The War No One Wanted

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.

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