The agony of Sudan runs deep; its history is crisscrossed with blood. Africa’s third-largest country, haunted by endless cycles of violence and war and famine, has survived two previous civil wars, and there was a time when the world paid attention. The soaring death tolls and the suffering of the displaced once garnered an international outcry and claimed the sympathies of celebrities and activists. In the late 2000s, actors such as George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Don Cheadle drew attention to Darfur’s genocide in the pages of this magazine. But today, overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, the world has averted its gaze from Sudan. The latest bout of internal military struggle, which started in 2023, fracturing along every possible fault line—religious, ethnic, political, tribal, and international—has created what the United Nations is calling the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Two opposing forces—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary group, and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—have been fighting for three years for control of the country, creating what one UN official describes as an “atrocities laboratory” on the ground. Sieges of villages, rampant sexual violence, and targeted ethnic killings by rebel forces, as well as attacks on schools and medical facilities have been acknowledged by experts as having “hallmarks of genocide.”
In late March, I travel with the photographer Lynsey Addario to report on Sudan’s war at a crisis point. Both of us are determined to document a war that the world had stopped watching, to capture the unraveling and the effect upon civilians and society. Around 34 million Sudanese are currently in need of humanitarian assistance—that’s 72 percent of the population. About 26 million people are facing food insecurity and imminent famine has been flagged in several areas of Darfur. More than eight million children are out of school—an entire generation deprived of education. Up to 90 percent of the health care facilities are shut down. One aid worker tells me that the number of dead and displaced is so high that organizations have stopped counting.
To begin our journey, Lynsey and I meet up in the middle of the night at the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and together we sleepily board a dawn flight to Juba. Both of us are experienced war reporters with many years working in Africa. But getting inside the country is not easy.
We intend to begin our journey in Port Sudan, then move to Khartoum and on to Darfur. But after months of waiting, our permission to travel beyond Port Sudan without a military escort was denied, so we decide to head for the Sudan border instead, where we know that refugees from Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and Kordofan are fleeing in large numbers. There we hope to capture the pain and the turmoil of a new wave of violence in a war that has spanned decades.
It happens to be the start of Christian Holy Week. Our small plane flies along the White Nile from Juba to Ruweng in the north, about just a few miles from the border. We fly over wetlands and savannas, small villages with mud and thatched huts where herding and nomadic families live. The plane flies low and lands at a dirt airstrip littered with the carcasses of crashed planes—noses, tails, wings, a graveyard of corroded steel in the red soil. Someone says more than 16 planes have crash-landed in the past few years. The man next to me makes the sign of the cross on arrival.
When we climb into a car, a tiny child, no more than five, runs to my window and pretends to vomit. “He wants sympathy, he’s pretending to be sick,” the driver says. The child watches us pull away and leave, resigned to being ignored. I see him growing smaller and smaller as we drive on in the red dust.
Ruweng is the gateway to the humanitarian hub of Yida, where displaced people arrive at “transit camps” before, in some cases, moving on to more permanent refugee settlements, like Jamjang. More than 149,000 people have made Jamjang their home, supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Most have just arrived, still shaky from fleeing their homes. In many cases they’d run away in the middle of the night when RSF troops arrived in their villages.
They are tired, scared, and hungry. Here, starvation is a tool of war, one of the many tactics the militias use before flattening a town. Besieging a city frequently looks like squeezing the life from its inhabitants slowly before launching drone attacks on their farms and villages.
At the Yida transit camp, I meet with five women, all shell-shocked, who sit quietly on a low wooden bench in a stifling room. I have a small bottle of water, which I pass to the women, who drink gratefully. The last gives the bottle with its few inches of water to a small child who has wandered in.
Two of the women are holding infants or toddlers; one is nursing. Another, a mother of 10, begins to cry as she recalls the bombs falling near Kadugli, and becoming separated from five of her children as her family scattered. A woman named Iman describes her husband’s trip to the market, where he was blown up by a drone, and how villagers brought pieces of him to her in a sack. Nowada, only 20 and recently married, says she saw so many dead bodies along her journey “that I could not count.” She says she witnessed soldiers from the RSF shooting civilians, “They would just fall down dead in front of me.” Next to her sits Isra, 19, anxious and due to give birth any day. She asks, “Where will I have my baby?” Isra describes her escape from the besieged town of Dilling with her husband, who, she says, would have been shot if caught. With her back aching from pregnancy and her feet shod only in sandals, they moved at night and hid in the bush by day. “We were fine before the war, just fine,” she says.
