Staggering Death Toll in Sudanese Conflict

"This grim and chastening anniversary marks another year when the world has failed to meet the test of Sudan."

"Sudan is an atrocities laboratory: sieges, denial of food, weaponized sexual violence."

Tom Fletcher, emergency relief coordinator, United Nations 

 

"He [young man who came to the morgue] was looking for his father and his uncle for over a year. When he came to us, he found out they had both been shot dead in the street in the early weeks of the war. It broke him, he collapsed and cried for a long time." 

"We photograph every body. We check if there's anything in their pockets to help us identify them, and we mark the spot where we buried them."

Ali Gebbai, mortician, makeshift morgue, Khartoum 

 

"[Khartoum has turned into an open-air morgue]. That leaves a mark on society, it destroys human dignity and it normalizes death."  

"The safest place to keep the DNA samples is buried separately in the ground, and marked clearly. Or we'll exhume the bodies again later."  

Hisham Zein al-Abdeen, head of forensic medicine, Sudan's health ministry

This photo taken on April 18, 2026 shows Sudanese Ali Gebbai, a volunteer responsible for handling burial procedures for unidentified bodies in the capital, Khartoum, examines one of the unidentified corpses at the mortuary of Omdurman's Al-Nao Educational Hospital. (AFP)

 

 The war in Sudan has now officially passed its three-year anniversary, since the Sudanese military and he paramilitary Rapid Support Forces opposed one another, bringing the nation to a war that shows no sign of abating, with an estimated 200,000 Sudanese having been killed thus far. This conflict represents a poster of the world's largest humanitarian crisis. A conference in Berlin on April 15 to raise aid funds and call attention to the conflict, doesn't appear to have made much of a global impact on news reportage.

 

Entering its fourth year, widespread displacement, violence and hunger has burdened the population with no end in sight, while the world's attention remains fixed on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli response in Gaza to Palestinian terrorism, and more latterly the joint U.S.-Israel aerial bombardment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz taking world headlines. 

 

Even so, the Iran conflict which has impacted rising fuel and fertilizer prices throughout the globe, has also compounded the severe food crisis experienced in Sudan. The Norwegian Refugee Council's latest report stated that the violence had "systematically eroded Sudan's food system -- field by field, road by road, market by market -- producing mass hunger."  

 

Photo: Southern Sudan city of Rabak after a drone strike hit several vehicles belonging to the Joint Forces, including some carrying weapons and ammunition, which caught fire. AP

 

The fierce fighting between the two antagonists -- both of which have been accused of vicious human rights violations, preying on helpless civilian populations -- have forced 14 million people from their homes. Arable fields  have been left untended as farmers abandon their growing crops in the face of danger from land mines and cross-fire from faceoffs by the two opponents. While harsh conditions for farming lead to a steep rise in food prices, incomes have declined and malnutrition stalks the land. 

 

Sudan's 50 million population is starved of food with over 10 million people suffering severe and extreme levels of food insecurity, while some 20 million more are confronted by shortages of basic foodstuffs in a  wartime economy. Millions of people sustain themselves with one meal daily in the two areas hardest hit by the conflict -- North Darfur and South Kordofan. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council report, desperately hungry people are left with little option but to eat foliage and animal feed for survival.   

 

 Destroyed section of Omduran, Sudan, AP

 

The ongoing crisis in Sudan is considered by aid agencies to represent the world's most critical, based on hunger and displacement. "Hunger and violence are reinforcing each other in a vicious cycle of desperation", stated deputy executive director Carl Skau, of the World Food Program.

 

Gold production and trade enables the warring competitors to finance their war with the abundant natural resources in gold that lie in deposits across the country. The conflict is also being supported by foreign powers supplying weapons to both sides. Sudan's economy has been destroyed, its health system collapsed 

 

Widespread violence against women is rife, most Sudanese children are without educational opportunities, and tens of thousands of children have died in this war. The civilian death toll is put at over 22,000 by the Sudanese health ministry, but some estimates see that number swell as  high as 400,000. 

 

As donors gather in Berlin, tens of millions in Sudan face famine, genocide and displacement   Health Policy Watch

 

 

Sudan's Darfur Deadly Landslide

"Initial information indicates the death of all village residents, estimated at more than 1,000 individuals, with only one survivor."

"[The landslide is] massive and devastating." 

"This is beyond our capacity. Masses of mud fell onto the village. Our humanitarian teams and local residents are trying to retrieve the bodies, but the scale of the disaster is far greater than the resources available to us."

Abdulwahid al-Nur, leader, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM) faction 

 

"We do not have helicopters, everything goes in vehicles on very bumpy roads."

"It takes time and it is the rainy season — sometimes we have to wait hours, maybe a day or two to cross a valley... bringing in trucks with commodities will be a challenge." 

Antoine Gérard, the UN's deputy humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan  

Aftermath of earthquake in Western Sudan  Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

Sudan has been in the throes of a deadly civil war for a number of years. The conflict sees the Sudanese military warring with the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF), once an ally of the government's military. During the Darfur conflict years earlier, government forces and the-then Arab Muslim Janjaweed horsemen raided black Darfurian farming villages, used helicopter gunships on the villagers, driving them from their homes and into nearby forests. Thousands were killed; an estimated 150,000 Darfurians lost their lives in the brutal war which displaced 12 million people. The Janjaweed represented herders, the Darfurians pastoralist farmers.

 

On Tuesday, more misfortune for Sudan's Darfur region when a landslide devastated an entire community, burying a town that held 1,000 people The village of Tarasin in the Jebel Marra range, under control of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement Army saw a deluge of heavy rain triggering the disaster.

 

Sudan was urged by the African Union to "silence the guns" and in the process permit aid delivery to the deadly landslide's victims. "In these painful circumstances the chairperson of the Commission ... calls on all Sudanese stakeholders to silence the guns and unite in facilitating the swift and effective delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance to those in need", the bloc stated. 

 

Debris-covered ground in the wake of the deadly landslide. Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

 On its website, the SLM published images showing huge sections of a mountainside collapsed, the village buried under thick muck and uprooted trees. Footage revealed people standing on jagged rocks, searching for people buried under the mud. Parts of the Jebel Marra range is controlled by the SLM where the conflict has not penetrated, while hundreds of thousands of people fled there, to escape the civil war violence into SLM-held territory.

 

The geological area is that of a rugged volcanic range that stretches roughly 150 kilometres south-west of North Darfur's state capital El-Fasher, itself under fire, besieged for more than a year, as the RSF strains to capture it. An area particularly susceptible to landslides, in particular during the August rainy season, peaking at this time. 

 

Both factions in the power struggle, between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan where the internationally recognized government is based in Port Sudan, and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagio, although rivals, have responded to the disaster that struck Sunday. Burhan's Transitional Sovereignty Council pledged to mobilize all available resources in support of those affected in the region by the landslide.  

"Initial information indicates the death of all the villagers, estimated at more than a thousand people, and only one person survived."

"[The entire area was] completely leveled to the ground [in the landslide]."

"We therefore appeal to the United Nations, regional and international organizations, and the living human conscience to help us recover the bodies of the dead from under the soil, whose number is estimated at more than a thousand people, men, women and children."

SLM statement  

Destroying Sudan in the Name of Total Islamist Conquest

"Thousands of people have been killed since fighting erupted just over a year ago between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group that is the latest iteration of the janjaweed [devils on horseback], which was central to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur in the 2000s. The R.S.F. helped to crack down on pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 and, with its general Mohamed Hamdan ... was part of a power-sharing regime that fell apart in April."

"Now it is at war with its former partners in government, and the Sudanese people have become collateral damage. A report from Human Rights Watch in May detailed the R.S.F.'s ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Masalit and other non-Arab people in West Darfur."

"There have been other reports of summary executions, torture and rape. Across the country more than 11 million people have been displaced. Homes have been occupied and looted. Museums have been targeted and their contents probably sold, destroyed or just taken."

"And yet the international community still stands by. Attention is rarely paid to Sudan, and much of what I read reduces the conflict to a power struggle between two generals or a migration problem for Europe. Perhaps this is why R.S.F. fighters feel so free to broadcast their crimes on social media."

Dena Ibrahim, Sudanese national in self-exile abroad

Objects are scattered in the yard of house in Omdurman, central Sudan, May 30, 2024, that was damaged amid fighting in the civil war that has raged for more than a year between the regular military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. AFP/Getty

 

In this barbaric version of a civil war in Sudan, civilian deaths and the aura of terrorism are not  unfamiliar to those who had previously suffered both at the hands of the military and its accomplice in violent persecution now known as the Rapid Support Forces. Back when the black farming community of Darfur was targeted by the Arab-led government of Omar al-Bashir and his horsed henchmen the conflict arose from tensions between agriculturalists and herders competing for scarce land resources.

Now the new war that is tearing the country apart is one of dominance by a fundamentalist Islamism that spurns any government direction toward democracy for its people. Across the country people have been dispossessed of their land holdings, of their homes, of their ability to earn a living, while scarce basic necessities of life including famine sit heavily on the land. Homes are being pillaged, their owners moving on hoping to survive the marauders who loot anything of value.

 

Hospitals have been destroyed, millions of people are facing the threat of dislocation and death. In the year-old war between the Sudanese military and the transformed janjaweed, an estimated 2.5 million people are said to be in danger of starvation. Half the population of fifty million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Non-Arab communities are the targets of the dominant Arab half of the population, finding common cause with the Rapid Support Forces.

 

Residents displaced from a surge of violent attacks squat on blankets and in hastily made tents in the village of Masteri in west Darfur. Paramilitary forces and their allied militias fighting to take power in Sudan carried out widespread ethnic killings and rapes while taking control of much of western Darfur that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Mustafa Younes via AP, File)

 

A country that was finally on its way to achieving a measure of democracy for its people, has been set back on its heels, its ancient heritage in tatters as R.S.F. fighters loot the country's museums, opening ancient caskets with their 3,000-year-old corpses, The Sudanese National Museum rebuilt with aid by UNESCO and the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, home to artifacts such as steles of ancient warrior queens and 13th-century Christian frescoes has been looted of its historic treasure. 

 

University libraries and archives have been ransacked and torched. Summary executions complete a picture of violent chaos. Over 14,000 Sudanese have died in this year of civil war. Its brutality has some similarities to the still-ongoing conflict in Syria where the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to target his Sunni Syrian population, some 400,000 of whom have been killed. An ongoing civil war that Russian warplanes aid the Alawite regime with in exchange for a Russian deep sea port. Russia awaits the same opportunity with Sudan.

 

Over ten million Sudanese have been internally displaced. Another two million have fled to neighbouring countries for haven. Charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity are once again being seen in Darfur. Crimes of sexual violence have become an integral part of the conflict, victimizing women and children. A main hospital in Darfur was looted, its closure forced, according to an international humanitarian group. 

 

According to Doctors Without Borders, South Hospital in al-Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur province was attacked by the Rapid Support Forces on Sunday, which opened fire on medical staff and patients. Local media published images showing abandoned wards and corridors, patient beds and medical equipment damaged, blood staining the floors. The Military fought the RSF and forced their withdrawal from the hospital.

 

Tragedy in Sudan

"Why is the world community turning a blind eye to this conflict? At the government level, there's geopolitics: there are few strategic considerations or resources at stake in the region for major players such as the United States, Russia or China. There is also the memory of the 2003 genocide in Sudan and the protracted UN peacekeeping operation; last week, Sudan's military government asked that the remaining humanitarian mission be withdrawn, though it claims to remain 'committed to constructive engagement with the UN'."

"But at the 'civil society' level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn't fit the left's anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the U.S. or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred."

"The crisis in Sudan exposes 'intersectionality' for what it is: a big, fat antisemitic lie. the hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price."

Tasha Kheiriddin, journalist, National Post

A Sudanese woman carrying her daughter on the outskirts of Adre, Chad, July 2023

Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

From Democratic Republic of Congo, to Gaza, just about anywhere in the 'underdeveloped', tribal, sectarian, uncivilized reaches of the world community, where war is prosecuted, women's lives are consumed by rape and slaughter. Terrorists don't much mind killing babies, either. Women are subject o mass rapes, the victimization of the most vulnerable in any society. Perhaps it has always been that way, from ancient history forward, but we like to believe we've progressed as humans since primal times.

 

Yet, terrorists are free in some places where we are thankfully not, to shoot babies in the head, and "punish and terrorize" people, burning communities to the ground. Women and girls taken hostage, held in "slave-like conditions". Ah, a familiar story by now, but one when repeated injudiciously risks the careless of being identified as Islamophobic. Arab terrorists determined to drive an ethnic group away from their ancestral geography. 

In the Darfur conflict when the government of Sudan and its military employed Arab Janjaweed (horsemen) to attack and slaughter and disperse Black Sudanese farmers in a regional conflict that pitted agrarians against herders, when land was valued not for its wealth of grain-growing conditions but for pasturage, the powerful swept down on the vulnerable to drive them off their land, raze their villages, rape their women, and commit mass slaughter; helicopter gunships came in handy for all of that as well.

The scene? Sudan, once again targeting Black Africans, the Masalit. It has been seven months and world leaders, human-rights groups and the progressive left don't seem to have noticed. In Europe and North America there have been no university protests, no rampaging mobs in public arenas. Arab businesses  haven't been targeted, no one has been calling for the isolation of Muslim colonizers. They haven't been condemned as genocidal killrs of babies. Black Lives Matter are nowhere to be seen.

That Islamists have targeted people of colour in yet another attempt at extermination is of little interest, it seems. If the United Nations has been wringing its hands, has anyone noticed? In Sudan 5.6 million people have been displaced as a result of fighting between the Arab paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (which renamed itself from simply 'Janjaweed') and the Sudanese army. Both got along very well for a while after the government coup of 2021.

The RSF killed over a thousand Masalit in 72 hours in the Ardamata refugee camp. 9,000 people were killed since the summer when the conflict broke out. In the five years 2003 to 2008, 300,000 Masalit were killed, 2.5 million displaced by the Arab militia force, Janjaweed when former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir used the terrorists to crush Darfur's rebel groups revolting against the neglect suffered by the Black African population.

Researchers at the Centre for Information Resilience verified videos of militiamen rounding up and whipping Masalit men in Ardamata. The  uniformed men wearing RSF insignia speak of their victims as "sons of dogs", targeting men and boys, an indigenous Darfuri group. "They killed every man they met in my neighbourhood. I was praying when I heard the sound of an explosion. A shell killed my friends and nearly cut off my feet", one Ardamata resident testified.

Lip service to a distaste for the situation did come from the European Union decrying the "ethnic cleansing campaign with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur". Human rights obligation done, and done with. Oh, and in case anyone wonders, the Black African Masalit are faithful Muslims. Just not the right kind. 

Refugees fleeing the deadly violence in Darfur are arriving to sites like this one in Adré, in Chad, in dire need.  UNHCR/Ariadne Kypriadi

Pomp and Hypocrisy UK-Style

"I have no idea [why it has taken so long to study the issue of sexual violence as a war crime]. I find it abhorrent and it makes absolutely no sense to me that we know that girls are being sold into sexual slavery; that when a woman is raped she is forced from her community; that girls as young as nine are being married off."
"I cannot fathom why it has ever been all right to treat women this way."
Angelina Jolie, anti sexual violence crusader, special envoy UN High Commissioner for Refugees

Angelina Jolie meets displaced Iraqis living in an abandoned school in al-Qosh last month. Photograph: Reuters

"Crimes against women have been accorded a lesser priority throughout history. Sexual violence in conflict involves the deliberate targeting of women and children and men, in ways that often simply defy the power of description."
"[The world has entered a period] of systemic instability [where sexual violence is seen as an inevitable part of war]. Despite this, we always have to strive to do something else as the United Kingdom, and that is to try to improve the condition of humanity … We can overcome that feeling that it’s a hopeless matter, that you can never change it."
William Hague, former UK foreign secretary  

"This summit demonstrates there is a dangerous lack of joined-up thinking when it comes to tackling sexual violence against women. These are the same women. On one hand, you've got real progress being made in conflict zones overseas, but when those same victims make it to UK shores it's a completely different story. Women often aren't believed, and instead of being protected they're further traumatised by the asylum system. It's critical that the government tackles this issue with the same gusto at home as it's doing abroad and protects the survivors of sexual violence."
"Of course, it means often a woman won't disclose until far later and that is then used against her – 'why didn't she disclose at the beginning? She must be lying'. The lack of resources and gulf between policy and practice means there is some rank hypocrisy at work in the way we treat the very small number of women who actually make it to the UK."  
Anna Musgrave,  women's advocacy manager, Refugee Council

"It was very, very difficult. When you are a refugee, you think you might be treated kindly in the UK but ... they behave in the same way. Before I even told my story I was shouted at, screamed at: 'Why do you come here? Why did you sleep in a cardboard box on the street?'"
"You don't feel safe ever. The only basic humanity I have seen is from charities. The Home Office think I am a liar and they can come for me in the night, any time. I know what the officials are capable of. They say they want to save women from atrocities. I am that woman."
Refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo

Angelina Jolie and William Hague to co-chair Global Summit to End Sexual Violence. Photograph: Elvis Barukcic/AFP/Getty Images

The London School of Economics has created and opened its Centre for Women, Peace and Security, and the grand opening featured two celebrities; one an actor and international women's activist, the other a former member of the UK Cabinet. This does represent the first and for the time being, only think-tank that has dedicated a specific area of research to women as sexual victims of violence and rape during conflicts. Presumably, the studies will reach back into ancient history, to the present when women then and now were seen as war booty.

Angelina Jolie produced several videos of her interviews with Iraqi women living in refugee camps. They have been posted online and make for some very painful viewing in personal testimony by women who were forced to undergo spirit-draining, humiliating violence inflicted upon them by men. From biblical accounts of women taken as slaves and concubines after tribal wars, to the Korean comfort women, to the plight of German women when Russian troops took their revenge post WWII, to the mass rapes in Darfur and Congo and now Syria and Libya, these vicious violations speak of the ongoing depredations inflicted upon women.

On the other hand, these are women who suffer these dreadful events during and after conflict situations. But then, rape is part of the subjugation of women who are tormented when they refuse to adhere to the religious-cultural restraints placed on their individuality and basic human rights, in many countries of the world. Where in Muslim countries accusations of rape hold the victim to be equally accountable and even more so, for her plight. Where in India the male dominated culture victimizes women and girls in viewing rape as a male entitlement. The shame is the woman's; males only doing what comes naturally to them.

"Sometimes women are killed after they're raped, so we don't find [out] about them. Then you have the chaos of war, and you have people moving around, and on top of that you have the stigma that prevents women from coming forward" stated Lauren Wolfe, director of the Women Under Siege project at the Women's Media Centre in New York who has been tracking sexualized violence in Syria for three years, interviewing women in Jordanian refugee camps. "It comes down to a lack of money -- you have to have the aid workers and support systems in place", she noted.

"Advocates and survivors in regions across Ukraine repeatedly recounted how police often blame women for provoking the violence perpetrated against them", pointed out Atonina Vikhrest of Women Under Siege. Universally, it is clear enough, from Syria to Burma, Sudan to Somalia, armies and non-state militias use rape as a method of subduing civilians through fear and intimidation, terrorizing women and the men who care about them.

A case in point was the revelation by Human Rights Watch reporting on yet another mass attack by Sudanese army troops in North Darfur where area men were rounded up and held in segregation while hundreds of women and girls were raped in a 36-hour period. Over 150 countries signed the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, at the United Nations last year. A variety of United Nations resolutions have been passed highlighting war-zone sexual violence and the travesty of horror it represents targeting women who are usually non-combatants but easy prey.

The outcome of which is precisely nothing whatever.

Her Unending Nightmare

The best-laid plans of those anxious to escape a nightmare are all too often dreams more difficult to realize than reality instructs us to expect. Meriam Ibrahim of Sudan aroused the outraged conscience of the world in a roar of condemnation for Sudanese justice when her plight became known. She was a 27-year-old Sudanese woman, raised by her mother, a Christian, to worship Christianity. In Sudan as elsewhere in the Muslim world, Christians are under deadly attack.

In Sudan, apostasy, turning away from Islam, is considered a capital offence. Muslims are not free to disown Islam, and all the more so if they turn in their defiance to another religion. In Meriam Ibrahim's instance, this was never an issue in reality, for she had never been a Muslim, had not been raised in Islamic tradition, and had lived all her life as a Christian. Which didn't stop the authorities from persecuting her, incited by her distant Muslim relatives.

Meriam Ibrahim stood accused by her father's family of abandoning Islam for Christianity. Even her half-brother called for the death penalty for her. She had married a Sudanese Christian who has dual Sudanese-American citizenship. She was herself Christian. When her father abandoned her mother when Meriam Ibrahim was a young child, her Ethiopian-Christian mother raised Meriam in the belief of Christianity, and that was the only religion she had ever known.

