Finding Hope and Love in the Ruins of Sudan’s War

On April 15, 2023, war broke out in Sudan. Within hours, the fighting had engulfed Khartoum, the capital, where my parents lived. Death, displacement, and violence spread swiftly across the country. Almost three years later, more than 13 million people have been displaced from their homes, and around 400,000 are estimated to have been killed.

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I was in Johannesburg, where I am posted as Africa correspondent for Sky News, when I got the news of the war: text messages of loud explosions and gunfire being heard in Khartoum. I frantically called my parents. They sounded quietly and deeply shaken; explosions echoed in the background. I became singularly focused on reaching Sudan, getting them out, and reporting on the war. My team and I traced a flow of people leaving Khartoum on evacuation flights to Djibouti and other groups fleeing Port Sudan by ship to Saudi Arabia.

We traveled to Jeddah. On April 26, 2023, a Saudi Arabian naval ship pulled into the Port of Jeddah, ferrying people escaping the war in Khartoum—a 10 hour journey across the Red Sea. I boarded the ship and started interviewing the passengers. I was wrapping up a live, on-air interview with a family when I felt eyes on me.

I turned around and saw my uncle looking back at me from across the crowded deck. I had no idea he had made it out of Khartoum safely. I ran to him. We hugged and cried with joy and relief. A wave of warmth swept over the weary evacuees who witnessed the chance encounter. If only for a moment, the despair and dread of war had been interrupted by hope.

War broke out after talks between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force commanded by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—better known as Hemedti—collapsed over whether, and on what terms, the RSF would be folded into the national army.

After a popular uprising toppled the dictator Omar al-Bashir, Burhan and Dagalo governed together within a military-civilian power-sharing arrangement that was due to transition to civilian-led rule. In 2021 they engineered a coup, dissolved the civilian government and seized control of the country. Their alliance of convenience eventually gave way to a power struggle, sharpened by regional patrons: Egypt and Saudi Arabia backing the army, and the United Arab Emirates supporting the RSF.

I have spent the following two years and 11 months reporting on the war and searching for glimmers of light. After seeing my uncle, I rushed to the consulate in Jeddah to secure Sudanese visas for our news team. Twelve hours later, we were back at the port, boarding a commercial ferry to Sudan and facing some trouble from the Saudi Arabian authorities.

“Why do you want to go to Sudan?” an immigration official asked. 

“My family is in Sudan,” I said. “I need to get there.” 

“I know,” he replied. “I watched the video of you with your uncle.”

The next morning, we arrived in Port Sudan on a ship carrying hundreds of other people who were rushing back to their families even as thousands were fleeing across every border. Mothers, brothers, husbands and daughters, all willing to face the war to be back home with the people they loved. “Death will find you anywhere,” one man told me. “Better to be with your family.” As our ship anchored off Sudan’s rugged eastern coast, men chanted, “Allahu Akbar.” Women ululated on the deck. Even in the extreme circumstances, we were all happy to be home. 

My parents did not want to leave their home. They kept finding reasons not to board yet another bus of relatives leaving Khartoum for Egypt. The house was not only their home of 25 years; it was the fruit of all their labor, their final base. My father is a journalist and politician. In 2002, he had returned from 12 years in exile and walked through its front door after landing in Sudan again.

Now, the shelling and airstrikes were not enough to push them out. Only after I called to say I had arrived in Sudan—and threatened to travel to Khartoum and bring them out myself—did they grudgingly agree to pack their valuables and board the bus we had arranged for them. As they got ready to leave, my mother asked, “Should I leave the key by the door for when we come back?”

In April 2025, two years after their reluctant departure, the Sudanese military reclaimed Khartoum from the RSF. A shell of a city was returned to its residents. The National Museum had been emptied of priceless ancient Nubian artefacts. Top floors of beloved hotel towers had been transformed into sniper nests. Our oldest souqs had been ransacked and burnt to the ground. Most family homes had been robbed and looted. We found baby photos and a wedding dress under a bridge that had been used as barracks by RSF fighters. 

I returned to our home and found nothing left. Militia members had ransacked and defiled the house. The walls had developed cracks from the shelling. I held on to whatever treasured family photos, artwork, and mementos I could find. I hired a group of young men to jet clean the house. I sent videos to my parents and siblings. They were relieved to see the videos of our somewhat restored home.

“Did they take my suits?” My father asked me.

Every suit and tie he had ever bought or had been gifted was gone.

All across Khartoum, thousands of other families were rifling through the ruins to salvage what was left. Volunteers were rebuilding the University of Khartoum, and charity initiatives that had raised funds to help people escape were now raising funds to help them return.

The day after we filmed in my house, we joined an injured young man as he went to see whether his family were still in their home in southern Khartoum. His six year old cousin opened the door and broke out in pure glee, rushing back to call for his mother. She ran out to embrace her son, sobbing, before collapsing onto her knees. She then turned to hug and thank the volunteer who had sheltered her son for two years and finally brought him home.

The return to Khartoum was momentous for me but the war had not ended. It was being recalibrated. The RSF had turned to drone warfare and redirected their troops to tighten their siege of Al Fashir, the capital of North Darfur—the region that was the cradle of the RSF, where the group’s predecessor, the Janjaweed militia, rose to notoriety during the genocide of the early 2000s. Al Fashir was a prize they coveted: its capture would consolidate their control over Darfur and give them leverage in any future negotiations.

The RSF choked Al Fashir into submission through enforced starvation, daily shelling, and drone strikes. They encircled the city and built an earthen berm to physically enforce their siege. Aid trucks of the United Nations’ World Food Program were attacked as they attempted to deliver food to Al Fashir city and the camps for displaced people surrounding it, where people were enduring a famine. The RSF eventually captured Al Fashir in Oct. 2025, and killed, detained, or disappeared thousands of its inhabitants.

We reported from north Darfur weeks before Al Fashir fell and documented the strength of a community that had endured 18 months of siege. We met members of the Emergency Response Rooms: volunteer run networks that had sprung up across Sudan in the absence of a functioning state, coordinating evacuations, medical care, and food distribution with little more than mobile phones and sheer will. They were saving the lives of those who had managed to escape. The volunteers from Emergency Response Rooms risked their lives to get lifesaving food and medicine into Al Fashir whose besieged people were reduced to eating animal feed to survive the famine. The RSF had disappeared 30 of their teammates the week we met them.

Two of them, whom I shall refer to as Ahmed and Hassan, as revealing their actual names would risk their lives, were in charge of logistics and coordination. In a hidden storeroom, they showed us the flour they imported from Libya, the rice and pasta they brought in from Chad, which brave volunteers sneaking past the militia men would hide on the outskirts of Al Fashir. They then sent the GPS coordinates to volunteers inside the city to retrieve the lifesaving drops.

Hassan took his phone and showed us videos of captured young men being tormented by RSF fighters for smuggling in supplies. Another video showed the volunteers smuggling in food killed and dumped in a ditch. Yet they continued to secretly raise funds and send out teams of courageous volunteers. Their fear for their own lives was eclipsed by an urgent sense of responsibility toward the civilians being starved and bombed to death.

The war in Sudan has created the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Yet amid the death, despair, and trauma, the spirit of Sudan endures. My parents knew such generosity, warmth and care in Khartoum that even bombs could not convince them to leave. The love with which long lost relatives embrace one another on a crowded ship deck or in the courtyard of a family home. The commitment and courage of young men putting their lives on the line to make sure their neighbors get food. The perseverance of women working every day in ill-equipped hospitals to keep their patients alive.

This is where our hope rests—in the strength and humanity of the people of Sudan.