Leaving Khartoum

1.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 14, 2023, as the last days of Ramadan drew to an end, I went to have iftar with my extended family in Omdurman, across the Nile from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. It had been a while since I had last seen them there. Born in the US to Sudanese parents, I had worked as a freelance journalist in Khartoum between 2007 and 2015. After some years away, in the spring of 2022 I had returned to work on a new investigation, start writing a memoir, research a book about the Sudanese Revolution (2018–2019), and renovate my mother’s home in Omdurman, where a guard had kept watch for decades over my family’s boxed-up belongings.

Living alone in a studio apartment in downtown Khartoum, I had been craving a homemade meal amid Omdurman’s old houses and dusty, narrow alleys. When the adhan (call to prayer) rose from a nearby mosque at sunset we began to eat: dates and baleela (boiled chickpeas), ‘aseeda (cooked dough) and mullah (stew), cold hilu mur (spiced sorghum) and karkade (hibiscus). After dinner my cousin dropped me off to attend taraweeh, Ramadan evening prayers, at al-Dhareer Mosque, one I had visited often before; the same young blind imam still led prayers in his distinctively beautiful voice. The mosque sits opposite the house of the late Ismail al-Azhari, a leading figure in Sudan’s independence movement after whose grandfather, a Sufi saint named Ismail al-Wali, I was named.

Later that night I attended a symposium back in Khartoum organized by the Sudanese Journalists Syndicate, which was hosting a discussion about the country’s recent political developments. There was much to address. Ever since April 2019, when four months of youth- and women-led protests forced an end to the three-decade authoritarian rule of Omar al-Bashir, the governance of Sudan had been a byzantine affair. At first the country had been ruled by a tenuous transitional government composed of civilian and military blocs and chaired by the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Free elections were promised in a few years, but in October 2021 the military pushed the civilians out.

Even as the revolution’s pro-democracy movement launched waves of demonstrations against the coup, a power struggle was emerging within the military establishment itself, which in Bashir’s last years had been dominated by two factions. One was the army, also known as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The other was the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary promoted by Bashir for his personal protection and led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Its roots lay in the Janjaweed militias that Bashir’s security apparatus had sponsored in 2003 to fight rebels in the western region of Darfur, where they committed mass atrocities; Bashir granted them control over extensive gold mines in the area in exchange for their services. In 2015 Bashir sent the RSF as mercenaries to fight for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Houthis in Yemen, and by 2021 the group had attracted more recruits and accrued advanced military equipment, money, and international connections.

In public, military leaders of both forces were insisting in 2023 they were in accord. But many of us in Khartoum had heard rumors that the senior army officers were unhappy at the prospect of the ragtag RSF turning into a powerful, wealthy, and practically independent force. The city’s best-off residents started buying real estate overseas. Others bought guns.

*

By that night’s meeting of the Journalists Syndicate, the situation had grown more critical. Lately there had been talk that, after months of negotiating, the military seemed close to a new deal with the ousted civilian coalition, the Forces for Freedom and Change, even as supporters of the old Bashir regime posted videos on social media threatening to sabotage any agreement that excluded them. Many feared that the army might restore members of Bashir’s government to power—the same sort of reassertion of the status quo with which other recent pro-democracy uprisings in the region had ended. At the same time the SAF and civilian leaders were demanding that the RSF integrate into the national army, but how and when it would do so had become a matter of fierce debate.

Three days earlier, on April 11, RSF troops had unexpectedly deployed to the northern town of Marawi, near a strategic air force base, where they captured twenty-seven Egyptian fighter pilots training with the SAF—traditionally an ally of the Egyptian military—and posted videos on social media parading them around. Marathon behind-the-scenes meetings, led by intermediaries, yielded statements assuring the public that the situation would deescalate. Some of us left that evening’s discussion hoping cooler heads would prevail.

The next morning was Saturday, April 15. I woke up for a light suhoor, the Ramadan meal before the break of dawn. A couple of hours later, as I was getting ready to leave the studio and shop for the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday, I heard gunshots from my apartment on the second floor—a brief faint volley followed by incessant and louder firing. Peering off my balcony onto El Jamhuriya Avenue, I saw several cars and an SUV speeding the wrong way down the empty street. I got my phone and started filming.

I spent the day glued to my laptop, taking in news from around the city, giving interviews to the international press about what was already clearly a major escalation. At noon the power went out. Just before sunset I heard a knock on my door; it was my neighbor Ikram Ahmed, a middle-aged woman who managed our apartment complex with her seventy-six-year-old husband. Until then our interactions had barely gone beyond polite hellos and nods, but now, in a display of Sudanese hospitality, she wondered whether I wanted anything for iftar: “I have chicken, rice, and mullah.” I took her up on the chicken, and as darkness descended I turned on a battery-operated LED lantern and sat down to my meal. When the adhan sounded from the nearby Khartoum Grand Mosque the gunfire subsided for half an hour, making for an eerie quiet. The soldiers on both sides had also stopped to break the fast and pray.

