Birth, death, escape: Three women's struggle through Sudan's war

On April 14, 2023, Yasmine* stepped off the plane and into the arms of her sister in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.

The Sudanese human rights activist was five months pregnant and living in a nearby country, yet she was happy to be home. She was looking forward to spending some quality time with her parents.

But the next day, her life and her country changed forever.

“I woke up to sounds of very heavy artillery at about 5 or 6am, and it lasted until 7 or 8am,” Yasmine, 31, told Al Jazeera over voice messages from Khartoum, where she still lives.

“I remember rushing to turn on Al Jazeera. They were talking about a heavy conflict.”

The roar of fighter jets and crackle of gunfire she, her brother, sister and 2-year-old niece heard in their top-floor apartment confirmed Yasmine’s worst nightmare. Sudan’s civil war had started and Yasmine was torn between comforting her siblings and telling the world about what was happening.

She recalls having to stop a phone interview with a journalist from the BBC when she heard an army jet overhead.

“I remember screaming so loud in the interview when I saw the plane and we had to hang up,” she said.

Looking back, Yasmine says she was terrified but not surprised when the violence erupted.

After months of brewing tensions, Sudan’s army and the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary had squared off, with no regard for civilians caught in the middle.

It was the collapse of a tense alliance which dated back to mass pro-democracy protests that overthrew autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.

Shortly after his departure, a military-civilian government assumed control of the country. It was to govern for three years and hand power to an elected government.

But the army and RSF upended Sudan’s frail democratic transition, jointly mounting a coup to topple the administration in October 2021.

Tensions soon heightened as they competed for foreign alliances, weapons and economic assets, trying to consolidate their power.

As the nation was roiled with protests against the coup and the coup masters quarrelled, the United Nations mediated a framework agreement to restore a transitional government.

The deal, signed in December 2022, effectively pitted the army against the RSF, specifying that the latter would have to be integrated into the former.

A major dispute over the timeline for the integration emerged as the army pushed for two years but the RSF insisted on 10.

Yasmine had been following the news closely in the days leading up to the war. She could see the RSF prepare for a confrontation by relocating many of its troops from the vast western region of Darfur – its historic stronghold – to Khartoum.

She could see the army digging in as it insisted its sole purpose in signing the framework agreement was to rein in the paramilitary, bringing the two forces closer to conflict.

In Yasmine’s family home, as the bombing began, they all thought they would die at any moment.

“I was trying to comfort my sister because we were hearing bombing in our neighbourhood… We realised that this [war] isn’t going to end soon,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I knew this war was going to end the lives of so many people I know.”

When the war started in Khartoum, people across Darfur relived traumatic memories from the 2003 Darfur war. They knew they would not be spared.

In 2003, al-Bashir exploited ethnic tensions to undermine political grievances, starting an inferno that devoured Darfur for years and killed about 300,000 people from armed conflict and the disease and famine the war brought, according to rights groups.

Darfur is often referred to as being inhabited by “Arab” and “non-Arab” tribes – both are Black, Muslim tribes who embrace two different ways of life and have lived side by side and intermarried for centuries.

The “Arab” tribes are traditionally camel herders or pastoralists while the “non-Arab” tribes are more sedentary farmers.

Some “non-Arab” tribes had long felt that their needs and demands were disproportionately ignored by the central government in Khartoum.

The built-up grievances led to an armed rebellion, which started when two rebel groups captured an airport in an attack on government troops in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

Spooked by how quickly the rebels captured the airport, al-Bashir recruited and armed “Arab” tribes for a violent counteroffensive.

At the time, Hind*, a human rights activist from West Darfur’s Masalit “non-Arab” tribe, was in North Darfur attending university.

She said the “Arab” fighters – who are popularly known as “Janjaweed” or “devils on horseback” in Sudanese Arabic  – had impunity to kill, rape and plunder “non-Arabs”, often supported by the army’s indiscriminate aerial bombardment.

Hind’s uncle, a tribal elder, was among the victims at the start of the war. As he was heading to Central Darfur for a meeting of tribal chiefs hoping to mediate an end to the killing, he was ambushed and killed.

Hind, in North Darfur far from her family, feared for her father.

“The first time [I came home from university] in 2004, I hugged my father and started crying.

“There was a heavy Janjaweed presence … they searched our house more than once. They even accused my father of supporting the armed movements,” Hind said.

Hind’s father survived the worst days of the war and lived a long life until he passed away from old age in 2010.

In that same year, the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir for war crimes and genocide. But rather than rein in the Janjaweed, al-Bashir repackaged them as the RSF three years later.

Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, a relatively unknown “Arab” Darfur fighter, headed the new paramilitary, tasked with cracking down on rebellions across the country and protecting al-Bashir from a possible mutiny in the army.

In return, Hemedti was bestowed the title of “general” despite never attending military college. Over the years, he captured lucrative gold mines and leased out his fighters to regional wars, earning tens of millions of dollars.

Flush with wealth and power, the RSF quickly threatened the army for supremacy in Sudan.

Looking back, the army’s decision to outsource a counter-rebellion to “Arab” tribal militias was fateful – 20 years after terrorising civilians in Darfur as bedfellows, they were fighting as foes.

When the war started, Hind knew that neither side cared about civilians in Darfur, but she was more scared of the RSF.

Despite the RSF’s efforts to rebrand, for foreign audiences, as a legitimate, benevolent fighting force, she knew they were still “Janjaweed”. After university, Hind had spent two decades documenting their human rights violations in Darfur, moving to the nearby town of Mourni.

“My heart was telling me that a catastrophe was going to happen,” she told Al Jazeera.

The RSF began summary killings, rape and plunder, just as it did in 2003, and Hind’s tribe, the Masalit, were targeted.

The paramilitary seemed to want to exploit the war to drive the Masalit off their land and consolidate control over agricultural and water resources.

On June 15, the group killed West Darfur Governor Khamis Abbakr – a Masalit – moments after he accused the RSF of genocide against his tribe on a live broadcast.

Hours after the killing, footage emerged of an RSF truck driving over Abbakr’s corpse while women threw rocks at his mutilated body.

The assassination sent tens of thousands of Masalit fleeing the capital al-Geneina. Many were shot as they tried to get away.

A communications blackout meant Hind did not know that her brother was among those killed by the RSF until she met his fleeing neighbour in Mourni about a week later.

“I’ve been in a terrible mental state since my brother was killed,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I still can’t stand thinking I’ll never see him again.”

Hind had no time to grieve for her brother.

Three days after learning about his death, the RSF attacked Mourni on June 26.

Masalit villagers picked up weapons and fought alongside the Sudanese Alliance, an armed group formed to protect the Masalit and headed by Abbakr before he was killed.

But Hind knew they were no match for the RSF, a rich, powerful paramilitary with decades of experience.

As artillery shells and bullets rained down, Hind hid under her bed with her sister and niece as they listened to the shells landing on their roof.

By noon, they made a run for it, taking their mother and their brother’s children and heading for the mountains. At sundown they moved on, fearing the RSF would look for civilians there.

They walked for miles until they reached a displacement camp east of Mourni; Hind’s feet and legs were swollen from the long walk but she did not have time to nurse her pain. She had to plan an escape.

“I stayed with a relative [in the displacement camp] for 21 days. I didn’t tell anybody where I was because I heard people in the camp were helping the RSF find activists and fighters.

“They had pictures of the people they were looking for – I was one of them,” she said.

Hind eventually found a smuggler “close to the Janjaweed” who agreed to drive her to al-Geneina, where the violence had somewhat died down.

In exchange, she handed over her precious gold ring, a gift from an old love and the one valuable she had left.

As they pulled out of the camp, Hind crouched in the back to avoid being seen by RSF fighters. Once they reached al-Geneina, she saw a message spray-painted across the walls of a looted and deserted street market.

“Al-Geneina is Arab.”

Hind stayed with a friend in al-Geneina and borrowed their car the next day to go to Mourni and rescue her family, taking them to Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

Nyala still had internet, which meant Hind could receive money wired from friends abroad. However, the city was a battleground: The RSF looted homes and fired indiscriminately while the army fiercely defended its garrison. Large numbers of civilians were killed in the crossfire.

“Many heavy weapons were used in Nyala. I remember being afraid for so long each day,” she told Al Jazeera. “I still think about the sounds.”

Hind had to leave Nyala quickly because she was at risk and by early August, a Western human rights organisation helped her flee to South Sudan and board a flight to Uganda, where she now lives.

Leaving Nyala, she cried and held her mother and sister, knowing it might be for the last time.

“It was very emotional. I wasn’t sure if I would see them again. We still aren’t sure if we will ever meet again,” she told Al Jazeera.

Hind still cannot believe she survived the atrocities in West Darfur, a campaign of ethnic cleansing that may amount to genocide, according to the European Union.

Her family still lives precariously in the shadow of the RSF, returning to displacement camps in al-Geneina because they cannot afford to live anywhere else.

