The Unsung War in Sudan

By Shabtay @ Adobe Stock

With hostilities raging between Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Palestine, the world’s other wars have taken a backseat in most news coverage. But the war in Sudan has resurfaced in The Wall Street Journal, where Gabriele Steinhauser explains the devastation being wrought on Khartoum and Omdurman, Sudan. She writes:

The smell of death still hangs over a historic intersection of this once-majestic capital on the Nile.

The Mahdi, the charismatic cleric who defeated Egyptian and British armies to build a short-lived Sudanese state in the 19th century, is buried in a silver-domed mausoleum nearby. Down the street stands a colonial clock tower, whose chimes for decades helped residents track the passage of time.

Now, Kalashnikov-toting soldiers, some dressed in T-shirts and flip flops, patrol between burned out vehicles, as the sound of gunfire cuts through the air. The men point to mattresses and blankets used to mark the graves of their slain opponents, carefully stepping over bits of clothing stained with decaying flesh. Metal casings from thousands of bullets and other munitions litter the ground.

“370-something,” said one officer when asked about the number of corpses his comrades recovered from this crossroads, which just weeks before had been the site of a key battle in the 16-month-old war that has ripped apart Africa’s third-largest nation.

Not since the battle for Damascus, more than a decade ago in the Syrian Civil War, has a national capital city been the sustained front line in a major war. The fighting has destroyed large parts of what was once one of Africa’s most populous cities, home to an estimated nine million people and the ministries, banks and corporations that powered Sudan’s political life and economy.

Sudan is now experiencing the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet, including in the western region of Darfur, where new atrocities have prompted warnings of another genocide and international experts earlier this month confirmed the world’s first famine since 2017. More than half of the country’s 48 million people are suffering from hunger, while one out of four have been forced from their home. By some estimates, as many as 150,000 Sudanese have been killed.

In mid-March, Sudan’s military took much of the city of Omdurman—the seat of the country’s parliament and one of the three municipalities that make up Sudan’s capital area—from the paramilitary-turned-rebel Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

Across the river, in RSF-held Khartoum, airstrikes, shelling and drones have hollowed out luxury skyscraper hotels, office buildings and the presidential palace where, in 1885, Sudanese fighters beheaded the British governor-general.

The RSF also still occupies the third part of the capital, the northern district of Bahri, where factories that used to churn out Coca-Cola and other consumer products are idle or have been reduced to rubble.

Like the capital, the rest of the country is now divided between the military and its former ally, the RSF, which grew from the notorious Janjaweed fighters that Sudan’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, employed to terrorize Darfur in the early 2000s. The two armies are led by rival generals fighting for control over Sudan’s vast gold reserves, the life-sustaining waters of the Nile River and the country’s strategic perch on Red Sea shipping lanes.

Read more here.