War pushes Sudan towards the abyss
As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year. An additional 9 million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on Earth
Published: 06:06 PM,Jun 08,2024 | EDITED : 10:06 PM,Jun 08,2024
Artillery shells soar over the Nile, smashing into hospitals and houses. Residents bury their dead outside their front doors. Others march in formation, joining civilian groups. In a hushed famine ward, starving babies fight for life. Every few days, one of them dies.
Once a proud city of gleaming high-rises, oil wealth and five-star hotels on the Nile, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground. A feud between two generals fighting for power has dragged the country into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.
As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year, by American estimates. An additional 9 million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on Earth, the United Nations says. A famine looms that officials warn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in the coming months and, if unchecked, rival the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
The war erupted without warning in April 2023, when a standoff between Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group it helped create — the Rapid Support Forces — burst into gunfire on the streets of Khartoum.
Few Sudanese expected it would last long. Since independence in 1956, their country has experienced more coups than any other in Africa, most short-lived and bloodless. The rivals this time — the national army and the paramilitary force that once did its bidding — had seized power together in 2021 but fell out over how to merge their armies.
Almost immediately, the fighting ripped across Khartoum and far beyond, in pulsing waves that quickly consumed Africa’s third-largest country. Sudanese have been stunned by the destruction, but neither side looks capable of victory, and the war is metastasising into a devastating free-for-all.
Another genocide now threatens Darfur, the region that became synonymous with war crimes two decades ago. Fields have become battlegrounds in the country’s breadbasket. The health system is crumbling. And a plethora of armed groups has piled into the fight.
With US-led peace talks stalled, the Sudanese state is collapsing and threatening to drag down a fragile region with it. Experts say it is a matter of time before one of Sudan’s many neighbours, like Chad, Eritrea or South Sudan, gets sucked in.
Gunfire and mortars splashed into the waters around Col Osman Taha, a badly wounded officer in the Sudanese military, as he crossed the Nile on a moonless night in November. Around him, he recalled, other wounded soldiers huddled in the boat, hoping to avoid being hit again. Several died.
Taha made it to the far bank, and five days later his right leg was amputated. Even then, there was no respite. As he recovered in a military hospital overlooking the Nile, he said, shells slammed into its walls, fired by the Rapid Support Forces across the river. Patients moved their beds to avoid being hit as artillery fell.
The Nile has long defined Khartoum. Its tributaries merge in the city centre before pushing north through the desert into Egypt. Now, the great river divides Khartoum militarily as well, yet another front line in a splintered capital.
Snipers nestle in the riverbank beneath a giant bridge, blown up in fighting, that slumps into the river. Drones swoop over the water, hunting for targets. And an island in the centre of the Nile, where people once picnicked and swam, has become a kind of open-air prison controlled by the RSF, residents say.
Half of Khartoum state’s 9 million residents have fled, the United Nations estimates. Its international airport is closed, bullet-pocked jets abandoned on the runway. Nearly all of the city’s 1,060 bank branches have been robbed, officials say, and many thousands of cars stolen — some later located as far away as Niger, 1,500 miles west — in a campaign of street-by-street looting, most but not all, by the Rapid Support Forces.
The military’s advance allowed hundreds of wounded troops to be evacuated by air to Port Sudan, where they lie in the crowded wards of a military hospital. One man had extensive facial injuries from a drone strike. Amputations were common.
The evacuees included Taha, who sat up in his bed to show a series of videos that he took during his last battle. Jubilant soldiers can be seen whooping and hugging, thinking they have won. Bleeding RSF fighters lie in the dust, and are kicked or taunted by the soldiers. The camera flips to show Taha, sweating heavily, his eyes glazed from battle.
But the soldiers had missed one RSF fighter, a sniper hidden in a residential block, and he shot Taha in the leg. Later that night, he said, medics moved him to an ammunition factory beside the Nile, where they embarked on their perilous crossing.
The United Nations has yet to officially declare a famine in Sudan, but few experts doubt that one is already underway in parts of Darfur and, shockingly, Khartoum.
