On one street is a small cafe where diplomats, successful businesspeople and visiting dignitaries enjoyed smoothies and burgers under umbrellas set against the blistering sun. On another is a showroom for custom-designed kitchens imported from Europe, a once well stocked pharmacy and a fast-food joint. Down dusty potholed roads, there are villas behind high walls and apartment blocks where chandeliers hang above shining marble stairways.
These central Khartoum neighbourhoods, once the most sought-after addresses in Sudan’s capital city, are now so dangerous that residents cannot wait to flee. For almost a week, they have been the stage for a brutal power struggle, shattered by shelling, grenades and automatic rifle fire that trapped tens of thousands in their homes.
Some have managed to escape. On Thursday, people continued to stream out of central Khartoum and, to a lesser extent, the twin city of Omdurman across the Nile.
Omer Belal, a resident of Khartoum 2, a neighbourhood close to major ministries and the fiercely contested international airport, has sent his family to distant relatives in al-Hajj Yousif, on the eastern outskirts of the city.
“I could be the last person to leave. I am just waiting for the explosions to stop for a bit,” Belal said. “There was random artillery strike and my neighbour’s house was hit by a huge rocket. Entire neighbourhoods and the areas around us are empty … Nobody is left here.”
More than 400 people have been killed and thousands more injured since the fighting erupted on Saturday, according to numerous estimates. Medics say the true toll is likely to be much higher.
The conflict has pitted soldiers loyal to Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s transitional governing sovereign council, and the regular army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Their power struggle has derailed a shift to civilian rule and raised fears of a long, brutal civil war.
Both came to power in 2019 after the fall of the dictator Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled for nearly 30 years. They then joined forces to marginalise civilians and crush the pro-democracy protest movement that had been crucial in the fall of the former regime. Now they have turned their guns on each other in an attempt to win uncontested control of Sudan’s precious resources and its crumbling but still powerful state.
The wealthy neighbourhoods in the centre of Khartoum have suffered most in this brutal fight because they are closest to key strategic locations, such as the defence headquarters where Burhan is believed to have his command bunker, the presidential palace and the airport.
But the damage also has another cause. Hemedti and his fighters see themselves as underdog insurgents from Sudan’s margins who are taking on an establishment that has monopolised power and wealth for too long. The young men who fill the ranks of the RSF are recruited in Hemedti’s home region – distant Darfur, 530 miles (850km) to the south-west of the capital – and see the streets where they are now fighting as bastions of the political, cultural and economic elite that has paid them little or no attention.
So too does their commander.
“Bashir kept the relatively affluent elite onside and Burhan has been trying to do the same … Hemedti seems less interested in their support and seems unconcerned about collateral casualties or damage to their neighbourhoods,” said Dr Nick Westcott, the director of the Royal African Society and a professor of diplomacy at SOAS in London.
“The RSF soldiers have little to lose. They are experienced and tough fighters. The Sudanese armed forces are used to living in barracks, regular meals et cetera, so Hemedti feels confident he can prevail.”
Of those fleeing the centre of Khartoum, many have headed for Wad-Madani, a city 80 miles south-east of the capital, where thousands spent their first night in their cars on the streets.
“People just took anything that was going on to the south of Khartoum and fled, whether on a lorry or a minibus … Many of us do not even have any cash,” said Majid Maalia, a human rights lawyer and former resident of Khartoum 2 whose apartment was hit by an airstrike shortly after he left on Thursday morning.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on Thursday became the latest foreign leader to call for an end to the conflict, in separate phone calls with Burhan and Hemedti. But even a temporary truce seems a distant prospect and successive ceasefires have collapsed within minutes.
“There is no other option but the military solution,” Burhan told the television network Al Jazeera.
In 2019, Hemedti made a chilling promise to a crowd of supporters in northern Khartoum. Speaking days after his RSF forces had attacked and dispersed a peaceful pro-democracy sit-in in front of the military headquarters, killing more than 200 people, the warlord said that if the protests had continued for a month rather than just the three days, his men would have reduced Khartoum to a “ghost town” resembling those in Darfur depopulated by decades of conflict. “These expensive buildings … [would] only be inhabited by cats,” Hemedti said.
For Belal and other residents of what has now become a battleground, this vision has been realised and there is little hope of any return to pre-conflict normality even when the fighting eventually stops.
“If you survive the shooting, you will die with hunger,” he said. “This is an absurd war.”
