3 days ago
Sudan's civil war shows no signs of slowing down
When the civil war began in Sudan, Shiraz Youssef couldn't hear the explosions, the gunfire or the screams.
The 22-year-old from Khartoum lost her hearing when she was very young.
But the haunting images she witnessed that day told her everything she needed to know. Those scenes she will never forget.
'All I saw were terrified faces, bloody bodies in the streets — children among the dead — and armed men filled with rage,' she told photojournalist Giles Clarke, who has been documenting the country's crisis as it enters its third year. Shiraz Youssef fled Sudan's capital of Khartoum after the civil war broke out. She and her family left everything behind. People watch as a grave is dug for an imminent burial in Khartoum.
Tens of thousands of people have died since fighting began in April 2023 between the country's military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. The exact death toll is unknown because of the chaos in the country, but more than 14 million have had to flee their homes to find safety, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The UN has described it as 'the most devastating humanitarian and displacement crisis in the world.' It's not just violence that is killing the people of Sudan — it's also malnutrition, dehydration and disease. Infrastructure has been obliterated.
'The trauma runs really deep. You can see that in the eyes of people,' said Clarke, a New York-based photojournalist who has extensive experience working in the region. 'I think what stands out about this is how shocking and how sudden it happened.' A woman and child lie down at a busy malnutrition ward inside the city of Port Sudan.
Saad Hammadoun, a 50-year-old mother of nine, remembers the day the war began.
'It was a regular Saturday, and I was working as usual, never anticipating that, in one moment, everything would change,' she told Clarke. 'When I returned home, I found my children terrified, and everything around us had transformed — nothing was the same. I felt a heaviness choking my chest as I was unable to bear the pain and anxiety for my children. I was afraid for them, uncertain whether staying at home would put them at risk or whether leaving would lead to exhaustion.'
After a month of bombing and shooting when 'every day felt like a year,' Hammadoun and her family decided to pack up and leave their home in Khartoum State. She spoke to Clarke in Kassala, a city in eastern Sudan close to the Eritrean border. Nearly half a million people fled to Kassala from Khartoum and the cities south of the capital. An aerial view of Kassala, a city in eastern Sudan close to the Eritrean border. 'Much of these houses here have become sort of host communities for the displaced,' photojournalist Giles Clarke said.
'The journey was dangerous, but staying in Khartoum was even worse,' remembers Fawziya, another woman who fled to Kassala with her family. 'We walked for days, passing through areas where bodies were lying in the streets, and we could hear gunshots in the distance. There was no safety, no peace. Only fear.'
Muzan Ahmed, 24, was a student before the war, with big dreams and plans for the future. That all changed quickly when the war broke out and she had to leave her home.
'The journey was terrifying,' she said. 'The streets were filled with bodies — men, women, children. I had never seen death up close before; now, it was everywhere.
'At one point, I tripped and fell … right on top of a corpse. I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. I was paralyzed with fear. The body was cold and lifeless, its eyes wide open, staring at the sky as if still in shock. I felt like I had died, too. If a stranger hadn't passed by and pulled me up, I don't know if I would have ever moved again.' Saad Hammadoun worked as a cook before the war. 'Life went on peacefully until, suddenly, the brutal war arrived,' she said, 'throwing us into a situation I never imagined.' Muzan Ahmed said the war has changed her. 'Looking in the mirror now, I don't see the girl I used to be. My eyes are tired. My heart is heavy. I don't know if I will ever feel safe again.' Dr. Tayseer Ebrahim Mohammed Musa fled Khartoum carrying only her phone. She introduced Clarke to displaced women who were living at a former school in Kassala. 'I help others living at the school with trauma and other medical issues,' she said. 'I have found my purpose.' Maryam Mohamed Ramadan says her children lived through moments of sheer terror. 'They would ask me in fear, 'Mama, are we going to die?' I would hold them close and try to calm them, telling them that God is with us and that this nightmare would eventually end.'
Some of the displaced people that Clarke met in Kassala had been displaced not once, but multiple times as the fighting spread.
Afaf, a 36-year-old mother of four, kept moving with her family from city to city: 'The war followed us like a shadow.'
In January, the United States accused the RSF militia of committing genocide. Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the RSF and its allied Arab militias had 'continued to direct attacks against civilians,' including the systematic murder of 'men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis.' Limited travel and lack of burial space has led to burials expanding from existing graveyard perimeters to the city roads.
They also 'deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,' Blinken said, adding that the same forces 'targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.'
The RSF called the United States' decision 'unjust,' adding in a statement on its Telegram channel that 'the State Department's claim that the RSF committed genocide in Sudan is inaccurate.'
Clarke visited various cities in January and February, documenting the displacement crisis with the support of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and OCHA, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Conditions were often dire. In Gedaref, a former bus station was sheltering thousands of people. It was hit with a deadly wave of cholera in August. In New Halfa, Clarke visited a hospital's maternity ward that lost power after a drone strike took out a nearby power facility. A former bus station was turned into a settlement for internally displaced people in Gedaref. A mother tends to her baby, born just hours earlier, in a dark maternity ward in New Halfa. The hospital lost power after a nearby drone attack.
In Kassala, Clarke spent time in a displacement camp that was set up on empty acres of land miles away from the center of town.
'They couldn't walk anywhere. They couldn't go to the market. There's no running water,' Clarke said. 'So it was just relying totally on the UN and partners to get any kind of services there.'
The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) was delivering the very basics once a month — sorghum, red lentils and cooking oil. Other organizations were also chipping in: UNICEF was setting up learning centers, Clarke said, and building latrines. The UNDP set up solar lights. One of the most sacred sites in Kassala is the Khatmiyya Mosque at the foot of the Taka Mountains. People line up to receive aid from the UN's World Food Programme at a camp in Kassala. The World Food Programme distributed sorghum, red lentils and cooking oil in Kassala.
