Inside Sudan’s War

Hi, and welcome to the Horn, a podcast from the International Crisis Group, I'm Alan Boswell. Today, we are speaking with Yusra Elbegear, the Africa correspondent for Sky News and the most recent recipient of the Journalist of the Year Award from the UK's Royal Television Society. We speak about her reporting from Inside Sudan's War across various front lines. Just a note that we recorded this episode last week before the news broke that the US denied General Berhan Avisa to attend the UN General Assembly in New York, so we do not discuss the fallout of all that here. Yusra, thanks so much for coming on our podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Alan. So you recently deployed with the Sudanese Navy in the Red Sea. Of course, there's a lot happening right now on those shores, especially on the Yemen side. Where exactly did you patrol? And was this part of this new maritime coalition that Saudi Arabia tried to put together starting on July/August? So we hugged the coastline, it was more of a kind of cruise out into the bay to see the bay and to see the commercial shipping coming into the port, and they played out a scenario of how they interdicked smuggling vessels, mostly they say, coming from Yemen. So it was more of just a show of their capability after joining the new defense pact, but they have been a part of an alliance with Saudi Arabia to protect the Red Sea or a part of a maritime alliance since 2019. What I found was that the Sudanese Navy was super-eager to show that they exist, that they're a part of the equation that they have been involved in maritime security in the Red Sea. It's actually been very difficult to get access. I've been trying for two years since we started going through Port Sudan to cover the war. I keep trying to get out with the Navy and just meet them. It had always been, I wouldn't say blocked, but deferred, put aside, this is an important right now. And I just, I kept at it, and I think the timing is super relevant that the militaries kind of commands step to side and let me do this. I think they are super keen to show that they are global players, at least the very least regional players, but it took a lot of persuading, even the head of the Naval Command back in Khartoum. He was very jittery. I sat down with him and I just tried to show him obviously that we're impartial, that we have no agenda, that we want to just get out on the water and present the facts and the visuals. So even though the timing seems very convenient for the armed forces, it still took a lot of convincing because it's a very sensitive portfolio and because there are so many intersections and essentially the anti-smuggling operations are very revelatory in terms of how the hoothies have been operating on the Red Sea and their approach to the Horn of Africa. And I found it really interesting that one of the Naval officers told me that the hoothies are exploiting the war in Sudan to finance their operation and all of this happening in the lead up to their big push to capture the Yemeni coastline. So for me, more than anything, it showed the inextricability of the instability in the Horn of Africa and what's happening just across the Red Sea in the Middle East. And so did you see any sign when you were on these patrols of greater cooperation among these different countries who are on the Red Sea or was it pretty indistinguishable from just a normal Sudanese Navy patrolling its own territorial waters? So they made it very clear that there was no foreign military vessel in their waters at the time, right? That's the key part at the time. But we were able to see part of the flamingo base that the Russians were interested in are interested in. We don't know if it's present tense or past tense right now given how long it's been since the deal has been frozen. They pointed out that part of the base to me, the Naval officers themselves, and then they proceeded to contradict themselves about the timings because everyone was so scared about actually pinning down when Russian personnel were on the base. We know that Russian personnel were on the base at some point. And the time period we've been given is between 2019 and early 2021. But we weren't able to see anything beyond the usual just naval personnel milling around the base. Also, we drove through the base and we were told that we wouldn't be able to film what the base looked like on the ground. And the context of that beyond military secrets is the fact that they were hit by an RSF drone in May of last year during that aerial campaign across the country that hit ports it down as well. And of course, the Russians are not the only one who have been reported to be seeking a place on Sudan's Red Sea coast. There's also the Turkish among others, although the Turkish interests, I think, are down at the swakian area instead. Did you hear anything on that front? We didn't hear anything on the Turkish side. They were very sheepish around the Russian deal, completely silent on any Turkish desire or presence. But I will say that I've been told consistently and by credible sources that Saudi Arabia absolutely does not want a foreign military presence on the Red Sea. And I did take note of how often Saudi Arabia was mentioned by the senior naval command and how much they cherish the Saudi Arabian partnership. And this is coming at a time where reports indicate that Saudi Arabian weapon deliveries, particularly of Pakistani hardware, did enable the recent military push in North Dakota fan and the reclaiming of the supply routes that connect the West to the center of the country and the capital. So there was a lot of emphasis on Saudi Arabia at a time where we can definitely let ingredients to reports that Saudi wouldn't want Iran, Russia or Turkey in the Red Sea, especially given, as you know, what's happening in Somali and Somali land. They just don't want it happening in Sudan as well. And in the wake of this regional war with Iran, the Saudis have also increased their cooperation coordination with the Turks, Pakistan, Egypt as well as part of this, what's some called the R4 grouping. Was that talked about on the ground in Sudan by authorities there in terms of seeing greater