Sudan: The War No One Wanted
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John Ashworth
Mar 4, 2026, 4:46:33 AM (9 days ago) Mar 4
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The War No One Wanted
In Sudan, the forces unleashed by the remnants of Bashir’s regime have
not won. Even under siege, life continues.
By Joshua Craze, with photographs by Salih Basheer [NB: This version
is text only - see link below for photo version]
Boston Review
November 11, 2025, New York City
Dear Salih,
You asked me to write an essay to accompany your book, The Return, and
gave me one rule. “Don’t discuss the photographs.” You told me: “I
want people to see the images on their own terms.” This essay is
written in counterpoint.
I arrived in New York three weeks ago, after a long trip to South
Sudan’s flooded conflict zones. Walking through the city, en route to
dinner, I reflected on the fact that all my Sudanese friends are
posing the same questions: Is anywhere safe? Is a return possible?
Some inquire from Tawila, having fled the massacre in El Fasher.
Others ask from bedrooms in Nairobi, shelters in New York, or the camp
in Kiryandongo, Uganda.
I was to eat with a friend whose family is from Gezira State, in the
center of Sudan. In January 2025, Wad Medani, the state capital, had
been recaptured by the Sudanese army. Videos of the massacres that had
occurred, taken by the perpetrators, were one of the few sources of
information we had about the assault. Not for the first time, I
thought how unjust it is that history is literally being recorded by
the victors, and that in the absence of another record we are forced
to confront these documents of savagery.
My friend and I ate pilau for dinner, surrounded by people from all
over the world who had come to New York for sanctuary or work, for
pleasure or duty. My friend was disconsolate. “It’s over,” she said.
“Even if there was a ceasefire, even if there was peace, to what would
we be returning? The Khartoum I know no longer exists. You cannot
build a life from ruins. There is no going back.” I was reminded of a
line in a poem by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish: “We travel
like other people, but we return to nowhere.”
Writing in November 2025, after the devastations of El Fasher, it is
hard to recall the uncertainties of the war’s early days, back in
April 2023, when I dared hope it might end quickly. Friends resolved
to stay in Khartoum, even as the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support
Forces (RSF) fought for control of its streets, reducing family homes
and favored coffee spots to rubble. One friend fretted about her
birds. “I would leave,” she told me plaintively, “but who will take
care of them?” In the end, she went, joining the flows of people
searching for a way out of the war. Some fled to Egypt, enduring or
expiring in long sunburned queues at the border. Others went to Jeddah
or even to Abu Dhabi—the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE),
the major sponsor of the militia razing Sudan. Many friends came south
to the Joda border crossing. The lucky ones who still had dollars in
their pockets went to Juba, South Sudan’s capital, and then made their
way to Uganda. Those without means were driven to Maban county, where
in August 2023, I saw the UN refugee agency pile doctors and teachers
onto trucks, drive them into the bush, beyond the reach of any phone
network, and curtly inform them that here is where they would make
their new lives.
Can there be life without a return? A few months after the war began I
was in Nairobi, smoking shisha with a Sudanese friend, freshly arrived
from Khartoum. We talked about how different the tobacco in Nairobi
tasted, and how Kenyans, inexplicably, never make time to drink tea.
He said: “I have just one question: Do I need to buy a mattress?” He
meant: How long will I need to stay here? How much of a life do I need
to imagine? I told him that he will, unfortunately, need to buy a bed
and more besides. His mouth hardened. Then we talked of Khartoum, as
it was before the war, and we discussed the brave women and men of the
Emergency Response Rooms, as they are now, all over Sudan, providing
food and health services to the needy, despite being persecuted by
both the army and the RSF. As we talked of Sudans old and new, he
smiled, and I thought, if I were a photographer, I would have liked to
take his picture.
________________________________
I am supposed to be an expert. I write reports about the war.
Diplomats with concerned brows ask me for my opinion on where the
conflict is going. Will the RSF take Babanusa? Will its drones strike
Khartoum again? Are the UAE interested in peace? The answer to the
last question seems obvious to me—it’s contained in images of the
bright new weapons the Emirates have festooned on the RSF, with as
much largesse as Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan uses to outfit the
Manchester City frontline. I try to answer the other questions the
diplomats pose, but under my peacocked expertise, I’m confused. This
war, I cannot understand it all. Perhaps it’s not helpful for the
expert to hold up his hands and announce his confusion, but I think
there is a clue here, something that might help us comprehend the
war’s enormous complexity. My confusion has its roots in a
demonstration I attended in Khartoum, back in October 2021.
The stage should first be set. Omar al-Bashir was an army brigadier
who came to power in a coup d’état in 1989, with the backing of Hassan
al-Turabi and the National Islamic Front. He took over a state gripped
by a civil war fought against a rebel group in the south of the
country. Sudan was also struggling with a deep economic crisis, partly
brought about by the punishing austerity politics promoted by the
country’s debtors in the Global North. From this unpromising material,
Bashir forged an enduring form of rule, one we are still living with
today. The state abandoned the peripheries of the country, and rather
than fight its civil war using the Sudanese army, it outsourced its
monopoly of violence to militias, who waged a counterinsurgency on the
cheap, taking loot in lieu of wages. To control the militias, Bashir
privatized the state, turning it into a multitude of rivalrous
fiefdoms, ruled over by his security services, each of which built up
its own economic empire. The Sudanese army took control of banking and
construction. To the riparian cities along the Nile, Bashir offered a
Faustian pact: accept cheap commodities and subsidies for fuel and
wheat, but know that their import requires foreign currency, obtained
from the sale of resources produced in the peripheries, which would
have to be pacified.
The war in southern Sudan finally ended in 2005, after twenty-two long
years, with a promise that the rebels would have a regional government
and the chance to hold a referendum on independence in 2011. By then,
another war had begun, one that has never really ended. In 2003, a
rebellion started in Darfur in protest at political marginalization
and land grabs by nomadic Arab herders backed by the government.