Clarke was there in February when it was announced that the Trump administration would be dismantling the US Agency for International Development. USAID had been critical in providing humanitarian aid for Sudanese organizations and its people, aid workers told Clarke.
'It was despair from humanitarians,' Clarke recalled. 'It was panic actually. … The world humanitarian aid system collapsed overnight.'
Very few Sudanese people have savings left, he said. Ashraf, 50, worked as a truck driver in Khartoum before the war. 'We first left Khartoum and moved south to Sannar, then the fighting started again, so we moved to Sinjar. Then the guns came to Sinjar and we had to move again. It's been very tough on me and my family. We have no money or work, and my children are always hungry. I never thought I would be in this position as I have worked hard all my life.'
Data from last year shows that 71% of people in Sudan were living on less than the equivalent of $2.15 (US) a day, according to the World Bank. That was more than double the 33% who were living in such extreme poverty in 2022.
By March 2024, nine in 10 people across the country were facing 'emergency levels of hunger,' the WFP said.
In the sweltering tent camps, the displaced battle a mixture of boredom and despair.
'All they want is the war to end,' Clarke said. 'They want to get back to their homes. They want to get back to normal.'
But many Sudanese people, when they return to their homes, are finding that there isn't much left. Moussa Hassan Mahmad has been a teacher in Khartoum for over 30 years. He is now the headmaster of a boys' secondary school in Omdurman. Many of his students have lost parents and siblings in the war. "The children missed almost two years of school,' he said. 'So all we can now do is support and educate them as best we can.'
In March, the army reclaimed control of the capital of Khartoum, forcing the RSF to retreat from the city.
But what was once a bustling and thriving capital city has now been reduced to a lifeless, charred ruin, said Clarke, who visited in April with support from Avaaz, a global activist group.
'In central Khartoum, which is where the fighting first erupted, the streets are now empty of people but littered with rubble, burnt-out tanks, military vehicles and mangled cars,' Clarke said in April. A government soldier walks across the Shambat Bridge in Khartoum. Destroyed vehicles can be seen across the region. A damaged church in downtown Khartoum.
Government buildings, banks and businesses have been charred and stripped to the bone by the RSF, according to local officials, doctors and medical aid workers who remained in Khartoum during the war. CNN has reached out to the RSF for comment.
'The scale of looting is mind-boggling,' Clarke said. 'Everything inside apartments, businesses and administrative buildings. Miles of underground electrical wiring have been ripped out of walls and roads. It seems nothing that has even the smallest value has been spared.'
Perhaps one of the most critical losses is the loss of paperwork. Some of the larger government buildings were home to Sudan's paper archives.
'Sudan kept almost all its records, from anything legal to the land registry titles, on paper,' Ahmed Khair, an independent aid consultant, told Clarke. 'Even marriage (licenses) and birth certificates. They are all gone now.' Reports and records from nongovernmental organizations are seen on the floor of a former Humanitarian Aid Commission office in Khartoum.
Hospitals in the center of Khartoum were also emptied and destroyed. Wards and operating rooms were plundered.
'In the three hospital buildings I visited, there was the stench of rotting bodies, mostly from dark basement areas that lie untouched from the recent exodus of the marauding RSF fighters,' Clarke said.
The Al-Buluk Hospital, in nearby Omdurman, is the only pediatric hospital operating in the region. In its crowded malnutrition wards, Clarke witnessed sick children writhing in beds that they had to share. Mohamed Maysara, 2, cries at the Al-Buluk Hospital in Omdurman. He was there to receive treatment for malnourishment People crowd the malnutrition ward of the Al-Buluk Hospital.
Clarke remembers the heartbreaking sounds he would hear inside the wards — groans from children in pain.
'There were probably 50 or 60 children I saw in there at that time who were severely malnourished, and doctors told me that the numbers are rising,' he said.
While the fighting has stopped in Khartoum, it has shifted to other parts of the country, including the large Darfur region, where the RSF is entrenched.
Earlier this month, explosions rocked Port Sudan, the country's main port city that became the base for government forces after the fall of Khartoum in 2023.
There is no sign that the fighting will stop anytime soon. Both sides have shunned global efforts to end their feud. A destroyed plane sits on the tarmac at Khartoum International Airport, which was occupied by the RSF before the Sudanese Armed Forces reclaimed control of the capital in March. This satellite image shows damage at the airport in April. (Maxar Technologies)
Last month, the RSF said it had formed its own government as it marked the two-year anniversary of the war.
With the war showing no sign of ending, many in the country have been left with a feeling of hopelessness.
A woman named Samira told Clarke that although she was only 22 years old, she felt like her life was over.
'My dreams of education and a future feel like distant memories, something that belonged to another life,' she said. Samira and her family fled Khartoum days into the war. 'At every checkpoint we passed, I held my breath, praying they wouldn't stop us,' she said. 'Praying they wouldn't take me.'
The war has also left lasting scars on Ahmed.
'Looking in the mirror now, I don't see the girl I used to be,' she said. 'My eyes are tired, my heart is heavy. I don't know if I will ever feel safe again.'
Youssef, the young woman from Khartoum, had a surgery planned before the war that she said might have helped her to hear again. That dream is dashed for now. And even though she escaped the fighting, she still fears for her life.
She told Clarke she's afraid that someone might take her and that she won't be able to scream for her mother or brothers to save her.
'Even here in the camp, when I go to the bathroom at night, I am terrified that someone might attack me … and no one will hear my cries.' The Omar Haj Musa displacement camp in Kassala is on the grounds of a former high school.