“I’m very afraid for my family,” Hind said. “There’s famine [in West Darfur] and [a] shortage of medicine. I’m especially concerned for my mother, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes.”

By September 2023, most middle-class civilians had fled Khartoum but Yasmine stayed behind with her newborn.

Khartoum had turned into a bloody, lawless, violent shell of itself. The RSF was in control and its fighters seizing homes and controlling food markets – inflating the price of goods to profiteer from the poor and desperate.

Its fighters also looted the cars, trucks and motorbikes in the city, leaving no form of transport except donkey carts.

Yasmine joined one of the emergency response rooms (ERR), civil initiatives set up by activists at the start of the war to help civilians by moving them to safety or providing help.

The ERRs also collected donations to finance hundreds of soup kitchens across Khartoum State, a vital source of food for civilians going hungry because aid was not reaching them.

“It was so difficult to start the soup kitchens… but it was all worth the risk. It helps people process the war and I feel honoured and blessed to be part of this experience,” Yasmine said.

Aid agencies have accused the Sudanese army, which controls aid operations from its de-facto administrative capital in Port Sudan, of blocking food aid from RSF-controlled areas.

They have also accused the RSF of holding up aid deliveries in areas they control to extract bribes from the organisations operating them.

As famine loomed in Khartoum, Yasmine said, people started looking different. They became paler, fell ill more easily and were noticeably thinner.

Just south of Khartoum, a young journalist named Noon* was working in Gezira State’s capital Wad Madani, an hour’s drive away from her family who lived in Hasaheesa to the north.

Noon, a writer, knew her work was dangerous, but she never told her family about the risks she was taking to cover all aspects of the war. Like other journalists, she was under surveillance and worried about being arrested but Noon continued to report, knowing what she did mattered.

“Military intelligence always accused me [of being some sort of spy] at every checkpoint,” she said. “They would constantly question my identity and the validity of my travel documents.”

Being a woman, she faced an extra, sexual, layer of harassment at checkpoints, she said, often being called a “Habashiyya” – a term describing a woman from Eritrea or Ethiopia – and accused of providing the RSF with sexual favours.

On November 25, the army began investigating her, confiscating her hard drive and laptop and making her worry that her sources may be taken and arrested.

She worked anonymously, writing about the impact of the civil war on civilians and talking to people in displacement shelters about their fears. In the course of her work, something became clear to her.

“This isn’t just a war between the army and the RSF. The Islamic movement in Sudan has also entered this war [to fight with the army],” she told Al Jazeera.

“The army and Kizan often accuse journalists and activists of being part of the December revolution [which brought down al-Bashir in 2019],” Noon said.

“Kizan” is a common name for members of Sudan’s political Islamic movement that ruled alongside al-Bashir for 30 years.

Many Kizan are speculated to hold prominent positions in the army and intelligence services, while others are said to have mobilised their own militias to fight alongside the army.

In early December, the army arrested and tortured Noon’s colleague in a village in Gezira, she told Al Jazeera, without providing details of what happened.

Both the security services and militias aligned with the army are accused of detaining and sometimes killing civil activists.

On December 14, Noon was reporting from a displacement shelter in Gezira when the RSF attacked Wad Madani.

Since the start of the war, Wad Madani had been a refuge for hundreds of thousands of people uprooted from Khartoum and surrounding towns. It also became a hub for vital aid operations and Sudanese professionals.

Like everyone who moved to Gezira, Noon believed the army would protect Wad Madani and surrounding villages from an RSF attack. She was wrong.

Army troops repelled an initial attack but quickly retreated as the RSF stormed Wad Madani.

Men were shot and killed on the spot for refusing to hand over their belongings, homes or daughters to RSF fighters. Just like in Khartoum and Darfur, the RSF came to kill, rape and plunder. Nobody was spared.

By January 15, about half a million people had fled Wad Madani, many heading to neighbouring Sennar State or further east to the states of Kassala or Gadarif. But Noon stayed with her family and relatives in Hasaheesa.

“Everybody around us was afraid but nobody expected the war to reach the villages,” she said.

The RSF would eventually get everywhere.

On February 6, the RSF, which controlled Khartoum, ordered the internet providers based there to cut connectivity to the entire country – ostensibly in retaliation for the army ordering internet providers MTN and Zain to cut off their network to Darfur, the RSF said.

Noon was now one of hundreds of thousands of people shut off from the world as the RSF attacked villages and communities across Gezira. Over the next few weeks, she said, RSF fighters came to her village to loot and attack medics and doctors.