Bashir decided to repeat the playbook he deployed in the south of
Sudan, and outsourced the conflict to local militias. He armed Arab
nomads, which were nicknamed the Janjaweed. They laid waste to Darfur.
Their modus operandi was to burn villages, kill civilians, and help
themselves to the land of the displaced. Among their number was a
young commander, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, nicknamed Hemedti. His raids
across North Darfur in 2006 were particularly brutal: he raped women
and tortured men. As much as they were fighting for Bashir’s regime,
the Janjaweed were also pursuing more local goals: consolidating
territorial control, and forcing non-Arab groups into camps for the
internally displaced. It is these camps that have been razed over the
past two years: the refuges of one war have become the charnel houses
of the next.
Back in the early 2000s, Bashir’s counterinsurgency on the cheap
proved expensive. Militia leaders, promised ranks and payments, soon
became disaffected with Khartoum. They would fight against each other,
and also against the government. Fearing a coup d’état, Bashir created
the RSF, which he conceived of as both a counterinsurgency force and a
Praetorian guard, designed to coup-proof his regime. Hemedti soon rose
to lead the militia. While the state paid and trained his fighters,
Hemedti expanded the RSF’s business interests, taking over gold mines
in Darfur, and dispatching his troops to Yemen to fight as mercenaries
for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Sudanese army got in on the act,
too, and also sent men to Yemen. That force’s leader was an army
general by the name of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Back in Sudan, Bashir’s regime was under pressure. In 2011, South
Sudan voted to secede, and Khartoum lost 75 percent of its oil
revenue. Facing economic crisis, Bashir desperately tried to diversify
Sudan’s income streams by getting into gold mining, just as a gold
rush was sweeping the Sahel and global prices surged. It didn’t work.
The state failed to control the production of artisanal gold, which is
largely smuggled out of Sudan. The boom in gold mining instead enabled
Hemedti to entrench his dominion in Darfur by running mining sites and
displacing other militia forces. Few in Khartoum were happy with
Hemedti’s success. He was an interloper from the peripheries, a barely
educated camel rustler with pretensions to power. In Darfur, the Arab
militias lorded it over non-Arab groups, even if the distinctions
between them were historically very mutable and became definitive only
through the devastations of war. In Khartoum, the Arabs of Darfur were
foreigners, “Chadians”—uneducated savages not fit to run the country.
Little came of Bashir’s effort to save his regime. By 2018, the
economy was flailing. The government cut subsidies to wheat and fuel,
breaking its pact with Sudan’s cities. Protests began in the
peripheries, but soon spread. I remember delightedly watching the
demonstrations. The resistance committees that led the protests were a
photographic negative of Bashir’s neighborhood committees, which kept
a close eye on political activities and produced an atmosphere of
paranoia and mistrust. Where the regime was repressive, the resistance
committees were joyful. While Bashir had withdrawn services from
Sudan’s poor and concentrated power in the hands of the security
organs, the resistance committees had offered free health care and
mutual aid, and were explicitly nonviolent. At protests, people would
chant kol al-balad Darfur: the whole country is Darfur. For a moment,
it felt like the racism and violence of Bashir’s predatory state would
be undone and a new social contract forged.
The protests intensified in 2019, and the regime met them with
violence. The security services became uneasy. It was one thing to
kill people in the peripheries and quite another to mow down the youth
of Khartoum, many of whom came from the families of soldiers and
politicians. One day in April, Bashir allegedly gave an order to open
fire on the protesters. By the next day, he was gone. The military
controlled the state. What a beautiful moment that was! The heavy
certainty of the dictatorship dissolved into the air. Slogans
celebrating the army were graffitied onto Khartoum’s walls. But the
goals of the protesters and those of the army were not consonant. The
security services hoped that by deposing Bashir, they could conserve
their economic empires. The protesters, in contrast, wanted a civilian
government, not a new military dictator.
The Sudanese army and the RSF found common cause in repressing the
demonstrations. On June 3, the security services violently invaded a
sit-in outside the military headquarters, leaving more than 120
protesters dead and some nine hundred injured. Despite the violence,
the demonstrations continued. On June 30, the thirtieth anniversary of
Bashir’s coup, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the
junta. I recently spoke to a friend, now exiled in Cairo. He said: “I
became a human being during those protests. I found out I had power.
That I did not have to be afraid. I felt like I was growing in size,
literally. They will never take that from me.”
What happened after the march will be debated for a century to come.
Civilian politicians from Sudan’s established parties opened up
negotiations with the military. International actors, including the
United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, pressured the army
to enter a transitional government with the politicians. Many of my
friends think protests should have continued and a general strike
called. It was a moment, they hold, in which the military could have
been pushed out of power. Others disagree: more bloodshed had to be
avoided, they say. Ultimately, a compromise was reached: a
transitional government was created in August 2019, with a sovereign
council composed of military officers and civilian politicians, prior
to elections promised for 2022. Burhan would serve as the council’s
head and Hemedti as his deputy. Abdalla Hamdok, a UN economist, was to
be prime minister and the head of a technocratic cabinet.
Viewed from the street, Hamdok’s time in government seemed like a
sellout. His economic policies abandoned the progressive socioeconomic
agenda propounded by the protesters in favor of economic austerity and
the elimination of subsidies, measures designed to win the sympathies
of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Relations with
Israel were normalized (as if they could ever be normal), and in
response, Trump promised to remove sanctions. Little was done to break
up the military’s economic empire. Some of my friends served with
Hamdok’s cabinet, and they didn’t think he was simply selling out. “We
needed allies,” they explained to me. “Without the international
community, we could never have fought against the old regime,” one
friend whispered, in a quiet garden in a residential area of Khartoum,
away from prying ears.
