Hajer Sulaiman, a 32-year-old communications specialist, was living in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, when a power struggle that had been simmering for months between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) burst into the open on 15 April last year.
“My mother was telling me she wanted to head to the market that morning,” Sulaiman said. “We could hear loud explosions, but we thought it was to do with protesters, not that the entire country had slipped into a civil war. It was just too overwhelming to process.”
She didn’t expect the fighting to last a long time, believing the country’s generals would be hauled around the table to thrash out a deal. But the sound of mortars, fighter jets and gunfire did not cease, and a few days later the family decided they had to leave.
Sulaiman, who now lives in Port Sudan, a small city on the Red Sea coast, is among millions of displaced Sudanese people whose lives have been upended by a brutal and seemingly intractable conflict that has killed at least 14,000 civilians, according to a conservative estimate by the nonprofit war monitor ACLED.
“I only took my laptop and phone because I thought we’d be back in a few weeks,” Sulaiman said. “That’s what hurts the most,” she added, “not being able to say goodbye and now it has been over a year.”
According to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, there are about 10 million internally displaced people in Sudan, making it the country with “the largest internally displaced population ever reported”.
More than 7 million have been internally displaced since the war began, of whom about 4 million are children, according to Unicef. “Child displacement goes along with multiple other crises as a result of the war,” said Mandeep O’Brien, Unicef’s country representative for Sudan. “Children face disease, malnutrition and hunger and close to 8.9 million are acutely food insecure.”
A further 2 million people have fled to neighbouring countries. Chad and South Sudan have received the largest numbers of refugees, followed by Egypt and Ethiopia.
Sulaiman lives in a small apartment that she shares with six other women because Port Sudan’s swelling population has caused rents to surge.
“People used to pay $200 or $300 a month here, but in some places rents have gone as high as $1,500,” Sulaiman said on a video call. She considers herself fortunate – many others who have arrived in the city stay in schools, tents or out on the street without access to food, electricity or other amenities.
El Fasher, the last major government-held city in the vast western Darfur region, is home to tens of thousands of refugees who have fled brutal RSF offensives. In recent months, people living in the city have endured a tightening RSF siege and daily indiscriminate fire. On 10 June, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said it had closed its last hospital in the city due to RSF attacks.
In Ethiopia’s north-western Amhara region, which shares a border with Sudan and is struggling with its own conflict between insurgents and government forces, an estimated 8,000 refugees were forced to leave UN camps after repeated attacks, gunfire and kidnappings.
The mass displacement has made Sudan’s humanitarian emergency even more acute. Aid organisations have been sounding the alarm, reporting shortages of medicine, food and shelter as populations in refugee camps and makeshift settlements across the country continue to increase. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a UN-backed tool for tracking global hunger, said 14 areas with high concentrations of internally displaced people were at risk of famine.
Tom Perriello, the US’s special envoy to Sudan, said last month that parts of Sudan were in famine, and that even in safer environments – such as the refugee camps in eastern Chad where people fleeing Darfur have primarily settled – the international community had done a “pitiful job” of getting aid through.
For Sulaiman’s aunt, who had diabetes and could not get access to insulin in a village in al Jazira, an east-central Sudanese state, the bottlenecks for life-saving medicine ultimately cost her life.
“Your mind keeps running back over the situation, asking: ‘What if she could have come to us?’ Something so simple cost her her life,” she said. “She was talking to us every day; she was my mother’s best friend.”
Her cousin also died early on in the conflict, amid an RSF assault on Jebel Aulia, a village south of Khartoum, after doctors – short on supplies – were unable to stop bleeding from a wound in his leg. “We found his body among a pile of other corpses in a hospital,” Sulaiman said.
Atiyat Zaidan, 24, was a student at the University of Khartoum living in Omdurman, a neighbouring city, when the fighting started. She and her family have since left for New Halfa in the eastern state of Kassala.
Zaidan said her younger sister had not recovered from the early days of the war. “She remains fearful, imagines things and looks at people with surprise as if she doesn’t know them. The worst part is that she cannot sleep; she dozes off for a few minutes and then wakes up frightened.
“I miss my home very much, and my university, and the roads that I used to frequent, and all the places in Khartoum,” Zaidan added. “Sometimes I dream about them and sometimes I imagine how I used to walk in peace, and it was a great blessing from God, and we didn’t know.”