support from the more coordinated group of backers? It wasn't discussed. There was quite a myopic one-pointed view on what was happening on the ground at the moment because it's been such a critical time for battlefield gains in North Dakota fan and the hopes that potentially that push can extend all the way to the Western border. What I did sense through the evidence of Pakistani hardware brought in by Saudi Arabia is that defense pact had come to fruition somehow. And that Saudi was lending its support in a tangible way. And that support was incredibly valuable and had helped this push on the ground. So it wasn't discussed theoretically, but it definitely felt like there was a shift in terms of the vulnerability of the army. And the army constantly tries to present a David and Goliath narrative around the UAE's support of the RSF and that they are just fighting on their own and fighting for the nation. And I think that's no longer the narrative because of the intense Saudi Arabian support. And I think that comes after Egyptian support having been the push and the backbone of the initial phases of the war, the first two years and now we're seeing this shift to Saudi Arabia. And I think they're leveraging both. And they are also leveraging the instability on the Red Sea to strengthen their relationship with Saudi. So David is growing taller. So finally, before we move on to some of the other reporting elsewhere in Sudan, some will raise eyebrows, I think, at the patrolling with the Sudanese navy trying to counter Houthi smuggling. Because of course, there are also these separate reports which surface every now and then including more recently detailing alleged links between the Houthis and contacts in Sudan, whether that be the army itself or be that others is the missed groups, those sorts. What do you make of those reports and do those sort of allegations come up when you were there? I have never seen any evidence of Houthi Sudanese military cooperation personally. But I will also say that one thing that was very clear is that the Sudanese armed forces are not a monolith. The navy has its own mindset within the broader picture. And I found it really interesting when we were told, again and again, that the navy don't want a foreign presence in the Red Sea, in spite of what leveraging and negotiations and deals the army command is a part of. So I think it's really simplistic to just lump everyone together and think the Islamists, i.e., the elite, the top brass of the Sudanese armed forces have an interest in dealing with the Houthis and with Iran and have a history of dealing with Iran. That means that the navy won't stop interdicting Houthi vessels. I think that these things are not mutually exclusive. OK. So you recently did a series of reports from inside Elobeid, the capital of North Kordefan, that RSF has tried to impose a siege on through various means. Since that time, I think there have been a number of army gains. But at the time, what was it like trying to get to the city itself? It was exhausting. I have to say. I mean, Sudan, it's huge. So the road between the capital and Elobeid had only been recently reclaimed by the army when we had arrived. So that route is six hours. But it's so unsafe, and it is essentially a frontline road, right? is covered from the sky with drone, so we use the long route through Kosti, which pedal to the metal is nine hours, but if you are a human being who needs to rest and spend the night, it's a 12 hour route, so we stopped over in Kosti, and then we pushed down South West from Kosti to a little bit, moving through towns and cities that the RSF held for the first at least two years of the war, right. So, so are these towns like Rahad the Tendulty have only been reclaimed by the army this year. So we're moving down this road, and we've been told by security advisors, not just our own security, but the security at the UN, that last hour from Rahad to a little bayid is the most dangerous, that's the part of the route that gets hit. Initially it was getting hit every two days, but once the push moved north of a little bayid, it was getting hit every ten days. And when we were about to drive down it, that ten-day window, we were good and the more dangerous edge of it, I think it had been eight days since there had been a hit. So you drive down and you're seeing the kind of pockmarked buildings and the hollowness of towns that have been ravaged by the RSF, and life returning and people returning to them, but there's this erosion that you feel and that people are just moving through the husks of their towns. And then you see these dirt berms broken through to reopen the road. And as we got closer to a little bayid, even though we passed that market, it was only, I would say, around 40 minutes away from a little bayid where you get that kind of goose bumps, hair-raising feeling. You can feel that you are under the eye. I would say, "I have sat around." It's the only way I can describe it. And the life just disappears. The roads get emptier. You see the burnt fuel tankers. So you are entering a city that has been intentionally isolated. It's not just a cutting-off, it's a really violent way to alienate people. And so we're going into a little bayid, and the road itself already tells us what people have been through. Right. And so what was life like for those inside elevators? What did you see once you got there? There was a real cognitive dissonance because it had been so bad that people were feeling relief that the drone warfare had eased, not ended, but eased. And so people were in the streets and kids were playing football in the fields. And if you're there for a day or so, you could well believe that things had improved, that the army had re-opened another supply route, and life has returned to a little bayid. But then you start to look at the mundane day-to-day survival. So be wake up. There's no power. You go to the hospitals. The emergency ward is in a state of a blackout because the generators have run out of fuel. The guy who works at the canteen in the hotel, you speak to him and you realize his daughter is studying at the school that was hit by the drone that you saw earlier and we actually filmed her without knowing and showed him the footage and he just started sobbing because he's trying to get fees together to get his kids through school because the fees have gone up and he's seeing his daughter studying outside a classroom because there aren't enough classrooms. It's relentless. And the civilian life and the military life are so mixed in together that it's so hard to see how civilians can be protected because there is a sense that they are being collapsed into a garrison town without having asked for it. There was a lot of military vernack that had just seeped into every day talks so everyone's talking about drones. Did you see the drone earlier? Did you see it? Yeah, we heard the drone and it's constant. And so even though the ground siege may have been broken, the aerial siege is ongoing. Supplies had improved because I'd say the eastern's functioning supply route was open but still really expensive to buy meat at the market or generally by groceries but meat is a huge luxury for people. And then also just the impact on children was really stark because there was a sense that this intensified militarization. I grew up in Sudan as well as the UK and I spent time in primary school there and it was very militarized. The national anthem is militarized and the public school uniforms are a camouflage and that has always really been a part of our social life that war and military is a normalized part of our lives. To the point where we're wearing the capital and the war is raging in South Sudan or Daiford and it's almost a non-factor, right? This has taken it to another level where we go to a school and school girls are on the stage to welcome us, yelling "we'll beat them, we'll destroy them, we'll be victorious" and it's that kind of rhetoric that is really worrying because it creates a national identity that is linked to brutality in a very close way and the catch-22 is that do you stock your life, do you not send your kids to school or do you send them and just pray that they won't get hit by a drone? So these were the kinds of things that people are navigating on the day to day. The starkest example for me is going to a family home to speak to a university student who in the first year of the war had her like amputated from a shelling attack on her school when the RSF would carry out these incursions and come into the city and we're talking to her about the experience and how she's living her life and she's showing a lot of acceptance, she said she wants to be a nurse because of the nurses that helped her and then we finish our interview and I turn and I see this kind of like young body on the bed like like arched, hunched over in a camo t-shirt and I sit down with him and it's her brother and he's joined the military and he has the youngest race. He's clearly a teenager and when we talk about his date of birth I ask him. His mom says 2009 and he goes no 2008 and he's saying you can't say that. I was born in 2008 and he just seems broken and helpless and very vocal about the fact that he might as well join the army and take up arms because he'll get killed anyway and the shells and the bombs come to you in your house and the thing that will probably stay with me for a very long time is that he said if you don't have a gun in this country you're no one and that is the summarizing line of what militarization and war does to a generation of kids who then believe that unless you take up arms and fight you're nobody but also specifically around manhood in Sudan and the fact that you can't sit aside and be a pacifist or a conscientious objector they believe they don't have the luxury to do that these are the things that will take a very long time to heal and work on and resolve well after the fighting ends. So you reported on the situation all fascia in north darfur state was the situation there similar in a sense to what you saw in alobade or do you think it was basically just an entire other category to itself. A completely other category I'll fascia and alobade are incomparable and I think that the collapsing of the two by the U.N. by the U.K. by the U.S. all of those press releases and statements that we saw before going in I think that is a discredit to both the people of alobade and the people of alobade because I think the motivations are different the terrain is different and the approach is different. The only similarity is that civilians are suffering intensely and have suffered intensely in both of those situations so alobade is about capturing a key garrison town it is at the center of vital supply routes and it's the gateway between the west of Sudan and the center and north east of Sudan right so it is strategically invaluable and both sides know this and both sides operate with that awareness that is why alobade has always been a goal of the RSF and a key goal it's deep historical resentment and it is the prize it is the tribal prize and fascia. Khartoum is a political and economic prize but it's not what you're going to go home and tell your family and loved ones at the end of the day but you tell them because it's a sign of strength and I always laugh and say Khartoum fell in a morning right and it was so quick and it showed the fragility of Khartoum and it showed how that bubble of privilege and safety we grew up in was so fragile and so tentative. Al-Fashad held on for a long time and Al-Fashad was that sanctuary city like Medin he was for the center of the country people were flocking to Al-Fashad from all over Darfur because the first captures in Darfur were not Al-Fashad or Jinnan or Nial or any of the big cities it was Khartoum so it was the town very close to Al-Fashad. Khartoum was captured by the RSF on June 3rd 2023 first month and a half of the war that capture was key for them to then encircle and besiege Al-Fashad. So that's just the motivation but if we look at the strategy the brutality that they unleashed Al-Fashad just in the siege because you've got burning of agricultural fields around Elfashir. You've got the ambush in the capture of Zamzam camps, so the kind of adjunct displacement site where people could move from and to Elfashir and be able to get the supplies and the sustenance from NGOs working in the