeera they remain haunted by what they endured.

The torment, they said, didn’t end with their release; it followed them, embedding itself in their thoughts, a shadow they fear will darken the rest of their lives.

On March 26, the SAF announced it had recaptured Khartoum. Now, the two men have returned to their neighbourhood, where they feel a greater sense of safety.

Having been detained and tortured by the RSF, they believe they’re unlikely to be viewed by the SAF as collaborators – offering them, at least, a fragile sense of safety.

Severe levels of ‘hunger, destitution and desperation’ found in the town of Jabal Awliya, south of Khartoum.

The risk of famine in Sudan has extended close to the capital Khartoum, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned as the country’s brutal civil war grinds on into its third year.

The agency has discovered “severe” levels of hunger in the town of Jabal Awliya, some 40km (25 miles) south of Khartoum, the WFP’s Sudan representative Laurent Bukera said on Tuesday.

Speaking upon his return from a visit to Khartoum state, Bukera described “widespread destruction” in the town and other areas around Khartoum, and called for urgent international action to prevent famine.

“The needs are immense,” Bukera said from Port Sudan, describing “limited access to water, healthcare and electricity”, as well as a cholera outbreak.

“Several areas in the south of the city are at high risk of famine,” he added. “The international community must act now – by stepping up funding to stop famine in the hardest-hit areas and to invest in Sudan’s recovery.”

The WFP, which says it is assisting four million people across the country, has had to reduce food rations in areas at risk of famine to 70 percent due to a major funding shortfall.

‘Meeting basic needs critical’

The government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023. The army took control of Khartoum in March and declared the city “completely free of rebels” in late May.

Now that WFP has access to the area and is able to make regular aid deliveries, the agency said it was doing everything it could to bring the local population back from the brink of famine.

Bukera said “the level of hunger, destitution and desperation” found in Jabal Awliya was “severe, and basically confirmed the risk of famine”.

The war has killed tens of thousands of people and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises. Over four million have fled the country and some 10.5 million are internally displaced, according to United Nations estimates.

Bukera said that with people expected to return to heavily damaged areas like Khartoum, the pressure on already overstretched resources would intensify.

“WFP is deeply concerned, and meeting basic needs – especially food – is critical and urgent,” he said.

Famine has already been declared in five areas across Sudan, including three displacement camps near el-Fasher in the southwest.

It has been all but confirmed in el-Fasher itself, where aid agencies say a lack of access to data has prevented an official famine declaration.

Across the country, nearly 25 million people are suffering dire food insecurity.

The announcement comes weeks after the army made gains in and around the capital city to push back the RSF.

Sudan’s army has announced it has cleared the state of Khartoum of rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after weeks of intensive battles, with the civil war now in its third year.

The General Command of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) said in a statement on Tuesday that the state – which comprises the capital Khartoum, its twin city Omdurman, and the city of Khartoum North (Bahri) – is now “completely free of rebels”.

“We also renew our pledge to our people to continue our efforts until every inch of our country is liberated of every rebel, traitor, and agent,” said the SAF, headed by Sudan’s de facto leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

This comes after Sudan’s army secured a number of victories in battles in and around the capital in March, including the recapturing of the presidential palace and major urban centres that culminated in taking back the Khartoum airport from the RSF, headed by General Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.

In late March, al-Burhan had declared “Khartoum is free” hours after the recapture of the key airport, although smaller battles were ongoing with RSF militias in pockets around the state.

Reporting from Khartoum, Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan said intense battles raged in recent days in southern Omdurman’s Salha area, which was the last remaining major RSF stronghold and home to one of the group’s largest military bases.

“The army had been making gradual advances in the Salha area in the past few days until it was able to take control of the area completely from the RSF in the early hours of Tuesday morning,” she said.

“The army also said it was able to recover weapons and ammunitions that were used by the paramilitary, including drones and jamming systems.”

After more than two years of devastating civil war that has gradually attracted foreign funding and weapons, control of Sudan remains torn between the two generals and their allies.

The SAF dominates the north and the east – including the smallest state by area, but most populous, Khartoum – along with some central areas, while the RSF holds most of western Sudan, including most of Darfur.

Where the RSF has been forced back on the ground, it has been trying to inflict damage with drone strikes, including those that have targeted energy infrastructure in both Khartoum and Port Sudan.

Fighting has also been ongoing in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in western Sudan, as well as some key supply lines in Kordofan.

More than 12 million people have been forcibly displaced by the war so far, with tens of thousands killed and many exposed to ethnicity-based violence.