More than 220,000 children could die in the coming months alone, the UN says. And both sides use hunger as a weapon of war, aid officials say. The army withholds visas, travel permits and permission to cross the front lines. Rapid Support Forces fighters have looted aid trucks and warehouses and raised their own obstacles.
Declan Walsh
The writer is a reporter covering Africa for The New York Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya
Once a proud city of gleaming high-rises, oil wealth and five-star hotels on the Nile, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground. A feud between two generals fighting for power has dragged the country into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.
As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year, by American estimates. An additional 9 million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on Earth, the United Nations says. A famine looms that officials warn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in the coming months and, if unchecked, rival the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
The war erupted without warning in April 2023, when a standoff between Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group it helped create — the Rapid Support Forces — burst into gunfire on the streets of Khartoum.
Few Sudanese expected it would last long. Since independence in 1956, their country has experienced more coups than any other in Africa, most short-lived and bloodless. The rivals this time — the national army and the paramilitary force that once did its bidding — had seized power together in 2021 but fell out over how to merge their armies.
Almost immediately, the fighting ripped across Khartoum and far beyond, in pulsing waves that quickly consumed Africa’s third-largest country. Sudanese have been stunned by the destruction, but neither side looks capable of victory, and the war is metastasising into a devastating free-for-all.
Another genocide now threatens Darfur, the region that became synonymous with war crimes two decades ago. Fields have become battlegrounds in the country’s breadbasket. The health system is crumbling. And a plethora of armed groups has piled into the fight.
With US-led peace talks stalled, the Sudanese state is collapsing and threatening to drag down a fragile region with it. Experts say it is a matter of time before one of Sudan’s many neighbours, like Chad, Eritrea or South Sudan, gets sucked in.
Gunfire and mortars splashed into the waters around Col Osman Taha, a badly wounded officer in the Sudanese military, as he crossed the Nile on a moonless night in November. Around him, he recalled, other wounded soldiers huddled in the boat, hoping to avoid being hit again. Several died.
Taha made it to the far bank, and five days later his right leg was amputated. Even then, there was no respite. As he recovered in a military hospital overlooking the Nile, he said, shells slammed into its walls, fired by the Rapid Support Forces across the river. Patients moved their beds to avoid being hit as artillery fell.
The Nile has long defined Khartoum. Its tributaries merge in the city centre before pushing north through the desert into Egypt. Now, the great river divides Khartoum militarily as well, yet another front line in a splintered capital.
Snipers nestle in the riverbank beneath a giant bridge, blown up in fighting, that slumps into the river. Drones swoop over the water, hunting for targets. And an island in the centre of the Nile, where people once picnicked and swam, has become a kind of open-air prison controlled by the RSF, residents say.
Half of Khartoum state’s 9 million residents have fled, the United Nations estimates. Its international airport is closed, bullet-pocked jets abandoned on the runway. Nearly all of the city’s 1,060 bank branches have been robbed, officials say, and many thousands of cars stolen — some later located as far away as Niger, 1,500 miles west — in a campaign of street-by-street looting, most but not all, by the Rapid Support Forces.
The military’s advance allowed hundreds of wounded troops to be evacuated by air to Port Sudan, where they lie in the crowded wards of a military hospital. One man had extensive facial injuries from a drone strike. Amputations were common.
The evacuees included Taha, who sat up in his bed to show a series of videos that he took during his last battle. Jubilant soldiers can be seen whooping and hugging, thinking they have won. Bleeding RSF fighters lie in the dust, and are kicked or taunted by the soldiers. The camera flips to show Taha, sweating heavily, his eyes glazed from battle.
But the soldiers had missed one RSF fighter, a sniper hidden in a residential block, and he shot Taha in the leg. Later that night, he said, medics moved him to an ammunition factory beside the Nile, where they embarked on their perilous crossing.
The United Nations has yet to officially declare a famine in Sudan, but few experts doubt that one is already underway in parts of Darfur and, shockingly, Khartoum.
More than 220,000 children could die in the coming months alone, the UN says. And both sides use hunger as a weapon of war, aid officials say. The army withholds visas, travel permits and permission to cross the front lines. Rapid Support Forces fighters have looted aid trucks and warehouses and raised their own obstacles.
Declan Walsh
The writer is a reporter covering Africa for The New York Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya