Children look outside from a train window as displaced Sudanese families return from Egypt to Sudan in July, 2025.Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
Elamin Abdelmahmoud is an award-winning culture writer and radio host. His memoir, Son of Elsewhere, was a Globe 100 book and a New York Times notable book.
Before I knew Sudan in facts, I knew it in song.
I was born in Khartoum – I spent my childhood there – and the first way I got to know my home was through music. I understood it in the lyrics of the likes of Abdel Karim Al Kabli and Mohammed Wardi and Hanan al-Neel, who strove to render the beauty of Sudan and its people; in the lilting voices that paid tribute to the way the Nile River worships at the shores of Khartoum, the hibiscus flowers in bloom, or the soft tenderness of my people. These were the hopeful building blocks of how I came to understand Sudan.
Here’s what you need to know about the war in Sudan, including how the conflict started, and its human toll so far.
Forgive me, then, if I find myself lost and disoriented, unable to reconcile the vast beauty captured in those songs with the horrid reality of what’s happening in Sudan right now. Every person in the Sudanese diaspora I speak to is in the same boat: we are all diligently trying to find hope, and all failing to sustain whatever scarce crumbs of it we find. We are all trying to recognize ourselves in those songs again.
The country is about to pass the two-and-a-half year mark since the current conflict started. The story of that conflict has its very roots in dashed hope: after an extraordinary revolution led by Sudan’s youth, Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s longtime dictator, was overthrown. It felt like the exhale that the country had been waiting for.
But in the wake of his removal from office, a precarious alliance between Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and the militia known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) collapsed, leading to an all-out war for control of Sudan that began in April, 2023.
Sudanese women distribute meals to people in Omdurman, Sudan, in July, 2024.MAZIN ALRASHEED/Reuters
Since then, Sudan has become the site of what is by far the worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now. The stats are grim: more than 12 million people have been displaced, including more than four million children, making it the fastest-growing displacement crisis of all current conflicts. More than 150,000 people have been killed. There is famine in the western Darfur region, and earlier this year the United States declared that the RSF was committing genocide. Nearly four million Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries. My family members have largely fled to Egypt, but others have taken refuge in Chad or the Central African Republic, and as far away as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
Amid the carnage, the flickers of progress have been faint and brief. After two years of retreating to the Red Sea area of Port Sudan, the government’s Armed Forces recaptured Khartoum in May, expelling the RSF from the capital. The most optimistic among the displaced took that as a signal that it was time to return and begin the work of repair. My social media feeds were filled with trains and buses overflowing with people eager to restore Khartoum to its glory. I even felt pangs of jealousy about missing what I assumed would be a deeply bonding act of national rebuilding. I wished I could show up for my home country. So too did a cautious wish make its way into the hearts of other Sudanese in the diaspora: here was the first step toward an uncertain future.
But those optimistic posts quickly faded, replaced by people in shock, sharing images of the profound disrepair they found in the ruined capital. Entire neighbourhoods had been levelled by heavy artillery. Power generators and electricity infrastructure were deliberately sabotaged. Some of my family members have found that even the wiring inside their walls of their homes had been ripped out, stripped for the copper. The eagerness of the optimistic rebuilders was swiftly overwhelmed by the sight of bodies in the streets, evidence of a non-existent government structure capable of addressing even the most basic health needs, let alone the business of resurrecting Khartoum.
A man walks through rubble in the Lamab suburb on the southwestern outskirts of Khartoum in July.EBRAHIM HAMID/AFP/Getty Images
But interrupted optimism is by now the most familiar state for Sudanese people watching from afar. News reports of the RSF being dealt successive defeats were quickly replaced by harrowing reports of the paramilitary group’s siege on the city of El Fasher, a city of a quarter-million people in the Darfur region. El Fasher has now been under siege for more than 500 days, with no aid or food able to enter, while its residents live under constant bombardment. The reports from inside El Fasher have only gotten more desperate; people are resorting to eating animal fodder usually reserved for camels, while mosques are routinely bombed. The Committee to Protect Journalists says journalists in the region are being hunted, raped and starved. There appears to be no end in sight to the misery.
Meanwhile, Sudan rarely elbows its way into the international headlines. As the conflict grows, so does the silence. It’s perhaps easy to observe a crisis so large in scale and feel helpless in its face. But still, there are tangible things within reach. What are armoured vehicles from Canadian-owned companies doing in Sudan? Why are Canada and the United States continuing their strong relations with the United Arab Emirates, a country that has been claiming to seek peace in Sudan while supplying weapons and medical supplies to the RSF?
Uncertainty and despair over Sudan’s future are the reigning moods. But – and I must ask your forgiveness again, for I am unable to stop looking for hope – there are still moments. Two months before the war broke out, I received an invitation that lifted my heart. Son of Elsewhere, my memoir about moving from Sudan to Canada, had found its way to an international school in Khartoum, and the school asked me to spend a week doing workshops with the students. I began to daydream about my return, which would have been my first time back in Sudan in nearly 15 years. I began to daydream about sharing the place that shaped me with my kid, who has only heard about it through stories and songs. I started planning the trip for the fall of 2023.
In Sudan’s war, civilians – and democracy at large – are under siege
Two days after the start of the war, a school administrator e-mailed to ask me to keep the date in the calendar, in hopes that things would settle. There was that optimism peeking out its head, even as tanks rolled in the streets, even as Khartoum began to burn. But a month into the war, the school was closed indefinitely.
Then, earlier this year, the Sudanese-Canadian artist Mustafa planned to perform in Port Sudan with his brilliant recent album Dunya. It was an audacious and bold and hopeful thing to do, to schedule a tour date so close to the chaos, to brave the logistics of staging a performance while all seems lost. The show did not take place as planned. But the mere dream, the mere possibility, continues to sustain me. The music, the hope.
Here is what Sudanese people know in their bones: our history is not a record of fulfilled dreams, but it’s the very act of dreaming that keeps you working toward a future. The hope has been interrupted far more times than it has been realized. The atrocities and damage may be more significant than they’ve ever been. But what we work toward is the next possibility: a workshop with students, a concert with friends, a glimpse of the Nile, a blooming hibiscus, a song that feels true again.