Sudan: What’s life like two years into the civil war?
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. You are actually radioactive and everything alive is unexpected elements from the BBC World Service. Search for unexpected elements wherever you get your BBC podcasts. For nearly two years, war has raged in Sudan. Millions of people have fled their homes. Countless others have been massacred. A widening famine has left tens of millions of people at risk of malnutrition and starvation.

At the heart of the conflict are two generals. On the one side is Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF. On the other side is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hameti, the head of the Paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

In recent days, the Sudanese army has been advancing on the capital Khartoum. So on today's episode, we're going to speak with a Sudanese reporter about the situation on the ground, and we're going to find out how Sudanese abroad are using social media to raise awareness about the conflict. I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. ♪

Here to talk us through this is Mohanad Hashim. He's a BBC journalist who grew up in Sudan. Mo, hi. Hi, Will. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for joining us. Mo, you recently returned to Sudan after three decades away. Can you start by describing what that was like for you? Going to Khartoum was a difficult journey. It took us something that should have taken you about eight to ten hours.

It took something like a couple of days. But then you arrive at a city that's a ghost of itself. You see signs of destructions everywhere. You're seeing people that you knew who used to have a certain physical build have lost a lot of weight or thin. You're seeing a lot of people who are queuing for meals to be handed out and whether they get it or they don't.

Um, my entire social network was nonexistent because they've all become displaced or have been made refugees. So going back to areas that, you know, you are familiar to, this is where you grew up and it looks, uh, it's desecrated, it's destroyed, it's empty. And, um, you wonder how it's going to...

What is going to come out of this? It's incredibly difficult to simplify a really layered and complicated conflict like we're seeing in Sudan. But we know the war in Sudan started in April 2023. And we also know that at the heart of it are two rival generals. Could you tell us about these two men and who's fighting? As to who are these two generals, we have on one side, you have the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

He was also the de facto head of state and the head of the transitional sovereign council.

The other general opposed to him or the other man leading the rapid support forces is General Mohammad Hamdan Dagalou, or Hameti, he's known as. And he was the deputy to General Burhan in the Sovereign Council. And he's the commander of the rapid support forces, which has morphed from

the Janjaweed militias from around the early 2000s that carried on a lot of horrible attacks in the western region of Darfur 20 years ago, getting the designation of the first genocide of the 21st century, and then they morphed into becoming the rapid support forces by around 2013.

As you start unpacking it, you'd realize that there are multiple layers to this conflict. These two generals were allied previously when they ousted the dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Mr. Bashir ruled Sudan with an iron fist for nearly 30 years. And he was considered a ruthless leader, accused of perpetrating war crimes in Darfur, a region in western Sudan.

So when these two generals, Burhan and Hameti, overthrew him, many Sudanese were joyous. People were, of course, thrilled. They were celebrating with some members of the military, as you can see. And all of this follows several months of protest. The two generals then entered a joint transitional government between the military and civilians, with Burhan as its head and Hameti as the deputy. Mo, why did their relationship sour?

So in essence, these two men came to power in April 2019, when under a very popular uprising led the army to carry out to force Bashir out of power. Now, since then, they work together. And in October 2021, they carried out a military coup against their civilian partners.

And really and truly, it's that military coup that developed into a dynamic of conflict and let's say disagreement between Haimetti on the one side and the Sudanese military and army on the other side, that ultimately there was a political process that was supposed to merge the rapid support forces into the army, forming one professional Sudanese army.

The problem was around the duration of merging the RSF. Some at the time were saying that the military was keen to merge the RSF and the other forces within the army. Within two to three years, the RSF wanted somewhere between 10 and 20 years. Not exactly quite clear, but on the 15th of April 2023, fighting erupted in the Sudanese capital and it cascaded into what we have now as this

two-year conflict war and the mass human suffering that it has caused or triggered. Let's take you to Sudan now, which has been embroiled in a vicious civil war during which women and girls have been at severe risk of sexual violence.

The UN has said that Sudan is home to one of the world's biggest humanitarian crises, with 150,000 people killed and 10 million displaced. In August 2024, the United Nations issued a damning report and they said that the warring parties had committed an appalling range of violations. Could you walk us through what those violations are and what the human impact has been?

I mean, in essence, because the war started in the Sudanese capital in April of 2023, the Sudanese capital was the largest city in the country with a population of around 8 to 9 million. Now, there was immediate wave of displacement that happened out of the capital city.

By the end of 2023, the beginning of 2024, the RSF or the rapid support forces took their onslaught out of Khartoum and decided to take more areas forcing more people. I mean, the people who were once displaced became twice displaced, thrice displaced.

And yes, both sides have committed what is deemed as war crimes. But the RSF has has carried out the bulk. The Sudanese army is accused of carrying out indiscriminate air raids against various locations.

in RSF territory. And that has resulted in the, in the death of large numbers of civilians, but it's also accused of arbitrary detentions of, uh, of political dissidents and, uh, emergency room activists. But this is again, something that has been, um, the RSF has been accused of similar crimes. And in some cases, the RSF and, uh, and the army are embroiled in, um, in discriminant killing, as we said, and, uh,

Rape has been used as a weapon of war against many people and various abuses that have been documented by the various rights groups. We'll get back to Mo in a minute, but I want to pivot now to talk about the role of social media in keeping the world's attention on Sudan and this escalating humanitarian crisis. Here to tell us more is Yasmin Abdel-Majid. She's a Sudanese writer now living in London. Yasmin, hi. Thanks for having me, Will. Thanks for joining.