The next day, Good Friday, we go to Pamir and Ajuong Thok camps, both created when huge flows of refugees arrived from South Kordofan during the last cycle of war. We see a procession of devout Catholic refugees moving through the mud behind a priest carrying a wooden crucifix toward the makeshift church. It is raining. The children play anyway: in the dirt, or with toys fashioned from sticks and stones; one has fastened wheels to a shoe and is pushing it happily as though it were a toy car. They jump in puddles of dirty water. Monkeys steal food. Those who have been here longest have built thatched huts, but the rain seeps through the roofs and floods the mud floors. We follow the procession inside the darkened church. Non-Muslims make up roughly 8 percent of Sudan’s population; before the South’s secession in 2011, they were closer to 20 percent. The priest reads the passion of Christ in English. Around me are faces drawn with deep pain, and yet they have come.
These are only a few of the stories of the 14 million Sudanese who have been displaced since 2023, and each story is more painful than the next. There is Aida, 30 and now nursing an infant—she has 10 children, five of whom are missing. Her husband, an SAF soldier, “was taken to the gold mining place,” which is all the information she has on him. Her childhood memory is all framed around conflict: her mother moving the children from place to place, avoiding bombs and bullets. Aida’s entire life has been shaped by war and the desire for a safe place.
She nervously snaps a rubber band on her wrist as she talks of “days and days” of drone attacks in Kadugli, then being at the market with her mother when a “small bomb”—we presume a drone—came and “killed everyone.” She begins to cry, burying her face in her hands. Are her children dead? Scavenging for food? Captured by RSF soldiers? Will she ever find her husband? “Everyone is missing,” she says miserably.
Other women come and go and recount their histories: brothers killed in battle, husbands forcibly recruited, children lost, endless hunger from the sieges. One talks of slit throats and beheadings. Another of rape. Someone else found out her husband had died when it was posted on Facebook.
Another young man I meet in a refugee camp near Juba came from El Geneina, a city in West Darfur, which fell to the RSF in June 2023. His house was burned; he saw his cousins’ throats slit and his pregnant aunt’s fetus cut from her belly. “Then they threw the fetus in the fire.”
“They kept saying: Today we are dealing with dark-skinned people. We are going to clean you out.” Then they shot him in the leg and left him to bleed out. He saw them shoot people as they were running away and chain prisoners together to collect the dead. “Then they put some people in a pit and buried them alive.”
This is the story of a once-blessed country, rich in gold and natural resources, now seized by those bent on its control. An ancient civilization in the Nile Valley—known for pyramids, temples, metallurgy, trade that shaped the region—has become known instead for thousands of stories of war and loss. There are more—some too terrible to tell. But they are essentially the same tale: people helpless, terrified, hunted down by drones or bullets or knives or fire. Stories of torture, beatings, rape, and whippings, humiliation of human beings led away in chains to chants of “slave, slave.” A woman raped while heavily pregnant. A man hung upside down by his feet while tortured, a fire lit around his head and chilies thrown in to burn his eyes. The details are too graphic for anyone to make up. I write this to illustrate how difficult it is to lose everything—your home, your family, your dignity.
But these testimonies reveal a larger machinery at work. The RSF and the SAF, once aligned in their appetite to crush civilian dissent, now wage war on each other with modern and barbaric technology—and the cost falls on those caught between them: children, women, the weakest and most vulnerable. Gold and weapons flow across borders; neighboring states position themselves for profit and control. Thousands flee burned cities and villages. And the world, watching or not watching, remains silent to the crimes.