By 2021, two years into the transitional government, discontent with
Hamdok was rising, but so were popular fears of a coup. I visited
Khartoum that fall, attending a demonstration on October 21. I
remember gathering—as is traditional—before a burning tire in Burri,
listening to speeches and conversations twirl around the thick black
smoke. Anxious European diplomats were texting me: “But do they favor
Hamdok?” I wanted to laugh. The protesters’ opinions on Hamdok
differed, but that was not the focus of the demonstration. The people
wanted an end to military rule. Behind that simple, powerful demand,
there was a feeling, experienced by everyone marching that day.
Thousands of people had organized together. Proud young women and men
went in front, scouting out the positions of the security services.
Groups of older people sang revolutionary songs just behind them. But
what are they saying? the diplomats asked, holed up in their
embassies. I replied by holding up my phone to the din of the crowd.
That night, I put my head down on the pillow and couldn’t sleep. I
didn’t think about the intelligence operatives who had taken up
residence in the lobby of my cheap hotel. Nor about the rumors of a
coup. I thought: Is there a soul in Sudan tonight that wants the RSF
or the Sudanese army to be in power? I knew they were out there, those
sad souls, but such was the power of the protests that I couldn’t
imagine them.
I left Khartoum for Addis Ababa three days later. The next morning,
Burhan and Hemedti launched their coup d’état, pushing the civilians
out of power. Anxious media commentators talked of a season of coups,
placing Sudan next to Guinea and Mali, but I knew that it was not the
same. The idea that Burhan could be Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ruling Sudan
with an iron hand, was risible. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army
lacked any real social base. Neither group had the religious support
that allowed Bashir to rule during the 1990s. While the RSF was backed
by the Arab groups that had profited from the devastation of Darfur,
such support stopped at the region’s borders—Hemedti’s efforts to
build up the militia as a multi-ethnic force had been unsuccessful.
The Sudanese army faced widespread unpopularity due to its role in
repressing the revolution.
Here is my confusion. This is a war that no one wanted. Everybody
hoped the military would leave power. They may have taken control in a
coup, but I knew they were weak.
So it proved. I next visited Khartoum a year later. The city looked
scruffier than I had ever seen it, with trash piling up and walls
falling down. The junta was not exactly flourishing. Burhan and
Hemedti had cast about for a civilian face for their regime. Hamdok
had been brought back, a month after the coup occurred, only to resign
six weeks later after massive protests. In cafés and at music events,
I found my friends still discussing politics, still singing, and still
organizing against the generals. This was not Sisi’s Egypt. In a way,
the coup returned us to a purer moment of politics. During the
revolution, the people wanted the fall of the regime. The transitional
government muddied the waters and introduced (or simply made apparent)
the many divisions that existed amongst the civilians. The coup
remedied that. Once again, it was the people versus the military, and
the junta was losing. The only thing that could save it would be a
war.
________________________________
The generals’ victory has not been on the battlefield. The agendas of
the resistance committees that brought down Bashir have vanished from
the diplomatic agenda. Ambassadors might ask me about the state of the
Islamists in government, but they never pose questions about the
possibility of a vision of food sovereignty not predicated on
commanders exploiting hunger and famine for political gain. Having
kowtowed to the generals in the transitional government, despite the
civilians’ insistence that Burhan and Hemedti could not be trusted,
the diplomats are once again focused on the military men at the
expense of the Sudanese people. To the extent that they engage with
civilian groups, the diplomats wine and dine the astroturfed political
parties that attend their workshops in Nairobi and Kampala on generous
per diems. The war has restored the primacy of the military. Thus far,
all the Global North’s desultory diplomatic efforts have focused on
trying to get to a ceasefire, despite both sides’ evident lack of
interest. Though the Sudanese army has been sanctioned for war crimes,
and the RSF has been condemned for carrying out a genocide, the
international community’s response has been to insist that the
generals are the only Sudanese worth talking to. If the war has
destroyed Sudan, it has saved the political fates of the beleaguered
leaders of the October 2021 coup.
It’s not just Burhan and Hemedti who have been revitalized by the
conflict. In August 2023, I sat by the side of the Nile in Juba with a
member of the General Intelligence Service (GIS), the Sudanese
intelligence agency. This intense young man had previously been close
to Salah Gosh, Bashir’s former national security advisor and once the
pretender to his patron’s crown. The young man told me that the
conflict was a boon to the Islamists. “We thought with Bashir’s fall
that all was lost,” he said. “But now, with this war, we can regain
popular support.” The army’s weak social base has meant that much of
the actual fighting is being done by Islamist militias, like the
Al-Bara’ ibn Malik Battalion. Figures that had been marginalized after
the revolution, like Ahmed Haroun, the butcher of South Kordofan, have
escaped from prison, and returned to a central role in Sudanese
politics.
The war has also lent legitimacy to the army as an institution. Its
most effective recruitment tool has been the massacres committed by
the RSF. In 2019, hundreds of thousands took to the street chanting
kol al-balad Darfur. In 2023, Sudan became Darfur in the worst
possible way. The Janjaweed’s violent campaign of counterinsurgency in
the region has become a living nightmare for the whole country.
Everywhere is a periphery now. In the first two years of the war, RSF
fighters raped and razed their way through central Sudan. In response,
tens of thousands of people answered calls from the Sudanese army for
popular mobilization. Intellectuals, too, have increasingly come out
as supporters of the military. In response to RSF atrocities, many
have concluded it is either/or, and the voices that say neither/nor
have grown fainter.
The RSF has profited from the conflict. When it was exporting fighters
to Yemen, it could offer attractive wages to young men in a faltering
economy. After the war began, it recruited from amongst Darfuri Arab
groups by portraying the war as an existential struggle for their very
survival. The only wages it offered were licenses to loot. In every
city it captured, it deployed the same tactics: raze, rape, and steal.