So I want to talk to you about the hashtag Keep Eyes on Sudan. Our listeners may know that hashtag has been used to draw attention to people in crisis in other parts of the world as well.

Do you think these hashtags are effective in turning people's attention to certain conflicts? So the Keep Eyes on Sudan hashtag has been around for a few years now. It began first when the revolution started in 2018-19. The government and the military dictatorship would cut internet off. It would...

create this blackout situation. And so folks in the diaspora would sort of say, keep eyes on, pay attention to what's going on so that the internet blackout, the communications blackout doesn't allow them to just commit atrocities without anyone watching. And so from that perspective, it is, I think, a hashtag that is successful in the sense that it is a constant reminder for people to pay attention. If you're going to ask me, is it effective at stopping the war? Is it effective at

pushing for a ceasefire? Is it effective at reducing the violence? I'm not sure that a hashtag ever has that amount of power. However, I think it has a role to play. And certainly in the online and digital space, it's been a key part of being Sudanese online and talking about the war online. As someone in the diaspora, do you feel a responsibility, a moral obligation to do this work?

I was born in Sudan, but I grew up outside Sudan. And yet it feels like as somebody who has the majority of the family or had the majority of the family in Sudan, and as somebody with a platform online, offline, with the ability to sort of communicate what is going on to the world, it feels incumbent upon me to do so. And I think a lot of Sudanese feel the same way. The sense that there's this urgency that if we don't, who will? Yasmin, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Mo, we know there's a lot of fighting on the ground. When these forces enter a new village or city, are they forcing people there to pledge allegiance to them? Or are they just trying to clear them from the area? That's a good question, William. I mean, in essence, what you're having is that if the RSF

attacks a particular area, then the people will flee that area because they don't want to, it's just unbearable for them to be under RSF control and they seek safety by going to areas that are controlled by the army. So it's not that the RSF will pledge allegiance because the RSF can easily come and accuse civilians of being informants for the army.

And when the army then comes and liberates an area, they will also kind of like be looking for the people who would have worked as informants or collaborators with the RSF. So it's not exactly us pledging allegiance, but from the people I spoke to, they say when the RSF comes, nothing is safe. They could go for your wallet. They could go for your house. They'll go for your mobile. They'll go for your children, your daughter's.

It's a nightmare. Is it possible that this conflict could be resolved militarily? Is one side stronger than the other? It appears that both sides, the Sudanese army and the rapid support forces, believe that they might be able to finish this in battle. But at the moment, what we're seeing is that the Sudanese army seems to have the upper hand, at least in central Sudan.

They've recently freed the city of Wad Madani in Al Jazeera state and they are making a move to try the closing in on the capital Khartoum.

whenever they've managed to secure the capital in the coming weeks and months. If that happens, then that will be a major victory for them. However, the likelihood of the conflict continuing in other parts of the country are very evident. I mean, Sudan is a country the size of Western Europe, so it's vast terrain, it's huge.

And if we see the advances that the army is making in the center of the country, the theater of war could shift to the west and therefore or could shift to the north.

But at the moment, momentum appears to be with the army in and around the Sudanese capital. In 2019, when Omar al-Bashir was ousted, there was a sense that tyranny had ended, that perhaps a bright future lay ahead. But of course, this war has unfolded since then. How do people reconcile these changes? That's a killer question. Yes, you will have at the moment voices that would say, wasn't Bashir better?

Or wasn't it better under the Bashir? We had stability, we didn't have any of this. And at the same time, the war is exactly the legacy of 30 years of dictatorship, of Islamist dictatorship led by Bashir. Because fundamentally speaking,

What is happening right now is that the war is between two major pillars of the regime, of the former regime, the army and the rapid support forces. And the rapid support forces got prevalence and was very favored by Bashir in his latter years. So in that sense, this particular war is a legacy of that.

At the moment, there is a very big schism with, socially speaking, between those who are backing the rapid support forces and those who are backing the army. And it might be fair to say all that misguided, misplaced optimism of 2019, if you were to ask the genuine kind of like,

revolutionary activists, they saw the revolution usurped by the dealing that was made by the then civilian administration and the army. Because in essence, you know, the deal that was agreed in July 2019 was a deal agreed on the blood of the massacre of the dismantling of the civilian setting outside the army's headquarters. So for now,

A contingent appears to be willing to forgive the army.

and to back the army as the only means for the survival of a united Sudan. Rightly or wrongly, many people backed that. The Sudanese people have had to endure for so long through this conflict. When you spoke with people, was there any sense of resilience or hope that there is an end to the conflict? Yeah, definitely. There is something new that I couldn't associate with or couldn't identify, but that is bringing people together.

And the fact that, you know, they've endured so much and it's in its long 7068 years of independence from from colonial rule. Sudan has never known peace. One part of Sudan has experienced war. I struggle to think of any country bar, you know,

the Israel and the Palestinians that has endured a conflict for 70 years. And finally, Mo, are there countries that are trying to end the conflict and broker peace? There has been efforts by various countries. The latest one is an attempt by Turkey to mediate between Sudan and the United Arab Emirates. There's been efforts by the

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States, that they tried to bring the two parties to agree on a ceasefire. But that has stalled since May 2023. And at the moment, there isn't any initiative that's on the table. Mo, thanks for explaining that. Thank you. If you want to get the latest updates and analysis on Sudan, be sure to visit the BBC News website.

That's all for today. Thank you for listening to another episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm William Lee Adams. We'll see you again soon.

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