The Unraveling
There isn’t an easy answer as to why Sudan has descended once again into civil war. But to understand this moment, it’s useful to look at Sudan’s bloody past. The country’s first civil war began on the eve of independence and lasted from 1955 until 1972, when the southerners, who were largely Christian or animists, revolted against the repressive and exploitative control of the government in Khartoum. “The country has always been ruled by the riverine Arab elites. They built and maintained their government by exploiting the resources and people of the peripheries, farmers and nomads from many diverse Indigenous African and Arab tribes,” Jehanne Henry, the Sudan director of the war documentation unit The Reckoning Project, says. There was relative peace for 11 years, until a second civil war erupted in 1983, when leaders in Khartoum imposed sharia (Islamic) law and accelerated repression of the southern Christian rebels, which ultimately allowed a ruthless military officer, Omar al-Bashir, to come to power in 1989. He would come to be known for many crimes and human rights abuses, the most notable of which was the use of the military and recruitment of Darfuri Arabs to form the Janjaweed militia, or “devils on horseback” as the locals called them, in 2003 to quash the rebel movements at the heart of the first Darfur war, which ignited in the midst of the second civil war and lasted decades. They would ride through villages killing, burning, looting, sparing no one. Women were raped as they went to gather food or firewood. Babies were killed while sleeping on their mother’s backs. An estimated 2 million people had died by the time the second civil war ended in 2005, which paved the way for the south to become an independent country in 2011. But that didn’t stop the fighting in Sudan. Technically, experts say that the Darfur wars ended in 2020 with a death toll of 300,000. But despite a series of well-intended peace deals, “the war in Darfur never ended,” says Henry.
For the next few years, wars broke out in the southern regions near the new border with South Sudan, adding to ongoing violence in parts of Darfur. This time, al-Bashir decided to outsource his counterinsurgency to an entrepreneurial Darfuri militia leader named Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti. Al-Bashir gave his protégé carte blanche to form a paramilitary group, the RSF, using militias drawn from the same Arab communities as the notorious Janjaweed. Well after the first Darfur war had faded from headlines, this duo continued to put down rebel groups throughout the country through brutal methods. But al-Bashir had other problems: Along with its autonomy, South Sudan took 75 percent of the oil economy, and Sudan’s economy tanked, catalyzing frustrated civilians to take to the streets in unprecedented numbers in hopes that civilian democracy might emerge, a delayed Arab Spring of sorts.
Gihan Eltahir Eltom, who now lives in exile in Cairo with her family, was one of those activists. “The resistance in Sudan didn’t start in 2011. It built up over decades, with peaks of resistance crushed by the state,” says Eltom, describing the protests with a mixture of fear and euphoria: “I knew all the risks if I got caught, the detention centers and ghosts houses [torture facilities].... Even now I get chills thinking about what we did. People were marching shoulder to shoulder against this mass of security apparatus, with all the tear gas. It was an epic moment.” These protests continued for almost a decade, eventually leading to the ousting of al-Bashir in 2019.
But the hopes for a civilian transition did not last long—in October 2021 the civilian government was ousted by a coup led by SAF commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, again aided by Hemedti, who still led the RSF. “We have been fighting against an Islamist regime backed by military force since 1989,” Eltom says. “People think the resistance is over—I don’t think it’s over. The resistance is still happening.”
This time the stakes are no less complicated. Kholood Khair, founder of the Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory, describes a war being fought on three distinct, but interconnected, levels. The first is at the local level, where ethnic communities have been locked in cyclical fights over control of water or grazing lands. The second is the military and paramilitary groups—the SAF and RSF, respectively—fighting for the keys to the country at the cost of thousands of civilian lives. The two generals, al-Burhan and Hemedti, were allies until 2023, when their dispute over integrating the RSF into the army erupted into the full-scale civil war that we are witnessing today. And the last, and most complex, are the regional powers financing the fighting, middle-power actors like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iran spending huge sums to back insurgent groups while carrying out strategic military strikes in pursuit of resources and political power.
But like the wars in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early ’90s, this most recent implosion in Sudan could, and should, have been prevented. To answer the question as to why it wasn’t, one needn’t look further than the fall of El Fasher.
War, Ignored
In October 2025, a slaughter occurred in El Fasher, another besieged city in Darfur that many people had never heard of, the location of a human rights crisis that had stretched on for the previous 18 months. The city of El Fasher held enormous strategic value for the RSF: It was the last government stronghold in Darfur; Nyala, El Geneina, and Zalingei had already fallen. RSF’s takeover of El Fasher consolidated the RSF’s control over western Sudan. It’s also an important trade and military crossroads as well as a humanitarian hub. The RSF knew that capturing El Fasher would have significant symbolic and political weight, strengthening its plans to take over the country.
