The word “home” held two meanings in my life. One was the physical space of my childhood in Sudan: the textured walls of my room, the scent of my mother’s cooking, the squeak of ceiling fans pushing back against the endless summer heat. The other was an unspoken, fragile assumption that the land we stood on was permanent. On April 15, 2023, the war in Sudan erased both meanings.
The news arrived in frantic, broken messages, reaching me halfway across the globe in South Korea, where I had left for college two years earlier. My family had fled and our house in Khartoum was ransacked. Photographs, books, the mundane artifacts of our daily lives were looted or scattered. An archive of my family’s story, built over several decades, suddenly became silent.
For three years, I have watched this catastrophe be reduced to a headline, then a call for action, then nothing at all. The consequences of the war, meanwhile, read like a checklist of human suffering at its peak: the largest displacement crisis in the world — nearly 13 million people, one in three Sudanese, have been forced out of their homes — amid extraordinary levels of food insecurity, countless cases of violence against women and children, and undeniable acts of genocide.
The world, distracted by other calamities, has largely looked away. But the Sudanese people are not waiting to be saved. In the shadow of the world’s condescension, and in the face of terrible cruelty, we have built our own lifeline. Far from picturesque or photogenic, it is messy and exhausting and achingly slow. But the resilience is real, proof that our spirit cannot be crushed by suffering.
Sudan’s plight is rooted not in poverty but in plunder. Under British colonial rule, Sudan’s resources — gold, cotton, gum arabic, even its people — were extracted for profit. After independence, the pattern continued: Oil was siphoned off as successive regimes enriched themselves and their foreign patrons. Today, the same dynamic plays out with gold, of which Sudan has some of the African continent’s most significant reserves. This war has taken things to a new level of brutality.
After the revolution of 2019 toppled the country’s dictator, the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces, a militia group, settled into an uneasy power-sharing arrangement. The R.S.F., whose roots are in the Janjaweed militias that carried out genocide in Darfur early this century, chafed under the control of the military. Tensions between the two forces and their leaders grew and grew. In April 2023, they broke out into open fighting.
Foreign powers stepped in, with most regional countries supporting the army. But the United Arab Emirates, which had previously cultivated ties with the R.S.F., lost no time in backing the militia. The group could deliver what the U.A.E. coveted: access to the Red Sea and Sudanese gold. Since the war began, smuggled gold has flooded Dubai’s markets, gleaming in the city’s new gold district. The U.A.E. has even reportedly had a role in recruiting Colombian mercenaries to fight alongside the R.S.F. in the conflict.
Outsiders tend to call what is happening in Sudan a “civil war.” The framing is convenient: It allows people to file Sudan away as another incomprehensible African tragedy, too complex to understand, too distant to matter. But there is nothing particularly Sudanese about Emirati drones or foreign mercenaries. What is happening in Sudan is entirely modern: a resource war fought by proxy, playing out against the world’s indifference.
Those fleeing the violence have found scant welcome. Western countries that previously streamlined visa processing for Ukrainian and Syrian refugees did not extend the same courtesy to Sudanese refugees. Several countries have imposed strict barriers on Sudanese applicants, from callous travel bans to stringent new regulations, often indefinitely delaying asylum claims and even short-term visas. In one tellingly egregious example of this spirit of exclusion, independent Sudanese filmmakers were recently denied entry to Germany to attend a Berlinale industry gathering.
We have had to help ourselves. In Sudanese Arabic, the word “nafeer” describes a communal mobilization: When a village needs food to be harvested, everyone gathers; when a home is destroyed by a Nile flood, everyone rebuilds. For the past couple of years, nafeer has gone viral in the best sense. Diaspora WhatsApp groups raise thousands of dollars overnight. Young volunteers inside Sudan coordinate emergency aid kitchens, delivering meals to families who have not eaten in days. Sudanese physicians operate in clinics under R.S.F.-controlled areas, risking death to heal the wounded.
Multinational aid agencies, bound by bureaucracy and security protocols, have largely retreated to the relative safety of Port Sudan. Yet Sudanese volunteers with little funding, and hardly any recognition, have reached places the United Nations cannot. They are not waiting for permission. They are not waiting for cease-fires. They are simply doing what the Sudanese have always done: showing up for one another. This is the story the world fails to see — our stubborn refusal to surrender to misery.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Khartoum. When the military recaptured the capital from the R.S.F. last year, hardly anyone was expected to return. But return they did. More than a million displaced Sudanese have come back to Khartoum, not because it is safe or whole, but because it is home. In February, a Sudan Airways flight landed at Khartoum International Airport for the first time in nearly three years, carrying 160 passengers. It was a small but powerful sign that the capital was coming back to life.
The war continues. The R.S.F., weathering the army’s efforts to push it back, now controls almost all of Darfur in western Sudan. Last April, the militia claimed to have established a parallel administration there, proclaiming it the “Government of Peace and Unity.” The irony is not lost on those who have witnessed the group’s brutality: The same forces that have killed thousands of civilians in ethnically targeted massacres now claim to govern in the name of peace.
With the war in Iran spilling out into the U.A.E., the calculus has shifted. The country that fanned the flames in Sudan is suddenly preoccupied with threats at its own doorstep, a reminder that those who profit from chaos rarely get to control it for long. For Sudan, this distraction may provide some respite. No matter what, the Sudanese people — tenacious, resourceful, unbreakable — are here to stay.
We remember what we lost. And we will make this rubble home again.
Mohammed Ahmed is a Sudanese writer based in Seoul.
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