She is a physician by profession, and she has a two-year-old son with her husband. She was arrested while very pregnant with her second child, and charged with apostasy as well as "adultery", because a court in the capital Khartoum did not recognize her Christian marriage to American citizen Daniel Wani. She was to be hanged for refusing to "return" to Islam. A few weeks after she was sentenced and imprisoned with her infant son, she gave birth to a little girl.

Authorities had mandated that during the birth of her daughter Maya, Meriam Ibrahim's legs must remain shackled. Under these mercilessly tortuous conditions, international outrage fueled condemnation of the Sudanese government and its justice system. The justice who had passed judgement on this woman ruled her execution would be held off for two years, until baby Maya was weaned; this is what passes for compassion in a Sharia court of law.

Meriam Ibrahim steadfastly refused to recant her Christianity. "She is not going to renounce her religion, though. She told me that", her husband said. Her husband lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and had been trying to move heaven and earth to enable his wife and their then-only child to move to the United States, before her imprisonment. And then, suddenly she was released from prison on Monday.

The family planned to leave Sudan as swiftly as possible. Two senators from New Hampshire had introduced legislation to grant Meriam Ibrahim and her children permanent legal status in the United States. With her release, she was moved to an undisclosed safe house. A day later, at Khartoum airport as the family of two adults and two children attempted to fly out of the country, the mother of the two children was re-arrested.

Meriam Ibrahim holding her baby daughter Maya, with her legal team and, left, husband Daniel Wani and son Martin -- Photo, The Telegraph

No reason for their detention was given, according to their lawyer, Elshareef Ali Mohammed, with them at the time, seeing them off, as they attempted to leave the country through South Sudan and then on to America. Reports began circulating that she was accused of travelling with false paperwork, the very documents provided by South Sudan with U.S. assistance.

She was released again on bail conditions; the unnamed individual who provided the surety for her bail would be charged with the same offences as Meriam Ibrahim, should she once again attempt to leave the country of her birth and her judicial agony before the 'case' was fully resolved.

• 

• From exile, a Sudanese journalist tells Darfur's stories

Nadia Taha is a producer at Sudan Radio Service in Kenya. She spoke with the Enough Project's Laura Heaton about the dangers and rewards of reporting on the humanitarian crisis in her home country. 

By Laura Heaton, Guest blogger / April 20, 2013

• 

Pagan Amum, (L) Secretary General of Sudan's People Liberation Movement (SPLM), seen with Salah Abdallah, (2nd L) Presidential Advisor of Internal Security from the National Congress Party (NCP), speaks to the media during a joint news conference in Khartoum Aug. 30, 2010.

Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters

Nadia Taha is a producer at Sudan Radio Service (SRS), based in Nairobi, Kenya. We met in March to talk about her childhood in Darfur, activism at university in Khartoum, and work as the first female reporter with SRS. This Q&A is excerpted from our conversation.

Can you talk about your experience growing up in Darfur at the height of the conflict?
I grew up in El Fasher and did my schooling there, and then I studied law at El Nilein University in Khartoum. I was in high school during the time of war in Darfur, in 2003. Actually, I was just doing my final exam for high school in [the town of] Tina, on the border between Chad and Sudan, and at that time the rebels came and attacked the town – while we were there sitting for our exam. So the government had to cancel the exam, and we had to travel to El Fasher. Imagine, when I was traveling with the other students from Fasher to Tina before the exam we had come through many, many villages. We would stop in villages, eat in the market, sleep, and then take the bus in the morning – it took three days. But when we came back there were no villages there. Can you imagine? The villages had been burned down. And I said, "but we were just here, and now, nothing."

Who had burned all the villages?
It was the Janjaweed [government-aligned militia]. They were retaliating for the attacks by the [rebel] Sudan Liberation Army, but at that time we didn’t know. We were just traveling through the villages and finding them not there. It was a dangerous time, taking that road. We met many times the rebels, and they would ask where we were going, and we told them we are students. Before we came to El Fasher, like 50 kilometers from the city, we came to a village that had just been attacked. The people were crying, some people were injured. And we asked them, “Who did this?” And they said it was the government’s military.