But no one could foresee how bloody it would be. Some Sudan analysts have said even RSF commanders were horrified by how out of control their troops were when they killed, raped, maimed, or mowed down anyone who could not escape—which was nearly impossible, because the city was surrounded by deep trenches dug by the RSF. Much of that violence was ethnically motivated, targeted at the non-Arab people of El Fasher: the Fur, Zaghawa, and others. More than 6,000 people died, and thousands are still missing. The massacre marked a turning point in what would come to be described by analysts as “the single worst episode in the history of Sudan’s conflict.”
This did not have to happen. The international community was warned two years prior, after the fall of El Geneina resulted in 15,000 people being murdered. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses open-source intelligence to investigate these sorts of atrocity crimes in real time, began ringing alarm bells about what would come to happen in El Fasher back in the spring of 2024. They warned the US government, the public, and the UN Security Council that a genocidal massacre would follow if the city were to fall to the RSF.
“The warning signs were there,” Confluence Advisory’s Khair explains. According to a detailed investigation into the October attack, which was reported in The Guardian, the UK did not update its intelligence apparatus throughout the 561-day siege of El Fasher. Briefings by the Yale team, as well as ones by other experts and advocates, were ignored. “US state department intelligence assessments that would have triggered obligations to save El Fasher were buried,” the article states. It would seem that El Fasher was not a failure of knowledge but of will.
In Khair’s view, there was no genocide determination because neither government was willing to confront their wealthy ally. He recalls briefing meetings with British government officials in May 2024. “Nobody wanted to hear anything against the United Arab Emirates, who backed the RSF and supplied weapons. Especially something inconsequential to the West like Sudan,” says Khair. (The UAE has denied supporting the RSF.) Two days before the city fell, Emirati officials reportedly vetoed any mention of El Fasher at a Washington meeting. Within hours, the bombardment began and thousands were killed—a population, as one British parliamentarian put it to The Guardian, whose lives “were not seen as important as others.”
No peacekeepers were sent to save El Fasher, as had been done at other inflection points in other wars. No international outrage prevented the murder of civilians. Instead, El Fasher was annihilated. The Sudanese writer Nesrine Malik once reflected that Sudan is not so much forgotten as it is abandoned. This is the most accurate description I can think of as to why such a brutal war is allowed to continue, why so many innocent people are allowed to die.
“The reckoning came later because a massacre was allowed to happen,” Khair says. “Unforgivable inaction.”
‘Does Anyone Care About Sudan?’
The political failure has fallen, as always, on civilians. I have been taking testimonies from refugees my entire career—in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa, and it never gets easier: witnessing the extreme pain and confusion of others. The accounts of survivors of El Fasher are among the worst I have ever heard: starving people ringed by man-made trenches, knowing they could not escape, knowing the RSF was coming. Mustafa Ibrahim, a 28-year-old doctor, survived, but barely.
Born and educated in El Fasher, Ibrahim, a general practitioner, had worked throughout the siege in the last functioning health care facility, known as the Saudi Maternity Hospital, in the city. In the days leading up to El Fasher’s fall, Ibrahim was stressed. During the siege, he got used to doing everything from birthing babies to setting broken bones and caring for geriatric patients and those with chronic diseases. He learned how to judge how bad the fighting was from the injured who came to his hospital. One morning, he admitted 130 people with war wounds: a signal that the fighting was getting fiercer.
As he moved from ward to ward, he heard the bombs get louder and closer. He knew violent forces were coming. He also knew he would be among the first to die: The militia targets doctors. He made one of the most painful decisions of his life: He took a small backpack and fled. He later said he felt “as though he had lost his soul,” but he had no choice. “Some of the patients had been there for months, and we had strong bonds,” he tells me. “I was their caretaker. But I was in survival mode.”
His journey out of the city was like one of Dante’s circles of hell. An asthmatic, Ibrahim climbed to the rooftops and went from house to house. Along the way he saw a cascade of misery: the dying, the wounded, the terrified, children calling for help. He watched a pregnant woman running with a small child on her back get mowed down by the RSF. Eventually he reached a series of three trenches the militia had built to deliberately allow no human to escape the burning city. The doctor described the trenches as “16 feet down and 16 feet crawling up.”