The existential struggle that it promoted as a rhetorical device
became a reality. In West Darfur, the RSF massacred 15,000 members of
the Masalit ethnic group, displacing hundreds of thousands. I met some
of the survivors in Kampala in February 2025. Tense and sober, they
described horrific scenes of violence, but also indicated that this
war is not over; they would take their revenge, whether or not they
had to wait a generation in Chadian refugee camps. The violence
playing out in Darfur cannot be halted by a ceasefire agreement
hatched in Geneva or Jeddah, if one could ever be agreed upon.
Though the two sides may be opposed on the battlefield, much unites
them. Both are remnants of Bashir’s regime—even if the army has a much
longer history—and both are reliant on external support to wage war.
Behind the RSF stands the UAE, while backing the Sudanese army one
finds Qatar—worried about its Emirati rival—along with Egypt, Turkey,
and Iran. Both sides have used famine as a tool of war, restricted
humanitarian access, and exacerbated social cleavages as a means of
building up their forces. The unity of the two belligerents is not
only formal: for both, business has never been better. Each side
exports gold to the Emirates, with official annual exports alone
nearly doubling since the war began. Animal exports to the Gulf have
also soared (from 2 to 4.7 million head of livestock from 2022-2023).
Most of Sudan’s livestock comes from Darfur, but is exported via Port
Sudan. In this fire sale of the country’s assets, the two sides
collaborate.
The successes of the Sudanese army and the RSF have been the
devastation of Sudan. This is a war fought over the bodies of the
Sudanese people. The fall of El Fasher is only the latest in a long
line of horrors. The RSF besieged the city for more than five hundred
days. Eighteen months of artillery barrages and drone strikes, of
people hiding in trenches and eating animal feed. There were several
famine declarations, a UN Security Council resolution calling for an
end to the siege, and endless commentaries in the international media
alerting us to an impending massacre. We did not want for warnings.
After all that noise, when El Fasher finally fell, on October 26,
2025, it did so in a communications blackout.
One of the few sources of information about what was happening came
from videos posted by RSF fighters. In one, Fateh Abdullah Idris,
otherwise known as Abu Lulu, walks alongside nine men, sitting next to
a dirt track, their heads limp, their hands clasped in front of them.
He shoots them casually. In another video, an RSF fighter asks Abu
Lulu to spare the life of a civilian he knows. Abu Lulu refuses. “I
will never have mercy on you,” he tells the civilian. “Our job is only
killing.”
The video that stays with me is of a group of young RSF fighters,
resting on carpets in front of a ruined building. Some hold prayer
beads; others look bashful as the man recording the video on his phone
asks them how many people they have killed. The first says: 115
people. Mabrook, says the questioner. Congratulations. The second
fighter, with hair like a young Bob Dylan and the sunglasses to match,
confesses he has only killed 70 people. The third man says he cannot
possibly remember how many souls he has dispatched, but on the day El
Fasher fell, he killed 214 people. He grins.
These testimonies to the RSF’s impunity were accompanied by satellite
photographs of El Fasher—obscene hieroglyphs in need of
interpretation. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been
analyzing these images, discovered a sudden proliferation of Cs and Js
in the landscape—the shapes taken by bodies after they fall, shot,
running away. Around them, the landscape is stained red. So much blood
had seeped into the ground, Yale’s researchers claimed, it was visible
from space. After all that killing, it feels absurd to be angry about
the politics of visual representation, but I deeply missed the
Instagram feeds of all the brave photographers inside El Fasher that
had been uploading images of daily life. Sudan is not only the videos
of killers and the satellite photographs of distant observers.
The country is under siege. The RSF—and in some places, the Sudanese
army—encircles towns and restricts the flow of goods and people into
them. Slowly, the towns starve. There is less food, less air, and less
possibility for thought. Even in settlements far from the RSF’s
troops, their Chinese-made drones make their presence felt. Everyone
feels the weight of the war. The word “siege” comes from the Old
French segge, a seat or chair. The original meaning of siege is
literally: when the army sits down. These days, the military is
sitting on everything.
Yet despite all the blood and loss, I cannot accept that it is over
and that Burhan, Hemedti, and the forces they have unleashed have won.
For in the most difficult of circumstances, facing famine and
destitution, people have banded together. Even under siege, life
continues. At the beginning of the war, when the state began to
massacre its own citizens, and all the international humanitarian
organizations fled, the Sudanese people organized health and food
services across the country. If one looks carefully, one can see, amid
the ruins of Sudan, a genuinely national network of mutual aid groups.
I see that sense of care amongst my friends, now displaced by the war
and living in cities around the region. In Kampala, back in February
2025, I drank coffee in a tent. On one side, hanging from the canvas
wall, were photographs of Sudan’s beloved singers. On the other,
pictures of the revolution’s martyrs. People from all over Sudan sat
in that tent, drinking tea, smoking shisha, and listening to music,
while discussing politics with a fervor that would be the envy of any
country in Europe. I had never experienced a more Sudanese scene than
that day in Uganda. It reminded me of a paragraph from Jacques
Derrida’s essay on Walter Benjamin, which I render here in my
translation:
I don’t see a ruin as a negative thing. First of all, it’s not a
thing. How can one love anything else? One can love a monument, a
building, an institution, only in the experience of its fragility: it
was not always there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And
it is because of all this that I love it in its finitude, through
birth and death, for its ghosts and the silhouette of its ruin, and of
mine—which it already is, or already prefigures. How else can we love
except in this finitude?
Perhaps, being presented with a ruin, recognizing a ruin (of a
country, a lover, a memory), is where our struggle begins, not where
it ends. I am sure it is not over. They have not won. There are these
discussions. These songs. These ruins. These photographs.
This essay is adapted from The Return by Salih Basheer, published in
February 2026.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To
support work like this, please donate here.
Salih Basheer is a Sudanese photographer. His books include 22 Days in
Between and The Return.
Joshua Craze is writing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war,
violence, and bureaucracy in South Sudan. His writing has also
appeared in n+1, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other places.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-war-no-one-wanted/
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
In Sudan, the forces unleashed by the remnants of Bashir’s regime have
not won. Even under siege, life continues.
By Joshua Craze, with photographs by Salih Basheer [NB: This version
is text only - see link below for photo version]
Boston Review
November 11, 2025, New York City
Dear Salih,
You asked me to write an essay to accompany your book, The Return, and
gave me one rule. “Don’t discuss the photographs.” You told me: “I
want people to see the images on their own terms.” This essay is
written in counterpoint.
I arrived in New York three weeks ago, after a long trip to South
Sudan’s flooded conflict zones. Walking through the city, en route to
dinner, I reflected on the fact that all my Sudanese friends are
posing the same questions: Is anywhere safe? Is a return possible?
Some inquire from Tawila, having fled the massacre in El Fasher.
Others ask from bedrooms in Nairobi, shelters in New York, or the camp
in Kiryandongo, Uganda.
I was to eat with a friend whose family is from Gezira State, in the
center of Sudan. In January 2025, Wad Medani, the state capital, had
been recaptured by the Sudanese army. Videos of the massacres that had
occurred, taken by the perpetrators, were one of the few sources of
information we had about the assault. Not for the first time, I
thought how unjust it is that history is literally being recorded by
the victors, and that in the absence of another record we are forced
to confront these documents of savagery.
My friend and I ate pilau for dinner, surrounded by people from all
over the world who had come to New York for sanctuary or work, for
pleasure or duty. My friend was disconsolate. “It’s over,” she said.
“Even if there was a ceasefire, even if there was peace, to what would
we be returning? The Khartoum I know no longer exists. You cannot
build a life from ruins. There is no going back.” I was reminded of a
line in a poem by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish: “We travel
like other people, but we return to nowhere.”
Writing in November 2025, after the devastations of El Fasher, it is
hard to recall the uncertainties of the war’s early days, back in
April 2023, when I dared hope it might end quickly. Friends resolved
to stay in Khartoum, even as the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support
Forces (RSF) fought for control of its streets, reducing family homes
and favored coffee spots to rubble. One friend fretted about her
birds. “I would leave,” she told me plaintively, “but who will take
care of them?” In the end, she went, joining the flows of people
searching for a way out of the war. Some fled to Egypt, enduring or
expiring in long sunburned queues at the border. Others went to Jeddah
or even to Abu Dhabi—the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE),
the major sponsor of the militia razing Sudan. Many friends came south
to the Joda border crossing. The lucky ones who still had dollars in
their pockets went to Juba, South Sudan’s capital, and then made their
way to Uganda. Those without means were driven to Maban county, where
in August 2023, I saw the UN refugee agency pile doctors and teachers
onto trucks, drive them into the bush, beyond the reach of any phone
network, and curtly inform them that here is where they would make
their new lives.
Can there be life without a return? A few months after the war began I
was in Nairobi, smoking shisha with a Sudanese friend, freshly arrived
from Khartoum. We talked about how different the tobacco in Nairobi
tasted, and how Kenyans, inexplicably, never make time to drink tea.
He said: “I have just one question: Do I need to buy a mattress?” He
meant: How long will I need to stay here? How much of a life do I need
to imagine? I told him that he will, unfortunately, need to buy a bed
and more besides. His mouth hardened. Then we talked of Khartoum, as
it was before the war, and we discussed the brave women and men of the
Emergency Response Rooms, as they are now, all over Sudan, providing
food and health services to the needy, despite being persecuted by
both the army and the RSF. As we talked of Sudans old and new, he
smiled, and I thought, if I were a photographer, I would have liked to
take his picture.
________________________________
I am supposed to be an expert. I write reports about the war.
Diplomats with concerned brows ask me for my opinion on where the
conflict is going. Will the RSF take Babanusa? Will its drones strike
Khartoum again? Are the UAE interested in peace? The answer to the
last question seems obvious to me—it’s contained in images of the
bright new weapons the Emirates have festooned on the RSF, with as
much largesse as Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan uses to outfit the
Manchester City frontline. I try to answer the other questions the
diplomats pose, but under my peacocked expertise, I’m confused. This
war, I cannot understand it all. Perhaps it’s not helpful for the
expert to hold up his hands and announce his confusion, but I think
there is a clue here, something that might help us comprehend the
war’s enormous complexity. My confusion has its roots in a
demonstration I attended in Khartoum, back in October 2021.
The stage should first be set. Omar al-Bashir was an army brigadier
who came to power in a coup d’état in 1989, with the backing of Hassan
al-Turabi and the National Islamic Front. He took over a state gripped
by a civil war fought against a rebel group in the south of the
country. Sudan was also struggling with a deep economic crisis, partly
brought about by the punishing austerity politics promoted by the
country’s debtors in the Global North. From this unpromising material,
Bashir forged an enduring form of rule, one we are still living with
today. The state abandoned the peripheries of the country, and rather
than fight its civil war using the Sudanese army, it outsourced its
monopoly of violence to militias, who waged a counterinsurgency on the
cheap, taking loot in lieu of wages. To control the militias, Bashir
privatized the state, turning it into a multitude of rivalrous
fiefdoms, ruled over by his security services, each of which built up
its own economic empire. The Sudanese army took control of banking and
construction. To the riparian cities along the Nile, Bashir offered a
Faustian pact: accept cheap commodities and subsidies for fuel and
wheat, but know that their import requires foreign currency, obtained
from the sale of resources produced in the peripheries, which would
have to be pacified.
The war in southern Sudan finally ended in 2005, after twenty-two long
years, with a promise that the rebels would have a regional government
and the chance to hold a referendum on independence in 2011. By then,
another war had begun, one that has never really ended. In 2003, a
rebellion started in Darfur in protest at political marginalization
and land grabs by nomadic Arab herders backed by the government.