2.

Slavos Apartments, the complex where I was living, was built in the Fifties by the Greek real estate broker who gave it his name. The two buildings, separated by a courtyard, are the oldest concrete structures in a city known for its single-story brick homes and tidy heishan (yards). The complex was the city’s first to include an elevator.

“My father and uncle thought there would be development in Sudan,” Ikram’s husband, Nicholas Marketo, told me. Slavos was his uncle; Nicholas’s father, a Greek businessman, had migrated to Sudan in the Forties, when the country was seen as a land of opportunity. Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, and Jewish merchant communities flourished in Khartoum’s downtown during the British colonial period, and in the decades directly following independence the district was the center of the city’s nightlife, full of cafés, bookstores, bars, and nightclubs. Some remnants of that era survive, perhaps most notably Papa Costa café, Khartoum’s first modern bakery, and Etinay Square, a nearby hub favored by artists, writers, and activists.

The Slavos complex originally hosted diplomatic missions and housed the offices of big companies, but in the Eighties it started attracting residents—longtime expatriates and some newly returned members of the upper-middle-class Sudanese diaspora. Over the following decade rigid social policies, corruption, the flight of some business owners, and a evening curfew forced much of Khartoum’s commercial and cultural life out of downtown. But government buildings remained, including the Republican Palace, first established in the nineteenth century by the Turks. In recent years RSF-linked companies had sought to consolidate the group’s business empire by acquiring property in the area, drawn in part by its reputation as a center of old money and prestige: months earlier, I happened to be in front of the seventy-year-old Marawi Bookshop, once a hub for the city’s intellectuals, when it closed its doors for the last time and a longtime employee handed over the keys to its new RSF-affiliated owners.

As the second day of fighting began, the building’s superintendent, Abdelhakim Elfafoul, who went by Hakim, went around knocking on doors to warn residents that the RSF, hoping to control the city’s downtown and confront the army three blocks away, had positioned soldiers outside the complex and snipers on nearby roofs. Everyone in the building was trapped, including the municipal waste tax collector who had stopped by that morning. The power was out; Hakim would spend the next days carrying residents’ drained cell phones and chargers to the complex’s portable charging bays. He told me to keep my voice down lest I catch the armed men’s attention. I took his concerns to heart; RSF fighters had a reputation for looting and brutality, and he had a family. In the coming days I hid my cash and passport in the oven and slept on the floor in the middle of the studio, in case bullets flew in from outside or soldiers shot their way in.

The next day I started to venture into other parts of the complex. I had never spoken with most of my fellow residents, but suddenly we were all we had. I felt an urge to know who they were.

*

On the second floor two men were facing the open, sunny courtyard and using a small solar-powered device to charge their phones. Mohamed Kamal was a project manager with the local British Council’s heritage preservation initiatives. Like me, he had grown up outside Sudan. The other fellow was Godwin, a web designer from India who had come to Khartoum thirteen months before to join his uncle’s business. This was his first time outside of his home country. He was shy and quiet but visibly distraught.

From her apartment above, another resident came down to use the charger. She wore an African patterned skirt, and Mohamed Kamal told me she was from Congo. She seemed to have been crying. “This country, this country,” she kept saying. As she returned to her floor I noticed a thin white man clambering down into the courtyard from the second-story terrace in the building across from us. “That’s Sam,” Mohamed Kamal said. “He’s Australian.”

I had seen Sam around the complex once or twice before in a straw fedora. He had at one point supported Trump, Mohamed Kamal continued, and “doesn’t think Covid is real.” Later Sam told me he had worked in Dubai before coming to Khartoum. He found a well-paying job with a Qatari real estate company in 2010 and had come and gone since then, but when the pandemic started he found himself forced to stay put. Sam liked what he called Sudan’s “simplicity of life” and “backwardness” but not what he somewhat cryptically referred to as its “communist impact.” When the fighting started he had gone out onto the street to see what was happening. An RSF soldier “scared the crap” out of him by shooting, and when Sam got back to his fourth-floor apartment he threw a rotten tomato at the troops. One of them returned fire. Sam later showed me where the bullet had hit his ceiling and air conditioner.

Sam passed us on his way up the spiral staircase to the floor above. Moments later we heard him get into an argument with the Congolese woman, over what we couldn’t tell. He was retreating down the stairs when Hakim ran into the courtyard. Dressed in a traditional white jellabiya (robe) and waving both arms in the air, he mimed the talking with his hands and whispered, “Your voices! They’ll hear us!”

I headed up to the third floor and introduced myself to the woman and her flatmate, who were teachers at Confluence International School of Khartoum, a private school a few blocks down the street run by the Greek Sudanese community. The flatmate, Carmella Akinyi, told me she had come to Sudan from Kenya four years earlier to make some money. Mamie Mpongo, the woman from Congo, had only come in the last six months. She’d grown up in Kinshasa. Her experience there, she told me, had been not unlike that of Khartoumites, who lived far from the conflicts that raged in their country’s peripheries. Her family had reservations about her choice to work in Sudan, but she wanted the opportunity and the decent pay. “We only see images of South Sudan and Darfur,” she said. She convinced them that Khartoum was different, that it was safe.

It turned out that Sam had visited them to confer about finding a way to leave the building; Mamie said she lost her temper when he called her a “bloody African.” As we talked, their middle-aged neighbor stepped out and walked past. Slender, fit, with a tucked-in shirt and tidy haircut, he nodded when he saw me and stopped for a brief chat. Hakim had told me that he was a retired military man named Ehab, now working with an agricultural business in western Omdurman. After he left, Mamie and Carmella told me they rarely saw him; he would peek out his door and quickly shut it if someone was there. “That’s the ghost,” Mamie laughed.

Carmella told me about how they had spent the previous day. She had woken up earlier than usual to the sound of loud blasts. At first she assumed that the shots were tear gas canisters, which security forces, including the RSF, often fired at demonstrators from the youth-led resistance committees on their way to the Republican Palace. When the women realized this fighting was different, they locked themselves in their apartment and lay on the floor for more than six hours. Mamie showed me a video they had posted to Instagram. “Popcorn is being made,” Mamie says, giggling, as the two women imitate the sounds of machine gun fire. Then an explosion erupts offscreen, and they both stop laughing. “Yo,” Carmella says, “shit is getting real.”

*

Other neighbors took the fighting still more in stride. The next day, walking through the opposite building, I came across a group on the ground floor sitting on stools and sipping tea. Among them were two of the building’s custodians, Salih and his relative Mohamad Abbakar, both from Darfur. I asked about the whereabouts of Kuku, a third custodian from the Nuba Mountains; they said he’d been off the day the fighting started. Salih told me he had peeked through the metal gate that led to the sidewalk and seen stacks of cash along the wall, single bills floating into the street. RSF fighters had looted many banks nearby.

The two men were joined by a woman from South Sudan named Flora, her young son Yongo, and a middle-aged woman in a long abaya (loose robe), her face covered by a niqab (veil). Flora’s husband was studying in China, she told me, and after war broke out in South Sudan she had brought Yongo back to Khartoum, where she grew up. “This is not new to us,” she said. All of a sudden an explosion shook the ground outside, the RSF soldiers started shouting, and we all went quiet.

When the chaos subsided I turned to the woman in the niqab. Nora was Irish. She had converted to Islam six months before and wanted to experience her first Ramadan in a predominantly Muslim country. I asked if she was scared. She brushed off the question: “I was brought up in Ireland.”

The noise of gunfire typically started at the break of day and, with few interruptions, continued into the late evening. Sometimes we heard rapid shots from AK-47s, other times heavy machine-gun fire from gas-powered DShKs, blasts from mortars and large artillery, or, most frightening, the roar of a MiG fighter jet followed by a faint whistle. After everyone scrambled for cover, the whistle would crescendo into a building-shaking boom somewhere close.

“We know these sounds,” said my second-floor neighbor Mohamad Almohamad. “The worst are from the sky; you don’t know where the bombs will fall.” Mohamad Almohamad lived with his twin cousins Ahmed and Mohamed Alasaad, with whom he owned an electronics shop on Al-Hurriya Street, a bustling commercial strip seven blocks west. All three were from Palmyra, Syria, and in 2015, when they were teenagers, they saw ISIS sweep into their ancient city. They told me they were trapped there for a month, during Ramadan, witnessing beheadings and the destruction of historical sites. Once they managed to get out they walked for two days through the desert to Homs, where they stayed for years. They graduated with university degrees in engineering, then moved to Khartoum in 2021, when Sudan was one of few countries that admitted Syrian refugees without visas.

The “Syrian kids,” as Carmella later affectionately called them, knew the importance of keeping backup batteries at home. They also stored some of their merchandise in their apartment, which became our charging center. Sometimes there was a line to get in. On the morning the fighting started a fourth roommate of theirs, Ashraf Alahmed, had left early to open the shop. By the time we all realized what was happening he was stuck there, but he and the cousins stayed in contact. In such circumstances, Mohamad Almohamad and the others had learned, it was best to stay put and off the streets. “All you need is a safe place with water and food,” he told me. “Don’t worry about possibly getting out. That’s in the hand of God.”

3.

We were all trying to figure out how to deal with what we called al-hala dee, the situation. Stay put or leave? On Saturday the US embassy had emailed me an alert to shelter in place. Because things were so volatile and the international airport had been closed after the start of the fighting, it said there were “no plans for US government-coordinated evacuations of US citizens.” In the beginning I understood the embassy’s caution well enough, but as the days went on, with no further elaboration, I felt my frustration build.

At first most of us in the building agreed: we would wait and see before venturing out. Ikram and Hakim knew the neighborhood well, and they felt it would be too dangerous to try to leave. Neighbors throughout the city were surely making similar deliberations, but in our vicinity we found ourselves largely on our own: ours was among the few residential buildings in an otherwise mostly commercial area. Those of us with international connections had started calling our embassies and our friends and contacts abroad; since we spoke both Arabic and English Mohamed Kamal and I kept everyone apprised whenever new developments reached us.

Waiting had its own risks. We were in the crossfire of the two forces, three avenues south of the RSF-held Republican Palace and three blocks west of the army-controlled zone. Rumors spread that the RSF soldiers had occupied the Acropole Hotel next door. Blocks away we could see thick black smoke emanating from the glossy Byblos Bank Africa building. 

While we were stuck, many of Khartoum’s residents were fleeing. Despite the lack of US coordination or embassy guidance, most Americans were finding their own ways to leave. Other Khartoumites left the country by road or plane from Port Sudan. Many traveled to towns in the country. A used-book seller who let me take books from his stand and pay later sent me a WhatsApp message: he wanted to leave Khartoum to Wad Madani to the south and asked if I could send him the cost of the ticket. I wired him the funds at once.

A friend had put me in touch with two activists with the resistance committees in Khartoum, Mutaz Khandagawi and Muhammad Ahmad, in the hope they could organize a bus to evacuate our group when it became safe enough. I packed two small bags, including my laptop, notebooks, flash drives, and (after a painful deliberation) six light books, leaving hundreds behind. Among those I took were signed first editions of three volumes by the Sudanese poet Mohammed El-Makki Ibrahim, with whom I had met just weeks before. A product of the hopeful Sixties, he had written verses celebrating the October Revolution of 1964, the country’s first popular uprising against dictatorship:

By your green name,
Oh October,
the land sings.
The fields are on fire
With wheat and promise
and with hope,
and the land has flung
open its treasures,
calling,
in your name–
that the people
are victorious,
and the prison gates are crushed.

Rasha Ahmad, Hakim’s wife, tried to bring attention to our plight on social media. In Arabic, she wrote on Facebook that there were families stranded in a building  downtown and posted her husband’s cell phone number. Arabic satellite news stations called for interviews. “We have children, and we are scared,” Rasha told one anchor. When the bombing got louder, her daughter asked, “Mom, can I go back into your stomach?” Samantha, Ikram’s daughter, hid under a table for the first three days. I heard her vomit more than once from my apartment across the courtyard.

Ikram always made sure everyone had something to eat, at least one meal a day. We subsisted on dates, bread, and chicken, some of it from a fridge that she and her Ethiopian housekeeper had filled up for Eid al-Fitr just before the fighting started. But by the third day of our confinement food was running low and the water tank on the roof was empty. We started going down to the ground tank and using an old gardening hose to fill buckets with water; I went early in the morning to beat the lines. With no water to flush toilets and trash accumulating in the courtyard, the air was foul; temperatures in Khartoum in April average 103 degrees Fahrenheit. I burned musk and amber incense sticks to cover the smell.

Under such stress, some of the building’s residents stopped fasting. Others, including me, carried on. On the sixth day of fighting, Hakim invited me, Mohamed Kamal, and Godwin to the last iftar in his apartment. An hour later the Sudan News Agency announced the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid al-Fitr. A cease-fire had been declared for the holiday but fell apart almost immediately.

Since no one was visiting relatives or going to a mosque, Ikram suggested that anyone who still wanted to pray do so in the building. Eleven of us met the next morning on the third floor, where she laid out two large straw mattresses. I sat next to Mohamad Almohamad, and with our heads down we softly repeated the Eid takbeer chants—“Allahu akbar (God is greater), Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar”—that we heard coming from far-away mosques. When the time came for the prayer, Hakim reminded me to recite with a low voice.

*

By then I was speaking daily with Mutaz Khandagawi, who was volunteering to help families around the city organize their departures and find safe routes. He had gotten to know some of the new authorities, and he put me in touch with the area RSF commander to try to negotiate safe passage. The two times we spoke, the commander went on a tirade about the kayzan and the filul, the Islamists and the remnants of Bashir’s regime. The RSF was fighting for democracy, he insisted.

It was a familiar line. The RSF had waited on the sidelines during the last days of protests against Bashir’s Islamist government, and once the regime crumbled it set about rebranding itself as a champion of the revolution. Since Sudan gained independence in 1956, its governments have been dominated by politicians from the north and center of the country. The RSF, on the other hand, has its origins among the nomadic Arab groups of the west, the same region that produced the non-Arab armed movements that had rebelled against state marginalization two decades earlier, in response to which the RSF’s predecessors subjected their communities to brutal collective punishment that human rights groups described as a genocide.

The area’s Arab nomads have legitimate grievances of their own, including losing grazing lands to colonial land laws and climate change. But now, as cover for its acquisitive interests, the RSF was appropriating the rhetoric of its former victims, including calling for destroying the “’56 state” and “refounding” Sudan on new political grounds. In the years leading up to April 2023 the group expanded, recruiting members from northern, central, and eastern Sudan and from outside its historic social base. Among them were professionals and intellectuals drawn by the group’s opposition to the kayzan, by the financial rewards it offered, and by its new packaging as the leading champion of a new Sudan. Meanwhile the RSF hired Western lobbyists and savvy media coordinators to promulgate its image as not just a militia but a legitimate political player. It also strengthened its regional ties, especially with the United Arab Emirates, which since the start of the war has been accused of covertly supplying the paramilitary with weapons and other material support in exchange for Sudanese gold.

The RSF’s attempts to reinvent itself may have attracted some unlikely supporters, but even in those first days it was not hard, knowing the group’s past and watching the videos its fighters were posting on social media, to see through its lofty self-presentation. We had ample reason to fear the soldiers who surrounded us. Late one night, I heard loud gunshots that echoed throughout the covered walkway downstairs. A dog’s long high-pitched howl followed, then descended into rapid choppy cries that seemed to last forever until they stopped. Even the RSF soldier’s comrades scolded him. “Why?” one asked.

The morning of the seventh day Salih walked outside and asked the RSF soldiers for permission to make a run for flour and oil, as he had done on days past. But they were a new group, and one of the soldiers raised his rifle butt to Salih’s chest, demanding to know who else was in the building and why they hadn’t left yet. Salih said there were families and khawajat (“foreigners,” but also, broadly, “white people”). The men, unsatisfied, wanted evidence that there were no soldiers or journalists in the building.

I was sitting with Mohamed Kamal, Mamie, and Carmella on a second-floor terrace when we saw Sam and Nora walk down the stairs, Mohamad Abbakar carrying their suitcases. We all mumbled the same thing: “Of course they’re going to evacuate the khawajat first.” But ten minutes later we saw them return, having been presented as proof that Salih was telling the truth. I was relieved he hadn’t mentioned the one journalist in the complex.

*

We were all getting a bit delirious. That afternoon I saw a hookah outside Mohamed Kamal’s apartment door on the second floor and suggested a smoke. We lit up some of my rose-flavored tobacco and puffed as the sounds of gunfire echoed through the courtyard. At one point Mohamed Kamal invited Mamie and Carmella to join. Carmella declined to smoke—it wasn’t good for our health, she said—but stayed with us to pass the time. Soon the conversation turned to Bob Marley. Carmella started softly singing the chorus to “Three Little Birds,” nodding her head to the melody, her long braids swaying. We all found ourselves joining in.

“One day we will come back and laugh about this,” said Mamie. She described herself as a “strong Christian” and asked if we could hold hands and pray. “Dear God,” she said, “we want you to protect all of us so no stray bullet can attack us, no one among the militia or the army will come and attack us. We want you to protect us as we leave Khartoum. We pray we will meet again.”

Others in the building were losing patience. On the eighth day several of us were waiting to charge our phones outside the Syrian kids’ apartment when we saw Anastasios walking by. Half Cypriot, half Eritrean, he had lived in Sudan earlier in his life and went by an Arabic nickname, “Ashraf.” He had come to Khartoum to get married: he and his new wife were staying in the Slavos Building on their honeymoon. As he passed by, Ashraf told Ikram he was heading outside to speak with the soldiers and convince them to let him leave. After the few seconds it took everyone to realize he wasn’t bluffing, Ikram and others ran after him and begged him not to go. Finally he yielded and walked back up the stairs, shaking his head.

Mohamed Kamal and I had held fast to the belief that it was best to stay put until it was completely safe to leave the complex. But Rasha, getting calls from family, wanted to leave, and she convinced Hakim to agree. Whatever the final decision, Ikram said to general agreement, we would be safest if we all stuck together. Eventually, seeing that we were in the minority, Mohamed Kamal and I assented to fast-tracking our departure.

On the eighth night I spoke again with Khandagawi. He had been following events downtown and making other calls, he said, and had decided it just wasn’t safe enough for a bus to come downtown and evacuate the group directly from the complex. He suggested that some of us speak to the RSF soldiers ourselves and see if they would let us out into the city, at which point we could either seek safer shelter or try our luck with one of the international evacuations. We agreed. For those of us hoping to evacuate, he and Muhammad Ahmad said they could secure a pair of apartments at the Al-Rowad Residential Complex in the west of the city, which we could use as waystations.