It took about 7 hours to get out of the trenches. Along with a small team—one of whom gave him an inhaler—he didn’t sleep or eat. He learned that the patients he left behind had all been killed. Finally out of the city, he and his team were captured by the RSF. He was chained and dragged behind a motorcycle. He was hung from a tree and whipped and beaten. His father in Khartoum eventually paid a ransom, and he was released. Today Ibrahim is still in Sudan taking care of many of the destroyed city’s orphans. He says he is all right, but he is traumatized, terrified, and tired of war.
In May, Reuters reported that a Sudanese RSF commander who had been arrested after videos surfaced of him executing people in El Fasher was released from prison and is back on the battlefield, back to active duty. Ibrahim has one anguished question for me. It is a question I kept thinking about, over and over, as I wrote this article: “Does anyone care about Sudan?”
A few days into our trip, Lynsey and I fly back to Juba, then catch another small plane to another part of the border, near Renk, where many “fresh” refugees came from Blue Nile State—where the RSF and its allies, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (an offshoot of the southern rebel group that won independence for South Sudan), launched full-scale attacks against SAF positions. This time, they wanted Ad-Damazin, a major city, and a nearby dam that would let them cut the SAF off from Khartoum from the east and control Sudan’s electrical supply. Blue Nile has gone from a sideshow to a central battleground. Again, the civilians are caught in the middle.
We set up base camp in an abandoned UN compound, sleeping under mosquito nets and trying to charge our phones. We have some peanuts and bread we bought in the market for dinner. At dawn, I am awakened by the sound of drums and cymbals and children singing—I think I am dreaming but then I realize it is Easter morning. Across the fence of the compound is another refugee camp, and the children there are celebrating Christ’s resurrection.
A few hours after dawn, we climb into a jeep and drive for hours—willing our vehicle not to get a flat tire—to a women’s center run by the International Medical Corps and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Most of the women here have been violated. I expect a place of endless sorrow; instead, they greet us in brightly colored toubs, ululating as though celebrating a wedding. It occurs to me I am in a small village of women united by pain who are simply trying to survive.
The week before, Médecins Sans Frontières issued a report, “There Is Something I Want to Tell You...,” detailing 3,396 survivors of gender-based sexual violence treated at MSF facilities in North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025. From El Fasher alone, it treated 140 women.
These numbers are the tip of the iceberg—only the women MSF treated. Many have not yet reached facilities. Many will never speak out or seek help. “There are no safe places for women and girls in Darfur,” said the introduction to MSF’s report, and the RSF, as well as the SAF, are using rape to wage war.
“I’ve never seen sexual violence like this,” says one UN senior official, a civil servant who has seen her share of wars: Iraq, Afghanistan. “It has the hallmarks of genocide,” she says, referring to the recent UN report with the same title.
In the women’s center, a tent is set up with an examination table, a midwife, and a doctor. The wind and rain whip the canvas, and we sit behind a screen for privacy. The women shyly arrive in plastic slippers and bright toubs; all have been raped. Only one denies being “touched,” insisting the story she tells me is another woman’s ordeal, not her own.“It is haram,” a nurse whispers when she leaves. “It is too difficult for her to talk about.”
But others do speak out. Zakiya has dimples, gold rings, and a pink-spotted toub shot through with matching gold thread. When I compliment her striking beauty, she retorts, “I’m not beautiful because I am not home in Sudan.” She’s from Blue Nile State, married at 17. She cracks her knuckles as she remembers being ambushed by the RSF as she fled her village. The men were separated from the women, who were lined up, taken away, and sexually violated.
“It wasn’t only the young that they took,” she says. “They took everyone.” She watched them beat the women with sticks.
Then they took her.
“If you don’t submit,” Zakiya was told, she would be beaten harder. She was violated by three men. Some of her rapists were “very young—teenagers,” she thinks between 14 and 19, in uniform: “combat pants, T-shirts.” She says she did not close her eyes. “They looked like Arabs, and they spoke Arabic, but not like us.” At first she resisted—but they said, “You don’t have a choice.” She tried to fight back, but “they took off their pants and did it.” She “thought I would die. I just gave them what they wanted.”
She thinks the assault went on for several hours as they passed her from boy to man to boy. But Zakiya’s main concern was not for herself. She was traveling with her 10-year-old niece, trying to hide her. Eventually, they found the terrified girl and took her to a separate spot. “She was raped for so long” and “so brutally” that she ended up unconscious, Zakiya tells me.
