That morning when the fighting started will remain with me for ever. It started normally enough: I planned to break the Ramadan fast with a group of journalists in downtown Khartoum, preparing myself to go out for an appointment with a musician in our home in Omdurman, the city on the other side of the Nile from Khartoum.
Then, around 9am, I saw messages from colleagues about sounds of gunfire coming from south Khartoum, so I thought I would go and see what was going on. Soon I was hearing about fighting between the Rapid Support Forces and the army around the airport, the presidential palace, and the military headquarters. I know all of these locations very well, and most of them are very close to the neighbourhood where all the newspapers are based and where I often work. Now they were a war zone.
Even before I had set out, the battle had reached my home, where I was born and grew up, from where I went to school, where I returned after studying journalism in Cardiff and politics in London. I heard sounds of explosions and shootings and clouds of black smoke and fighter jets hovering over us in Omdurman too. It was terrifying and the beginning of a long nightmare that I do not think will end soon.
As a correspondent for the Guardian and Observer in Sudan, my job is to understand my country and work out what is going to happen here. Often this is a very difficult job. But not with this war.
I saw this coming. The conversation of the war dominated our gatherings and talks for months before, but we didn’t prepare ourselves for it. In fact we wished something else could happen and stop it. The revolution of 2019, when the dictator Omar al-Bashir was forced to end his rule of 30 years, made me really hopeful that we as a country might have a bright future; even if my experience working for over a decade in Khartoum, Juba and from all the many war zones of Sudan had taught me not to be too optimistic when hopeful things happened in my country.
I worked under al-Bashir’s rule, when we had to submit our articles for censorship before publication. I had been arrested twice by the intelligence service for my work, and was kidnapped by a militia affiliated with the army in Abeye – a disputed area between Sudan and South Sudan. So my hope was real while covering the mass protests of 2018/2019 against our repressive ruler. The fact that I carried my toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and period pads in my handbag for four months until Bashir was finally gone said everything that anyone needed to know about living and working under his regime. They were there because my friends who spent months behind bars during an earlier wave of protests said such things had been deliberately denied to them as another form of torture.
These last few days have been bad, and we have been picking bullets off the road, but my neighbourhood in Omdurman is now safer than some others. Many people moved to it to be relatively far from the immediate clashes, but people are dying of preventable diseases. A relative and a childhood friend died of Dengue fever which is spreading here, and could have been saved if they had reached better medical care sooner. But the hospital nearby had to close following an airstrike that killed one person and injured 12 patients and their relatives.
Until recently, I found a sense of normality in my mother’s sense of humour, making fun of me for being scared and losing weight after the start of the war, and in seeing children carrying biscuits to be baked for preparation for the Eid celebrations even while clashes were taking place around the city. But then we began to experience electricity, water and internet cuts.
Some of this we are used to. Having patchy internet or not having it at all is the norm here, and whenever there was a big protest, the army would cut the internet. Now though there is something new. My grandmother’s neighbourhood still has electricity for some reason, but when I set out for her house to file my stories, I knew there might be airstrikes at any moment.
The worst thing may be the uncertainty. This conflict could turn to an all-out civil war in a country that is deeply ethnically divided. As a family we are still unsure whether to leave or to stay and face whatever is coming. This is a very big choice. We are a big family, with some disabled and sick people and children so this is the hardest decision to take at the moment. And it is not getting easier: bus tickets became 10 times more expensive and the prospect of getting stopped at a border for days is almost impossible to imagine.
And then there is Khartoum, and Sudan. I love my city and never wanted to live anywhere else in the world. I loved its authors, the poet and novelist Abbakar Adam Ismail’s famous poem, The Sound of the Sixth Chord, in which he envisioned the Khartoum war of today; and the short stories of Stella Gaitano and Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin.
Khartoum’s culture scenes and its new galleries that have started to open in the past few years have transformed the city, as have its music festivals. Even while studying and working in the UK and the US, I always came back to be with my family and my friends and to tell the Sudanese story to the world. I do not want to leave now.