Bashir decided to repeat the playbook he deployed in the south of
Sudan, and outsourced the conflict to local militias. He armed Arab
nomads, which were nicknamed the Janjaweed. They laid waste to Darfur.
Their modus operandi was to burn villages, kill civilians, and help
themselves to the land of the displaced. Among their number was a
young commander, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, nicknamed Hemedti. His raids
across North Darfur in 2006 were particularly brutal: he raped women
and tortured men. As much as they were fighting for Bashir’s regime,
the Janjaweed were also pursuing more local goals: consolidating
territorial control, and forcing non-Arab groups into camps for the
internally displaced. It is these camps that have been razed over the
past two years: the refuges of one war have become the charnel houses
of the next.
Back in the early 2000s, Bashir’s counterinsurgency on the cheap
proved expensive. Militia leaders, promised ranks and payments, soon
became disaffected with Khartoum. They would fight against each other,
and also against the government. Fearing a coup d’état, Bashir created
the RSF, which he conceived of as both a counterinsurgency force and a
Praetorian guard, designed to coup-proof his regime. Hemedti soon rose
to lead the militia. While the state paid and trained his fighters,
Hemedti expanded the RSF’s business interests, taking over gold mines
in Darfur, and dispatching his troops to Yemen to fight as mercenaries
for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Sudanese army got in on the act,
too, and also sent men to Yemen. That force’s leader was an army
general by the name of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Back in Sudan, Bashir’s regime was under pressure. In 2011, South
Sudan voted to secede, and Khartoum lost 75 percent of its oil
revenue. Facing economic crisis, Bashir desperately tried to diversify
Sudan’s income streams by getting into gold mining, just as a gold
rush was sweeping the Sahel and global prices surged. It didn’t work.
The state failed to control the production of artisanal gold, which is
largely smuggled out of Sudan. The boom in gold mining instead enabled
Hemedti to entrench his dominion in Darfur by running mining sites and
displacing other militia forces. Few in Khartoum were happy with
Hemedti’s success. He was an interloper from the peripheries, a barely
educated camel rustler with pretensions to power. In Darfur, the Arab
militias lorded it over non-Arab groups, even if the distinctions
between them were historically very mutable and became definitive only
through the devastations of war. In Khartoum, the Arabs of Darfur were
foreigners, “Chadians”—uneducated savages not fit to run the country.
Little came of Bashir’s effort to save his regime. By 2018, the
economy was flailing. The government cut subsidies to wheat and fuel,
breaking its pact with Sudan’s cities. Protests began in the
peripheries, but soon spread. I remember delightedly watching the
demonstrations. The resistance committees that led the protests were a
photographic negative of Bashir’s neighborhood committees, which kept
a close eye on political activities and produced an atmosphere of
paranoia and mistrust. Where the regime was repressive, the resistance
committees were joyful. While Bashir had withdrawn services from
Sudan’s poor and concentrated power in the hands of the security
organs, the resistance committees had offered free health care and
mutual aid, and were explicitly nonviolent. At protests, people would
chant kol al-balad Darfur: the whole country is Darfur. For a moment,
it felt like the racism and violence of Bashir’s predatory state would
be undone and a new social contract forged.
The protests intensified in 2019, and the regime met them with
violence. The security services became uneasy. It was one thing to
kill people in the peripheries and quite another to mow down the youth
of Khartoum, many of whom came from the families of soldiers and
politicians. One day in April, Bashir allegedly gave an order to open
fire on the protesters. By the next day, he was gone. The military
controlled the state. What a beautiful moment that was! The heavy
certainty of the dictatorship dissolved into the air. Slogans
celebrating the army were graffitied onto Khartoum’s walls. But the
goals of the protesters and those of the army were not consonant. The
security services hoped that by deposing Bashir, they could conserve
their economic empires. The protesters, in contrast, wanted a civilian
government, not a new military dictator.
The Sudanese army and the RSF found common cause in repressing the
demonstrations. On June 3, the security services violently invaded a
sit-in outside the military headquarters, leaving more than 120
protesters dead and some nine hundred injured. Despite the violence,
the demonstrations continued. On June 30, the thirtieth anniversary of
Bashir’s coup, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the
junta. I recently spoke to a friend, now exiled in Cairo. He said: “I
became a human being during those protests. I found out I had power.
That I did not have to be afraid. I felt like I was growing in size,
literally. They will never take that from me.”
What happened after the march will be debated for a century to come.
Civilian politicians from Sudan’s established parties opened up
negotiations with the military. International actors, including the
United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, pressured the army
to enter a transitional government with the politicians. Many of my
friends think protests should have continued and a general strike
called. It was a moment, they hold, in which the military could have
been pushed out of power. Others disagree: more bloodshed had to be
avoided, they say. Ultimately, a compromise was reached: a
transitional government was created in August 2019, with a sovereign
council composed of military officers and civilian politicians, prior
to elections promised for 2022. Burhan would serve as the council’s
head and Hemedti as his deputy. Abdalla Hamdok, a UN economist, was to
be prime minister and the head of a technocratic cabinet.
Viewed from the street, Hamdok’s time in government seemed like a
sellout. His economic policies abandoned the progressive socioeconomic
agenda propounded by the protesters in favor of economic austerity and
the elimination of subsidies, measures designed to win the sympathies
of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Relations with
Israel were normalized (as if they could ever be normal), and in
response, Trump promised to remove sanctions. Little was done to break
up the military’s economic empire. Some of my friends served with
Hamdok’s cabinet, and they didn’t think he was simply selling out. “We
needed allies,” they explained to me. “Without the international
community, we could never have fought against the old regime,” one
friend whispered, in a quiet garden in a residential area of Khartoum,
away from prying ears.