Right to the end I kept watering two plants outside my front door. One was a hibiscus bush, just about to bloom. Twelve years earlier, as the Arab Spring started sweeping the region, I met two friends at Papa Costa café before going out to cover a demonstration nearby. We contemplated whether a pro-democracy uprising could happen in Sudan. Thinking of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, one of us suggested “the Hibiscus Revolution.” But by 2019, when it did happen, flower-named revolutions weren’t the trend.

4.

On the morning of April 23 I drew up a list of the residents and their nationalities and sent it to Hakim and Ikram, who went around knocking on doors to make sure we had accounted for everyone. We were thirty-two: Sudanese, Greek, South Sudanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Congolese, Kenyan, Indian, Cypriot, Eritrean, Irish, Australian, and American. All of us assembled on the ground floor of the east building. Nora, it seemed, had packed everything she owned. She sat down on a step to wait and started weeping. Mohamed Kamal was late, so we went to check on him.

He had been trying to catch his two cats. “They were my children,” he explained to me after the fact. He was able to get one, Larry, into a canvas duffle bag into which he cut small round holes. But the other refused to join, scratching and biting maniacally. When Mohamed Kamal finally came down his right hand was bleeding. Ikram went back to the apartment with him; they left food on the floor and opened the windows. When they returned it was time to leave.

Three members of the group went to plead with the RSF soldiers outside. Hakim seemed about to join but then hung back (“just in case one of them had issues with northerners,” he told me later). When the trio returned, the RSF fighters told everyone to get in line. Women and children stepped out first, then the rest of us followed, with a wheelbarrow for Nicholas just in case he couldn’t finish the walk. I had my Galaxy phone with a Sudanese number hidden in my backpack and my iPhone with a US number in my underwear. It was the first time we had left the building in nine days. That same morning, we learned later, US forces had evacuated embassy staff in helicopters from Khartoum to Djibouti.

Before the war El Jamhuriya Avenue had been packed with speeding buses, uniformed bank employees, tea ladies, and street vendors. It was the street that, for many Sudanese, once best captured Igd al-Jalad’s 1985 song: “Oh the beauty of the Nile/and Khartoum at night.” Now it was deserted except for the RSF soldiers, some bare-headed, others in face-covering kadamol turbans. The streets were dusty and filled with trash: tuna tins, potato chip bags, soda cans, and water bottles. Nicholas, who hadn’t completely recovered from a recent heart surgery, stopped every few minutes to exhale. He would point with his cane, squinching his eyes, and say “this building used to be” such and such, or “this building was owned by” so and so. The Khartoum he grew up in was in flames.

I stared at the old buildings and streets, dreading that they and their inhabitants wouldn’t be there when or if I came back: Al-Toma, who prepared my morning coffee; Anwar, who sold the two newspapers I read; Thanasis, the Acropole Hotel manager who had suggested my apartment; Abbaker, the electronics shop manager who exchanged US dollars for Sudanese pounds; Mustafa, the used-book seller who found me old, rare editions; El Tayeb, the grumpy old taxi driver. The old post office, the Republican Palace, the National Museum, the Grand Mosque, Etinay Square, Papa Costa café, al-Suq al-Arabi, the Turkish tombs, St. Mathew’s Cathedral, the University of Khartoum, Grand Hotel, the Sunut Forest, the mugran, where the two Niles meet.  

The RSF soldiers we encountered along the way were surprisingly polite. Most were very young, carrying Russian PKM machine guns as long as the men holding them were tall. They gave us water and offered to drive Nicholas in a pickup for a few blocks. I later heard that some of them asked if they could film a video with our group. The paramilitary’s media team was clearly hoping to burnish its reputation. Nothing came of it.

Some of us were hoping to reach El Sitteen Street, in the city’s south, where the UN, embassies, and international organizations were coordinating evacuations out of the country. Others wanted to reach Um Badda, a neighborhood in Omdurman where Ikram owned another apartment building, and figure out matters from there. We kept walking until we reached El Hurriya Street. Twenty-two of the group—most of them Sudanese, along with Godwin, the Syrian kids, Ehab, and Ikram’s Ethiopian housekeeper—continued westward with Ikram and Hakim along the avenue, toward Omdurman. I joined the other nine heading southward on El Hurriya Street, toward the Al-Rowad complex. We gave Hakim our keys and embraced. “Allah ma’kum,” Hakim said—may God be with you.

*

I asked Sam to walk in front. Armed men on both sides, I thought, would think twice if they saw khawajat among us. Many shops on and around the street were looted, some burned. Thirty minutes later we walked through Jackson Square, a bus station named after a former British colonial officer. A street down, before reaching the old Jewish cemetery, a transit bus, to my surprise, slowly approached from the opposite direction, made a U-turn, and dropped off some passengers. Still luckier: the driver agreed to take the ten of us. When Sam tossed his bag in through a window and made as if he was about to ride on the roof, I lost it and shouted, “Get the fuck inside!”

