Inside Sudan’s army-controlled capital as civil war enters fourth year

KHARTOUM, Sudan – One year since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) retook the capital, large parts of the ravaged city are a ghost town. The shell of the grand presidential palace is stained black from fire and smoke, its windows and floors blown out, its Islamic-style arches and columns crumbling.

Posters of martyred soldiers, some looking barely into their teens, are seen across the capital. The street signs and concrete buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes. Carcasses of burned-out vehicles have been dragged to the side of the road or dumped in empty lots. Bombed-out planes still line the tarmac at Khartoum International Airport, which only resumed domestic flights in February. 

A few days in the city is plenty of time to realize just how difficult the road ahead will be for Sudan’s military government and its people. And fighting continues to rage in much of the country, with no end in sight three years after this brutal civil war started. 

The Hill joined a rare delegation with five other foreign journalists on a weeklong trip sponsored by the ONE Campaign, the nonprofit advocacy organization co-founded by U2’s Bono and focused on health and economic development in Africa. 

The SAF-dominated government exercised tight control, facilitating the transportation, recommending interviewees and closely observing some of the independently organized meetings. Still, the conversations in Khartoum and Port Sudan showed there are still extraordinary people fighting for peace and a new Sudan. 

‘Either there’s Sudan or not’

On April 15, 2023, open conflict erupted in the capital between the country’s leading generals, the SAF’s Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and Mohammed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 

What has unfolded since amounts to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, fueled by foreign powers and largely ignored by the Trump administration as it focuses on conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran. The global community has failed to step up and fill the gap.

“This is intentional. It’s not forgotten; it’s there, everybody knows what’s happening but it’s intentionally because of the politics,” said Sulaima Elkhalifa Sharif, general director of the Combating Violence Against Women Unit under the SAF-controlled government.

“Even the humanitarian aid is manipulated politically.”

While Sudan’s civil war is often cast as a battle between two generals — Burhan and Dagalo — it’s complicated by a range of militias on both sides, armed tribes, and an increasing number of foreign powers. 

From the Middle East to Sudan’s neighbors, these countries are jockeying for interest in a resource-rich land plagued by conflict. 

Sharif was critical of the recently held Berlin conference on Sudan, a major fundraising forum that excluded representatives from both the SAF and RSF for their failure to come to a ceasefire. But the forum included the war’s main foreign backers: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which supports the RSF, and Burhan’s allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Sharif is also critical of the Sudanese political opposition in exile, called the Somoud Alliance.

“The international community is actually ignoring the fact that things are not the same after the war. Those are not the prodemocracy people we want,” she said. “There are other prodemocracy people. There’s other people in Sudan … they are prodemocracy, but they are not part of this alliance.” 

Sharif represents some of the hard trade-offs within the SAF-controlled civilian government — working with the people who have tried to kill her and imprison her. In 2019, Sharif survived an RSF-led crackdown on peaceful protesters in Khartoum, where an estimated 118 people were killed. In 2022, she was detained by the Burhan-controlled government for exposing sexual violence committed by military forces.

“There’s people in Sudan still, they’re still working with this government … it doesn’t have to be elected but they know its transitional government and things will change somehow and Sudan needs time to breathe actually,” she said. 

“For me as a Sudanese, I don’t want to be governed by the army. No one wants to. But actually we don’t have any options. Either there’s Sudan or not.”

The Trump administration has said there are no good actors on either side of the war. The SAF, like the paramilitary rebels it’s fighting, stands accused of war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. The U.S. has also sanctioned the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood — the Sunni-Islamist military and political movement allied with the SAF — as a foreign terrorist organization. 

Still, the RSF is viewed as even further beyond the pale, labeled as committing genocide against non-Arab ethnic groups: the Masalit in West Darfur and the Zaghawa and Fur communities in North Darfur. 

A bipartisan group of senators have called for labeling the RSF a terrorist organization. Earlier this month, Democrats introduced legislation that would also hold the UAE accountable for providing them with weapons.

“I think if the war doesn’t stop very soon, this will grow into something that we can’t do something about,” said Duaa Tariq, a prominent prodemocracy activist and organizer with Sudan’s grassroots mutual aid movement, the Emergency Response Rooms. The ERR’s were considered a front-runner for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Searching for solutions

The outbreak of fighting in the center of Khartoum in 2023 was a shock even for people accustomed to instability and conflict throughout the country’s turbulent recent history. 

Tariq was at the forefront of the 2019 prodemocracy movement that toppled the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. Burhan and Dagalo joined forces to oust Bashir, then worked together in 2021 to oust the transitional civilian leadership and strengthen the military’s control over the country. 

Still, gunfights in the street and fighter jets criss-crossing the Nile River were unheard of until the two military men took up arms against each other. Tariq was forced from her home and relocated four times while remaining in Khartoum. 

“I started calling it war probably by the end of the year, I think I was shocked or something,” she recalled, hosting our group on the first floor of an upscale home in the more tony area on the east side of Khartoum. The spacious room serves as a community space for artists and political activists to gather. An unfinished mural of tropical plants and a rising pink bird stretches across a brick wall painted blue. 

The war forced Tariq to shift her activism to focus more on humanitarian assistance and encourage a culture of mutual aid.

Volunteers offer a safe space for people to gather, get a break and receive support — health, food, shelter — while recipients are asked to donate what they can. This can amount to extra water for cooking or tea and coffee, extra foodstuffs or other forms of assistance.   