By 2021, two years into the transitional government, discontent with
Hamdok was rising, but so were popular fears of a coup. I visited
Khartoum that fall, attending a demonstration on October 21. I
remember gathering—as is traditional—before a burning tire in Burri,
listening to speeches and conversations twirl around the thick black
smoke. Anxious European diplomats were texting me: “But do they favor
Hamdok?” I wanted to laugh. The protesters’ opinions on Hamdok
differed, but that was not the focus of the demonstration. The people
wanted an end to military rule. Behind that simple, powerful demand,
there was a feeling, experienced by everyone marching that day.
Thousands of people had organized together. Proud young women and men
went in front, scouting out the positions of the security services.
Groups of older people sang revolutionary songs just behind them. But
what are they saying? the diplomats asked, holed up in their
embassies. I replied by holding up my phone to the din of the crowd.
That night, I put my head down on the pillow and couldn’t sleep. I
didn’t think about the intelligence operatives who had taken up
residence in the lobby of my cheap hotel. Nor about the rumors of a
coup. I thought: Is there a soul in Sudan tonight that wants the RSF
or the Sudanese army to be in power? I knew they were out there, those
sad souls, but such was the power of the protests that I couldn’t
imagine them.
I left Khartoum for Addis Ababa three days later. The next morning,
Burhan and Hemedti launched their coup d’état, pushing the civilians
out of power. Anxious media commentators talked of a season of coups,
placing Sudan next to Guinea and Mali, but I knew that it was not the
same. The idea that Burhan could be Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ruling Sudan
with an iron hand, was risible. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army
lacked any real social base. Neither group had the religious support
that allowed Bashir to rule during the 1990s. While the RSF was backed
by the Arab groups that had profited from the devastation of Darfur,
such support stopped at the region’s borders—Hemedti’s efforts to
build up the militia as a multi-ethnic force had been unsuccessful.
The Sudanese army faced widespread unpopularity due to its role in
repressing the revolution.
Here is my confusion. This is a war that no one wanted. Everybody
hoped the military would leave power. They may have taken control in a
coup, but I knew they were weak.
So it proved. I next visited Khartoum a year later. The city looked
scruffier than I had ever seen it, with trash piling up and walls
falling down. The junta was not exactly flourishing. Burhan and
Hemedti had cast about for a civilian face for their regime. Hamdok
had been brought back, a month after the coup occurred, only to resign
six weeks later after massive protests. In cafés and at music events,
I found my friends still discussing politics, still singing, and still
organizing against the generals. This was not Sisi’s Egypt. In a way,
the coup returned us to a purer moment of politics. During the
revolution, the people wanted the fall of the regime. The transitional
government muddied the waters and introduced (or simply made apparent)
the many divisions that existed amongst the civilians. The coup
remedied that. Once again, it was the people versus the military, and
the junta was losing. The only thing that could save it would be a
war.
________________________________
The generals’ victory has not been on the battlefield. The agendas of
the resistance committees that brought down Bashir have vanished from
the diplomatic agenda. Ambassadors might ask me about the state of the
Islamists in government, but they never pose questions about the
possibility of a vision of food sovereignty not predicated on
commanders exploiting hunger and famine for political gain. Having
kowtowed to the generals in the transitional government, despite the
civilians’ insistence that Burhan and Hemedti could not be trusted,
the diplomats are once again focused on the military men at the
expense of the Sudanese people. To the extent that they engage with
civilian groups, the diplomats wine and dine the astroturfed political
parties that attend their workshops in Nairobi and Kampala on generous
per diems. The war has restored the primacy of the military. Thus far,
all the Global North’s desultory diplomatic efforts have focused on
trying to get to a ceasefire, despite both sides’ evident lack of
interest. Though the Sudanese army has been sanctioned for war crimes,
and the RSF has been condemned for carrying out a genocide, the
international community’s response has been to insist that the
generals are the only Sudanese worth talking to. If the war has
destroyed Sudan, it has saved the political fates of the beleaguered
leaders of the October 2021 coup.
It’s not just Burhan and Hemedti who have been revitalized by the
conflict. In August 2023, I sat by the side of the Nile in Juba with a
member of the General Intelligence Service (GIS), the Sudanese
intelligence agency. This intense young man had previously been close
to Salah Gosh, Bashir’s former national security advisor and once the
pretender to his patron’s crown. The young man told me that the
conflict was a boon to the Islamists. “We thought with Bashir’s fall
that all was lost,” he said. “But now, with this war, we can regain
popular support.” The army’s weak social base has meant that much of
the actual fighting is being done by Islamist militias, like the
Al-Bara’ ibn Malik Battalion. Figures that had been marginalized after
the revolution, like Ahmed Haroun, the butcher of South Kordofan, have
escaped from prison, and returned to a central role in Sudanese
politics.
The war has also lent legitimacy to the army as an institution. Its
most effective recruitment tool has been the massacres committed by
the RSF. In 2019, hundreds of thousands took to the street chanting
kol al-balad Darfur. In 2023, Sudan became Darfur in the worst
possible way. The Janjaweed’s violent campaign of counterinsurgency in
the region has become a living nightmare for the whole country.
Everywhere is a periphery now. In the first two years of the war, RSF
fighters raped and razed their way through central Sudan. In response,
tens of thousands of people answered calls from the Sudanese army for
popular mobilization. Intellectuals, too, have increasingly come out
as supporters of the military. In response to RSF atrocities, many
have concluded it is either/or, and the voices that say neither/nor
have grown fainter.
The RSF has profited from the conflict. When it was exporting fighters
to Yemen, it could offer attractive wages to young men in a faltering
economy. After the war began, it recruited from amongst Darfuri Arab
groups by portraying the war as an existential struggle for their very
survival. The only wages it offered were licenses to loot. In every
city it captured, it deployed the same tactics: raze, rape, and steal.