“All the workers in the medical sector had to hide their identities, otherwise the RSF would try to kidnap them… to coerce doctors to treat their injured fighters,” she said.

Noon heard that a nurse was attacked and raped in a clinic near Hasaheesa. As news of the incident spread, women in the village feared they could be next.

On days when the crackling sound of RSF gunfire drew near, Noon would hide under the bed or in a small room with other women in her family.

“We would just stay in the room and wait for hours. Nobody would leave because we feared we would be raped. We were frightened like animals,” she told Al Jazeera.

In March, Noon left Hasaheesa to look for work as a journalist to support her family.

She eventually reached Kassala State in east Sudan, where panic and militarisation were widespread.

After the fall of Wad Madani, men, women and children across eastern, central and northern Sudan picked up weapons in fear that the army would not be able to protect them from the RSF. They became known as the “mustanfireen”.

“There is total chaos right now,” Noon said. “Every night, I can hear them shooting [in the air] and banging cars. The [mustanfireen] often resist any sort of [command structure] and will soon pose a threat to peace and security in Sudan.”

Figures from Sudan’s Islamic movement exploited the panic amid reports of RSF abuses to remobilise fighters and recruit civilians, telling communities in River Nile State that the RSF would occupy their villages, kill their children and rape their women.

The speeches would incite hatred and suspicion against poor workers, often from Darfur and Kordofan, regions where the RSF recruits from its “Arab” tribal base. The governor of River Nile said in a speech that beggars, informal workers and veiled women were RSF collaborators.

The rhetoric coincided with a sharp uptick in human rights violations against poor young men, many of whom had escaped the Janjweed’s abuses in 2003.

Once arrested, they are often accused of “spying for the RSF” and tortured – sometimes to death.

In December, a woman in the Sudanese diaspora shared a photo with Al Jazeera of her 17-year-old cousin holding a rifle. Her cousin had told her over the phone they had just captured and tortured an “RSF spy”. She did not ask how they knew he was a spy, but she was sceptical.

In March, a source in River Nile State, who has a relative in the security forces, said orders were given to “liquidate” young men suspected of being RSF. Another source said military intelligence often stopped buses passing through River Nile to arrest passengers who looked or sounded like they were from Darfur and Kordofan.

“Living under the security forces means that you can’t ask for any rights or freedoms,” Noon said. “Everybody is on edge and panicking because an [RSF] attack could happen at any moment.”

With the help of the mustanfireen, the Sudanese army has begun to turn the tide in the war. In February and March, it won two significant battles in Omdurman, the largest city in Sudan and part of the national capital region known collectively as Khartoum.

After both victories, photos emerged of Sudanese civilians greeting the army as liberators, relieved to no longer live under the lawless RSF. But not everybody felt safe once the army arrived.

Al Jazeera learned that several members of the ERRs were threatened, forced to stop their activities and go into hiding. Two activists running a soup kitchen were reportedly killed by forces aligned with the army, though the reasons for their deaths remain unclear.

The mustanfireen looted furniture from empty houses as well as aid from a convoy that received army clearance to pass through Omdurman to reach Darfur, according to a worker at a UN agency who spoke on condition of anonymity to not jeopardise aid access.

In both cases, army troops did not attempt to stop the mustanfireen, presumably out of fear of triggering a backlash, said Suliman Baldo, an expert on Sudan.

“The army is going to have a problem in the future if it is unable to discipline its fighters,” he told Al Jazeera. “We haven’t seen any disciplinary measures taken by the army against their fighters when they commit more serious crimes, such as executing RSF prisoners or people suspected of being informers for the RSF.”

Just across a bridge from Omdurman, activists and civilians have tried to adjust to life under RSF rule in Khartoum. Many know RSF fighters in their neighbourhoods and are friendly with them to try to pacify them.

Aid volunteers are still detained, robbed and attacked sometimes, yet most can help their communities without fear of being shut down.

Many may welcome the army as liberators if they wage a violent campaign to retake the entire national capital. However, “People are afraid that the army would slaughter them if they came here”, Yasmine said.

There is trepidation, she continued, that the army would treat civilians – especially ERR members – as RSF collaborators.

Despite the fear, civilians have little time to worry about the future. With basic services like water and electricity down, most people spend each day searching for food and fuel, which is needed to power generators.

Yasmine credits her friends and peers for keeping her and many others alive, thankful for the people who stayed and for the friendships she has built with those who cannot leave Khartoum.

“The people that stayed here after the war – especially those working in mutual aid – have given me such relief,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I just feel very privileged to be alive.”

* Names have been changed to protect individuals.