It was Zakiya’s mother and her sister, the girl’s mother, who came and carried the lifeless body away. She was unconscious, and they tried to tend to her as best they could in captivity. She died a few days later.
What Becomes of Sudan?
In many ways, Jehanne Henry says, the war in Sudan is an existential battle. The SAF now controls central, northern, and eastern Sudan; the RSF holds the west; the south remains contested. The RSF, above all, wants legitimacy. It doesn’t want just to be an armed paramilitary group in the backwaters of Darfur. It’s been strategic, announcing a parallel government, Tasis, with its capital in Nyala, South Darfur. It has forged alliances with other groups in Sudan and is trying to increase its leverage at whatever bargaining table lies ahead—if peace negotiations ever come. The SAF seeks total victory rather than a negotiated settlement, which most likely means more years of painful conflict.
And it seems, even after all the bloodshed—or perhaps because of it—everyone in the region and beyond wants something from what remains of Sudan.
The Sudanese conflict has conscripted the neighboring countries who are selfishly courting either faction for resources or political standing, as well as greedy, exploitative foreign powers who repeatedly leverage religious and cultural tensions in the region, into the fight for profit. Everyone stands to gain, gnawing at the carcass of Sudan: Ethiopia, Egypt, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar.
The strongest backer is the United Arab Emirates, which denies all ties to the RSF despite numerous sources—the UN among them—documenting its arms shipments and logistical support to them. Beyond fanning intra-ethnic violence to control a region rich with oil and resources like gum arabic, the resin that goes into everything from Coca-Cola and M&Ms casings to pharmaceuticals, the UAE’s interests are largely about access to the Red Sea to counteract what it considers an unacceptable alliance between the SAF and Islamists (while simultaneously supporting Israel in its quest for greater hegemony in the region).
The UAE has also become the destination point for gold that is mined in Sudan, which is essential to keeping the arms supply running throughout the region. The World Gold Council says Sudan is the fifth-largest gold producer in Africa, behind Ghana, South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Most of the gold that is mined in Sudan is exported to the UAE. “Despite the diplomatic tensions, they continue to smuggle gold to the UAE,” says Suliman Baldo, executive director of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, which tracks the gold supply chains in Sudan. They are not the only beneficiaries. Gold also goes to Egypt, then makes its way to the markets in the UAE. The money lines the pockets of the commanders. Russia, which only takes payment for weapons in advance, according to Baldo, is also enjoying the arms race between the rival military factions.
“The money circulating back to the SAF allows them to have an autonomous budget and allows them to go to the open weapon market and buy weapons, for example, from Iran,” Baldo explains. “You take gold to Dubai, the next day you have dollars and you can buy weapons left and right.”
It would be easy to reduce the arms deals to just gold and guns, but the Sudan war, like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, is largely being fought with drones, reportedly supplied to the RSF with frightening velocity by the UAE. Most refugees I take testimonies from describe drone attacks as swarms of “small bombs” that can wipe out an entire marketplace. “It’s two mechanized armies,” International Crisis Group’s Joseph Tucker says of the drones that have added a new level of misery to this war; modern warfare where one person sits behind a desk playing a kind of video game and the other person dies. It is the ultimate violence without accountability.
Right before I leave, in one of Renk’s sprawling camps, I meet a young couple who had married four months earlier. The bride, Yasmeen, is only 18; her husband, Mustafa, is 25. He had studied biology at Khartoum University but could only get a job selling shoes before he and Yasmeen ran away from the fighting. They, too, have an Odyssean tale of reaching Renk—hiding in the bush at night from the RSF, being robbed, beaten, starved.
They are in a transit center headed to Wedweil, one of the largest refugee camps in South Sudan, with more than 33,000 people. They are not ready to have children. “We’re discussing it,” he says, adding that bringing a child into the world as a refugee is not how he wants to start a family. I leave them packing their meager belongings—a bedroll, some blankets—to wait for a barge that will take them and thousands of others down the White Nile to Malakal, where they will then make their way, somehow, to Aweil.
I ask Mustafa what lies ahead for him—the long view, the years ahead.
He is thoughtful.
Finally, he speaks. “It might be a very long walk.”
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