The existential struggle that it promoted as a rhetorical device
became a reality. In West Darfur, the RSF massacred 15,000 members of
the Masalit ethnic group, displacing hundreds of thousands. I met some
of the survivors in Kampala in February 2025. Tense and sober, they
described horrific scenes of violence, but also indicated that this
war is not over; they would take their revenge, whether or not they
had to wait a generation in Chadian refugee camps. The violence
playing out in Darfur cannot be halted by a ceasefire agreement
hatched in Geneva or Jeddah, if one could ever be agreed upon.
Though the two sides may be opposed on the battlefield, much unites
them. Both are remnants of Bashir’s regime—even if the army has a much
longer history—and both are reliant on external support to wage war.
Behind the RSF stands the UAE, while backing the Sudanese army one
finds Qatar—worried about its Emirati rival—along with Egypt, Turkey,
and Iran. Both sides have used famine as a tool of war, restricted
humanitarian access, and exacerbated social cleavages as a means of
building up their forces. The unity of the two belligerents is not
only formal: for both, business has never been better. Each side
exports gold to the Emirates, with official annual exports alone
nearly doubling since the war began. Animal exports to the Gulf have
also soared (from 2 to 4.7 million head of livestock from 2022-2023).
Most of Sudan’s livestock comes from Darfur, but is exported via Port
Sudan. In this fire sale of the country’s assets, the two sides
collaborate.
The successes of the Sudanese army and the RSF have been the
devastation of Sudan. This is a war fought over the bodies of the
Sudanese people. The fall of El Fasher is only the latest in a long
line of horrors. The RSF besieged the city for more than five hundred
days. Eighteen months of artillery barrages and drone strikes, of
people hiding in trenches and eating animal feed. There were several
famine declarations, a UN Security Council resolution calling for an
end to the siege, and endless commentaries in the international media
alerting us to an impending massacre. We did not want for warnings.
After all that noise, when El Fasher finally fell, on October 26,
2025, it did so in a communications blackout.
One of the few sources of information about what was happening came
from videos posted by RSF fighters. In one, Fateh Abdullah Idris,
otherwise known as Abu Lulu, walks alongside nine men, sitting next to
a dirt track, their heads limp, their hands clasped in front of them.
He shoots them casually. In another video, an RSF fighter asks Abu
Lulu to spare the life of a civilian he knows. Abu Lulu refuses. “I
will never have mercy on you,” he tells the civilian. “Our job is only
killing.”
The video that stays with me is of a group of young RSF fighters,
resting on carpets in front of a ruined building. Some hold prayer
beads; others look bashful as the man recording the video on his phone
asks them how many people they have killed. The first says: 115
people. Mabrook, says the questioner. Congratulations. The second
fighter, with hair like a young Bob Dylan and the sunglasses to match,
confesses he has only killed 70 people. The third man says he cannot
possibly remember how many souls he has dispatched, but on the day El
Fasher fell, he killed 214 people. He grins.
These testimonies to the RSF’s impunity were accompanied by satellite
photographs of El Fasher—obscene hieroglyphs in need of
interpretation. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been
analyzing these images, discovered a sudden proliferation of Cs and Js
in the landscape—the shapes taken by bodies after they fall, shot,
running away. Around them, the landscape is stained red. So much blood
had seeped into the ground, Yale’s researchers claimed, it was visible
from space. After all that killing, it feels absurd to be angry about
the politics of visual representation, but I deeply missed the
Instagram feeds of all the brave photographers inside El Fasher that
had been uploading images of daily life. Sudan is not only the videos
of killers and the satellite photographs of distant observers.
The country is under siege. The RSF—and in some places, the Sudanese
army—encircles towns and restricts the flow of goods and people into
them. Slowly, the towns starve. There is less food, less air, and less
possibility for thought. Even in settlements far from the RSF’s
troops, their Chinese-made drones make their presence felt. Everyone
feels the weight of the war. The word “siege” comes from the Old
French segge, a seat or chair. The original meaning of siege is
literally: when the army sits down. These days, the military is
sitting on everything.
Yet despite all the blood and loss, I cannot accept that it is over
and that Burhan, Hemedti, and the forces they have unleashed have won.
For in the most difficult of circumstances, facing famine and
destitution, people have banded together. Even under siege, life
continues. At the beginning of the war, when the state began to
massacre its own citizens, and all the international humanitarian
organizations fled, the Sudanese people organized health and food
services across the country. If one looks carefully, one can see, amid
the ruins of Sudan, a genuinely national network of mutual aid groups.
I see that sense of care amongst my friends, now displaced by the war
and living in cities around the region. In Kampala, back in February
2025, I drank coffee in a tent. On one side, hanging from the canvas
wall, were photographs of Sudan’s beloved singers. On the other,
pictures of the revolution’s martyrs. People from all over Sudan sat
in that tent, drinking tea, smoking shisha, and listening to music,
while discussing politics with a fervor that would be the envy of any
country in Europe. I had never experienced a more Sudanese scene than
that day in Uganda. It reminded me of a paragraph from Jacques
Derrida’s essay on Walter Benjamin, which I render here in my
translation:
I don’t see a ruin as a negative thing. First of all, it’s not a
thing. How can one love anything else? One can love a monument, a
building, an institution, only in the experience of its fragility: it
was not always there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And
it is because of all this that I love it in its finitude, through
birth and death, for its ghosts and the silhouette of its ruin, and of
mine—which it already is, or already prefigures. How else can we love
except in this finitude?
Perhaps, being presented with a ruin, recognizing a ruin (of a
country, a lover, a memory), is where our struggle begins, not where
it ends. I am sure it is not over. They have not won. There are these
discussions. These songs. These ruins. These photographs.
This essay is adapted from The Return by Salih Basheer, published in
February 2026.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To
support work like this, please donate here.
Salih Basheer is a Sudanese photographer. His books include 22 Days in
Between and The Return.
Joshua Craze is writing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war,
violence, and bureaucracy in South Sudan. His writing has also
appeared in n+1, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other places.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-war-no-one-wanted/
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
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