When we arrived at Al-Rowad we paid the driver ten times the normal fare. At the front of the imposing gated complex sat several guards, who asked us to wait. Flora, despite our pleas, said goodbye and continued to Al-Shajara, a neighborhood four miles southwest where she could meet with relatives leaving for South Sudan.

A car pulled up, and Khandagawi and Muhammad Ahmad stepped out to greet us, thanking God we were safe. They had driven out looking for us but couldn’t get in touch. When the guards let us in and our hosts saw us into an apartment, the first thing they gave us was cold water. A Sufi saying came to mind: “When one drinks warm water, one praises the Lord grudgingly; when one drinks cold water, every organ in one’s body praises the Lord.”

Once we had plugged in our devices, Mamie called her brother in Kinshasa. “I am in a safe area now,” she told him, fighting back tears. Officials at the Kenyan embassy told Carmella to try and make it to a housing complex off El Sitteen Street to join international evacuations, and after some effort she convinced them to let Mamie come with her. A rickshaw driver agreed to take them for thirty thousand pounds ($50 USD), more than six times the standard fare. The rest of us still had to get to El Sitteen and find a bus to Egypt or Port Sudan or Wad Madani or Kassala. We were one more: a friend who was trying to evacuate her parents called me from overseas and asked if her mother, Layla, could join us. She arrived the next morning.

“Where are you going?” Layla shouted at a bus driver as we all stood at the complex’s gates planning for the day. “Can you take us with you?” She managed to flag down a large travel bus on its way to pick up an extended family in Al-Rawad whose second-floor corner apartment had been hit by a rocket days before. Among them was a longtime local employee at the US embassy, Abdalla Tharwat, who had lost his mother-in-law in the bombing. “She was incinerated,” he told me. No longer willing to wait, he and his family were on their way to Egypt.

*

When we arrived at El Sitteen Street a long line of parked buses stretched down the road carrying people from all over the world, most of them employed by international organizations. After some calls with riders who had changed their plans and relinquished their seats, Abdalla secured room for the five of us. We agreed to pay $330 per seat—already higher than the going rate of $250 that we had been quoted the day before. Three days later the price would more than double. Those in our group who could pay covered for the ones who couldn’t.

After an hour our bus set off. We maneuvered through greater Khartoum, sometimes turning around and finding new routes when there was fighting or the roads were blocked. RSF fighters and SAF soldiers each stopped the bus at their respective checkpoints. The gun-toting men from both forces said the same thing: “Safe travels! May God protect you.”

Only now, passing through the streets of the city, was I able to reflect on the extent of the devastation: soldiers everywhere, looted shops, destroyed property, ashen grounds, rising thick black smoke, lines of desperate people, piles of dead bodies. A full-blown war had come to Khartoum for the first time since the army of the Mahdi marched into the city in 1885. After breaking up a sit-in organized by the revolution’s activists in 2019, Hemedti had warned that, if the protests went on, he would turn Khartoum into a ghost town, “inhabited by cats.” He kept his word.

Gangs popularly known as tis’a taweela had been on the rise for months in the city. When our bus stopped for groceries in a tough neighborhood in Omdurman some of us got off, including Mohamed Kamal, who went to buy cigarettes from a stand nearby. As he was paying he glimpsed a nearby tea lady grinning. Then, out of nowhere, around five young men surrounded him, a couple of them carrying large sticks. One grabbed his collar and demanded whatever was in his pockets. Another called him a thief.

I had stepped out to stretch when I heard the commotion. I looked over and saw Mohamed Kamal being dragged and hit; a teenager next to him was holding a brick and waiting to strike. Several of us pulled him away and rushed him back to the bus. By late afternoon we were finally out of the capital and heading north.

5.

Crossing the desert, we paused at a rest stop not far from the Nile’s bend. Tens of buses were doing the same, some of them carrying students from West Africa and Southeast Asia who had been in Khartoum for Islamic studies and to learn Arabic. At the next stop, per Egyptian regulations, men with Sudanese passports between the ages of eighteen and fifty—including Mohamed Kamal—had to get off the bus to cross the Nile on a ferry to Dongola. From there they could travel along the east bank of the river to the border city of Wadi Halfa and apply for an entry visa.

When we rolled up to the border crossing at Argeen we saw nearly two hundred buses already waiting in line. A refugee crisis was clearly in the making. Some of us got off to inquire about procedures: it turned out that we needed exit visas from the Sudanese side and then entry visas from the Egyptian one. Around this time we said farewell to Layla, who found relatives to join.

