Three years of messages at once - a chronicle of Sudan's war pours in as trapped reporter's phone turns on

BBC

Soon after Mohamed Suleiman entered the telecoms office in the coastal city of Port Sudan on 13 January, he started to cry.

He hadn't heard his phone ring for most of Sudan's civil war, which began exactly three years ago following a power struggle between the army and its then-ally, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.

The journalist and academic had made it to Port Sudan after being trapped in the western city of el-Fasher, largely cut off from the world by a communications blackout and unable to convey fully the horrors he was witnessing.

"I was flustered because people were talking on their phones (inside the office)," he tells the BBC.

"Throughout the past three years, my phone was silent. After I inserted the SIM card, my tears flowed."

When his phone finally sprang to life, it was pinging with three years' worth of messages, an inventory of loss: news of colleagues who had died, friends asking whether he was still alive.

"A few days ago, a person called me saying he thought I had died," he says. "Some people had told him that I was in Port Sudan, so he called me, but he didn't believe (it was me) until I called him back by video, then he broke down in tears."

In some ways, the silence was almost as deadly as the violence, Suleiman says.

He describes it as "a suffocating feeling because I was watching systematic killings through drone strikes and bombs or deadly killing through the tight siege" imposed on el-Fasher by the RSF for 18 months.

And when the RSF finally took over the city in October last year, "It was like the Day of Judgment on Earth," he says.

"We witnessed the Day of Judgment on Earth."

The fall of el-Fasher was one of the most brutal chapters of the civil war, which began in the capital Khartoum on 15 April 2023.

It soon spread to other parts of the country and has been particularly vicious in the western region of Darfur, the RSF stronghold, where el-Fasher is located.

Worst humanitarian crisis

As the conflict enters its fourth year, the fighting has led to a de facto partition between territory held by the army and the paramilitaries.

Millions of Sudanese citizens are scattered, some outside the country, forced from their homes in the midst of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Diplomatic efforts to end the war led by the US have failed, with both sides receiving support from regional powers that enable them to keep fighting.

Mohamed Suleiman's account is a story about the worst of the war, and the way it can strip the innocent of food, shelter, life and even identity.

Civilians in el-Fasher were caught up in the fighting between the RSF and local armed groups, which helped the army defend the city. And as the paramilitaries tightened their siege, a UN-backed food monitor declared famine conditions.

The relentless daily trauma of death and hunger exploded into apocalyptic scenes as people frantically tried to escape when the RSF closed in.

"We saw dead children in the streets," Suleiman says.

"We saw women crying from extreme hunger and thirst, too weak to carry their children, so they left them in the road."

There were "people we know by name and know their fathers, we cannot provide anything for them".

"There is no food, no water, no first aid to save them, or to carry them with you. You cannot do anything. So you step over them, jump over them, cry, and continue walking," Suleiman says.

Many tried to flee to the nearest safe place, the town of Tawila. The road was littered with the dead and injured - "very, very large numbers, countless numbers".

If there had been a way to call for help, Suleiman says, they wouldn't have had to leave so many wounded behind.

"There are things I cannot describe because they are inhumane. I cannot talk about them. The regrettable thing is that the audiovisual media did not convey the scene.

"Until now, the world does not know what happened in el-Fasher city, nor does the state know." Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy01d1g0rrjo