So when you were back in El Fasher you took the exam to finish high school?
Yes, and I passed. Then I was going to Khartoum for university. My mother had died this same year – she had been sick. So in 2004 I traveled to Nyala with my grandmom and my aunties to sell my mother’s cows so that I could go to school. They sold most of them, and then they gave me the money so I could go to Khartoum to study.

Had you ever been to Khartoum before?
Never. I was very excited. I had heard so much about Khartoum, so when I was going there I was so happy. You know, after that incident in Tina I had much hatred for the government in Khartoum, the National Congress Party (NCP). So when I got to university I joined a Darfuri political activist group, and I was very active. I joined ... the student group that was supporting the rebel group on campus. We used to argue with the students of the NCP.

What kind of activities did those student groups do?
If there was any violence in Darfur we would do a demonstration. We did many demonstrations. During my first demonstration in 2004 it was really difficult. We went to give a letter to the UN saying there is genocide in Darfur. And there was a big reaction.

What happened?
They came to our hostel [dorm] at the university and bombed it. Most of the Darfuri students were staying together in the same place, so we all had to run. It was a very big incident. No one died, but there were many injured.

Were there many women involved in the Darfuri student movement?
No, not many. We were very few Darfuri girls at the university.

Where do you feel like your political activism comes from? Are your parents political?
No, all my brothers are very quiet, they are doing their school. None of them are involved in politics, only me. When I was coming from Tina I could see that the government doesn’t want the civilians of that area to live, so they bomb and kill the people of certain ethnicities. My father used to tell me not to get involved; he would say, "they will kill you." But I didn’t listen to him.

I guess it was particularly risky for you as a woman, because you stood out among the male activists at school.
Yes, that’s true. Some of the other students used to call me Condoleeza Rice!

How did you decide to study law?
My mom wanted me to do it. To come to Khartoum to study law is very difficult for Darfuris. You have to have high marks. But some people succeed.

I did my training with a lawyer in Khartoum, but when I was finished in 2010 I didn’t find a job. But that’s when I got recruited to work for Sudan Radio Service. They were looking for women who could speak Arabic, some English, and the Zaghawa language, and a family friend knew about the job and nominated me.

So that’s when you moved to Nairobi, to do this job?
Yes, I came to Kenya immediately.

Do you ever go back to Sudan?
No, I can’t. The Sudanese government thinks of Sudan Radio Service as “rebel radio,” because we bring the news to Sudan, especially about the conflict areas, like Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains, and Darfur. We talk to the citizens there, and to the rebels as well, so it would be dangerous to go back. Today we’re also covering east Sudan as well.

You were the first female radio producer for Sudan Radio Service?
Yes, when I came to Sudan Radio Service there were no other women – just six guys. I started presenting in my local language, Zaghawa, and in Arabic. And finally I came up with the idea to do a program about women’s issues. The project agreed, so I started this program, focused on violence against women, women’s education, human rights. It airs on Fridays and Tuesdays in Zaghawa and Arabic.

Are there many radio stations that reach Darfur?
Yes, there are many, but the way we cover the news is different, because we believe in balance. Some radio stations only cover the rebel side. But at Sudan Radio Service, if the rebels say that they attacked a government position and killed a certain number of soldiers, we have to ask the government for its view. We put the two voices in the stories together. The listeners decide who is saying the truth.

Do you primarily cover Darfur, or do you cover other areas as well?
I cover Darfur daily. Other reporters focus on the other conflicts. I report daily on North and South Darfur in Zaghawa. I even went to Chad once, to visit the Darfuri refugee camps in the east. In some of the camps I was focused on women’s stories.

That must have been very interesting to speak to people from your home area but who had been displaced for a long time.
People were very happy that I came, because they listen to me on the radio and they know my voice, and I speak their language. I was there for Eid [the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice], and you know that for the holiday you’re supposed to buy new clothes for the children, have a big feast. But of course, no one could follow those traditions anymore. It was a sad story. The situation in the camps was very sad. Some people were hopeful they would be able to go home, but only, “after [President] Bashir,” they said. They told me only after Bashir goes to the [International Criminal Court] will we be able to go home. Some of them were even born in the camp, and they don’t even know their home.

Do you ever see yourself living in Darfur again?
Me? Yes, yes, I will. I have to go home one day. At any time that this Bashir government leaves I will go back, because I want to do projects to help my community there. Projects for women and kids, development projects, radio programs about avoiding tribalism.… There is so much to do there.