After dropping off the passports I walked around to explore the area’s shops and cafés—only to run into Hakim. Walking with his daughter, he told me where his group had ended up after we parted ways. First, still in Khartoum, they brought Ehab to the nearby Egyptian embassy, where, he said, they saw the Egyptian pilots the RSF had detained after it deployed to Marawi; after about a week of captivity the men had been released into their own country’s custody. Ehab made it to Cairo, but the Egyptian diplomat who was meant to join them had been killed by RSF fighters when he went to get his belongings for the trip.

Eventually, Hakim said, he, Ikram, and the others crossed a bridge into an army-controlled area in Omdurman. The soldiers told them to sit on the ground and asked to go through the photos on their phones. Our group replied that their phones weren’t charged—and at that moment Ikram’s rang. “It’s my sister,” she told the soldiers. “She’s coming to pick us up.” The soldiers let it lie.

After four hours the soldiers let them go, and later everyone made it to Ikram’s apartment. The next day they parted ways. Ikram, Nicholas, and Samantha boarded a French military aircraft carrying evacuees to Greece via Djibouti; Hakim and his family found a bus traveling to Egypt; Godwin stayed with a family friend near a military base in Omdurman; the Syrian kids reunited with Ashraf and left for Port Sudan, then from there to Damascus. Salih, Mohamad Abbakar, and Ikram’s relatives stayed in Omdurman.

I spent the first night at Argeen sleeping on the asphalt near the bus, consuming nothing but small amounts of dates and water to avoid needing to find somewhere to relieve myself. The next day I went to check on the passports. When I was heading back to the bus with some of the documents we needed, I saw from afar that an older man from the bus was angrily throwing a big brown handbag onto the sidewalk.

When I got closer Nora, who had been taking care of Larry in Mohamed Kamal’s absence, was standing outside the bus. The other passengers, she explained, had objected to the smell coming from the bag. “I’ll walk to Cairo with the cat if I have to!” she said. Nora, Sam, and I got off the bus, thanked Abdallah, and crossed the border on foot.

I was in touch with Mohamed Kamal’s ex-wife, an American educational consultant named Jackie, who had changed her travel plans to meet us on the Egyptian side. We spent much of that night waiting for hours with thousands of other displaced people in the border crossing’s in-between zone. Ambulances pushed through the crowds, sirens blaring. Many of the elderly and sick couldn’t bear it any longer and started crying out in exhaustion, anger, and hunger.

Finally we made it to the Egyptian side. Larry caused a brief consternation among the officers; when I explained that he belonged to khawajat and showed them his vaccine card, they gave a confused look and waved us through. From there we had more paperwork to fill out, more lines to stand in, more people to ask for help, more hours to wait. At last we were out. Jackie was waiting for us outside the gate with a taxi; she had reserved guest houses on a river island in Aswan, where Mohamed Kamal would soon join us. When she picked up the duffle, Larry stuck his head out timidly, weak and dazed. I doubt he would’ve lasted another day.

*

In the following months the war in Sudan would expand from Khartoum throughout the vast country, producing what the International Rescue Committee has called the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded.” Nine million people are internally displaced. Three million have become refugees in neighboring countries. Thirty million people need humanitarian assistance; in parts of the country, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has issued famine declarations. Endemic diseases such as malaria, cholera, and dengue fever have become common. Death toll estimates run as high as 400,000. A wide range of reports document human rights abuses from sexual violence to slavery.

In the town of El Geneina in Darfur, RSF fighters massacred 15,000 members of the Massalit ethnic group. The US government described it as an act of genocide, twenty years after it declared a genocide in the same region. In Gezeira State, in central Sudan, RSF fighters ransacked villages and killed thousands. Militias allied with the army targeted suspected RSF collaborators from western Sudan in Kanabi farmer settlements; video shows them slaughtering some like sheep. Army jet fighters have indiscriminately bombed towns where suspected RSF fighters resided, killing civilians; in two cases in September 2024, a France24 investigation alleged, the military dropped barrels of chlorine, a banned chemical weapon.

Mercenaries from as far away as Ukraine and Colombia have joined the fighting. Smuggled Sudanese resources—including gold, gum arabic, and livestock—have found their way into regional coffers to enable the war to go on. Most recently, after an eighteen-month siege that starved residents into eating cowhide, the RSF overran the city of El Fasher in Darfur, killing untold numbers of people. Satellites captured images of the bloodstained sand.

*

A couple of days after we arrived on the island I attended Friday prayers in an old mosque. When the prayer ended the local community welcomed the refugees, “our Sudanese brethren.” Thabit Tbed, a Sudanese Nubian artist living in Aswan, got up to extend his thanks. He started tearing up and couldn’t finish his sentences. Then it hit me. After two weeks my guard was finally falling. I withdrew from the circle, turned around, and cried.