“The main idea is keeping the civilian space open and making sure a lot of people are participating,” she said, adding that her focus is particularly on women and children. She gave birth to her first child four months into the war. 

“I believe the solutions for the Sudanese problems can only come from the Sudanese people,” she said. 

Dr. Safa Ali is another woman who stayed behind, telling her husband when he pleaded with her to evacuate that she couldn’t leave. She had 172 cesarean sections scheduled for the next day. 

Under threat from bombs outside the hospital, she said her fear was eased by the joy of the crying baby following delivery. But she also recalls one of her staff members being killed in front of her as explosions occurred around them, and, during another attack, saving a pregnant mother and her fetus after shrapnel pierced the woman’s abdomen and lodged in the unborn child’s arm. 

When the situation became too dangerous for the hospital to remain open, patients gathered outside her home asking where they could go for help. She drove them to another hospital that wasn’t set up with a maternity ward. 

“I told them, no problem, you’ll go with me. I take the women in my car and go to the surgical department in Al Nao Hospital. Three days, we prepare our department while I do my C-sections and normal deliveries in the surgical department in Al Nao Hospital,” she said.

“It was difficult days, but we continued.” 

Ali is lobbying her colleagues to come back to Sudan. 

“The health system is destroyed, but it can be built up again by our hands. If we are not here it is difficult. I told them to come back again.” 

The health, humanitarian and social needs of the country are overwhelming — the numbers dwarfing other crises across the world. More than 30 million people in need of aid, 12 million displaced, the majority inside Sudan with the refugees outside borders exacerbating regional instability. Sudan is also hosting more than 1 million refugees who are fleeing fighting from South Sudan and Eritrea. 

Sudan is facing all types of disease outbreaks: malaria, dengue, measles, polio, hepatitis E, meningitis, and diphtheria.

Humanitarian agencies are running on fumes, with the U.S. and other major donors throttling foreign aid over the past few years. Sky-high fuel prices and lack of commodities like fertilizer due to the Iran war are only compounding the challenges on the ground. 

The network of militias on both sides of the fighting stifle the ability of humanitarian workers to move around the country safely, and both the SAF and RSF are criticized for creating overly bureaucratic processes for aid groups trying to secure authority and permissions to travel.  

Atrocities on both sides of the war, rampant sexual violence and recruitment of child soldiers are just some of the traumas wrought on the population. 

At the technocratic-led Health Ministry, acting minister Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim agrees that Sudan meets the metrics for the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but he sees a “huge opportunity” to remake the country. 

Sudan needs to spread its health services outside of the capital city, building up its facilities in the historically ignored periphery. The shutdown of services in Khartoum amid the fighting underscored the fragility of the centralized system, he explained. 

Ibrahim imagines a focus on decentralizing health services could influence other parts of the state, “the decentralization of the power itself.” 

“It is not an opportunity, it is a huge opportunity!” he said in an interview in his office, sitting in oversized sofa chairs and flanked by two flags, Sudan’s national flag and one for the Ministry of Health. Different awards and distinctions line the wall and fill another glass cabinet. 

Recently, the Health Ministry deployed the first-ever CT scanner in the north of the country.  

He said previous efforts to set up health facilities in far-flung parts of Sudan failed because consultants couldn’t hack living in such isolated areas. 

“Consultants were there and come back after three months and said ‘I need better schools for my children, better lifestyle.’ That means the development needs to be decentralized, it is a good opportunity.”  

‘We are remaining in Sudan‘

An estimated 4 million Sudanese people are choosing to return to areas under SAF control, the result of a mix of factors reflecting the improved security situation, but also the insecurity of being a refugee abroad or internally displaced. 

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a U.N. agency, warned this month that restoration of essential services must be accelerated or the country would be at risk of another humanitarian disaster. The IOM said it was $97.2 million short of its funding goal to aid this effort. 

While downtown Khartoum is largely empty, the markets are busy in the neighboring city of Omdurman. Crossing over the converging Nile Rivers — the slow-moving but expansive Blue and White Niles meet in Khartoum — tables line the street with fresh watermelons, mangoes and bananas. A man drives a cart hitched to a donkey, loaded with bags of pita. 

Sellers occupy the first floor of destroyed cinder-block buildings, selling major appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and stand-alone air conditioners. A fish market by the river is full of people, and herders gather their goats in an empty lot alongside piles of destroyed cars. 

“There was a bustling life for us,” said one Khartoum resident, who spoke to The Hill without the observation of SAF government personnel. 

“I know we are a third-world country, but this is our life. We live this life in happiness and enjoying this small life, but right now it’s vanished. No one from our friends, family and community are here. It’s millions of Sudanese — it’s not a figure, it’s real — millions are witnessing and living this hard experience.”

This Khartoum civilian said they lived 15 months under occupation by the RSF in the capital city, calling the SAF takeover of the city “a miracle.”  

“It’s a fact. It’s a miracle. Right now, SAF and the government, they are playing [working] hard to regain the ordinary life here, to revive the city.” 

Sharif, the director of the Combating Violence Against Women Unit, describes the war in the country as existential.

“The regime will go, but the institutions will stay. We have to stay behind to protect the institutions,” she said. 

Still, Sharif cannot guarantee that she’ll stay in Sudan forever. With three children, it’s difficult to see their future here. 

“I might be thinking of living somewhere [else], but this is not the thing that I think about all the time,” she said. 

It’s difficult to imagine her children living outside Sudan, but Sharif believes that if they do go, even to attend a university in another country, “I will go with them because I can’t leave them.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But until then, we are remaining in Sudan.”

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