area. They then build an actual berm around the city and they also were carrying out incursions. So they were going into the city, ravaging neighborhoods pulling out. We saw that consistently. And more and more closer to the time of the capture. And then you have the drone warfare. So you have a full encirclement, you have languishing ranks, you've got the whole city basically paying for whatever military objective the RSF have at the time. And you've got supplies coming in from Chad. So you've got a constant supply of arms. So when we were on the ground in North Outford, one, we were able to speak to a commander on the ground who shared videos that he says show those supplies continuing to come into Daftford from Chad. And we were given an extensive mapping out of the different smuggling routes for the RSF from Chad. And of course, told consistently that the United Arab Emirates are providing these arms, not only told by the joint task forces who were tasked with protecting Elfashir and keeping it safe, but also told by an RSF intelligence officer who made it clear that is the kind of main supply room at the time. So we're able to see that supplies are coming in to prop up this capture of Elfashir. Obviously, we know from later reports that Colombian mercenaries were involved in that capture as well. We then speak to volunteers who are coordinating smuggling food into Elfashir from Chad. We speak to them on the border of North Outford. And when we met them, they lost 30 volunteers that week. So they were operating under extreme circumstances. But I remember being in the storeroom in the market and they're showing me a video of their volunteers being held up by the RSF. And this RSF militiaman is saying to them, what are you carrying and they go pasta and then the other guy goes bread and one guy goes insulin, one guy goes flour. And then there's a mock execution on camera and then the next video is bodies dumped in a trench. And that, for me, kind of encapsulates the siege. In forced starvation, we hear reports and we see reports of people eating animal feed in Elfashir to stay alive. And it was only after the collapse of Elfashir that famine was determined because, obviously, no one could get in to assess whether there was famine in Elfashir, but all signs were pointing to famine. But the fact that volunteers had to face death and go on foot and bury, they were burying food drops and medicine drops around Elfashir and then sending coordinates to volunteers in the city to then go out and secretly pick it up. So that was the level of strangulation. And then we, of course, saw the citywide massacre that took place when the RSF got in and when the army withdrew. And we also saw the killing fields outside Elfashir and what was being done to people as they tried to flee. The UN panel of experts in their report said that it bears the hallmarks of genocide. And I think that there was no way that any of us could not see the genocidal intent in the RSF's capture of Elfashir. Not only because of their rhetoric and because of their crimes and other parts of north, that for specifically because of their deep-rooted historical rivalry with the Zarawa, but because this is the history. This is what they did in the early 2000s. This is the precedent is glaring and the whole world turned around and said never again and then watched it happen with more sophisticated weaponry with external support, with huge numbers of people concentrated around an urban area. I grew up at the time of the war in Germany in the early 2000s and I feel that what we're seeing now is an accelerated, intensified version of that. So Elfashir was genocidal and the UN said it evidence shows genocidal intent. A lubeid is military and I think what my perception of the UK sounding their alarm is because they will never be able to shake off the stain or wash out the stain of Elfashir and the fact that they did not do enough to prevent those atrocities at the time where those atrocities were clearly looming and being presented to them by human rights observers, by journalists, by all sorts of civilian actors saying you have to stop the fall of Elfashir because it is becoming inevitable and it is going to lead to huge numbers of civilian death. You were part of an investigative team that reported on the massacres by RSF and how Elfashir fell to RSF. One of the points was that the army basically fled the city right before it fell and of course in the process, also you could say abandoned the militias that were fighting alongside it in Elfashir. What do you know about that? Was there some deal between the RSF and the army for the army to leave or what did you find? - So on the day that Elfashir was captured very early on, I was told by sources that the army had made arrangements to withdraw those senior leadership and that they were not gonna have an issue leaving the city. That sounded alarm bells for me and we started investigating what arrangements had been made and who had managed to get out safely. So we were learning about cars that were able to leave the city before it fell and make its way to safe areas, including the capital, but also up north to Dubba and eventually to Port Sudan. This was happening as battles were ongoing. So there was another battle that took place as other soldiers tried to withdraw and they called it a suicidal withdrawal. So they tried to withdraw and they were met with gunfire it's called the Battle of the Pavement, which happened when they were trying to leave the city. We've been told that the comms were completely down that they had been jammed by the RSF and that's been reported as well. So there was a lack of coordination between troops on the ground that we could say is explained away by the jamming of all communications, of the radios of everything that they were using, but there was also an abandoned command because the garrison had been emptied and the defense said some of them were shocked to turn around and see that some commanders had already left the city. So we put this to the office of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and in his statement he said that there were orders for withdrawal and he denied that there was any abandoned commander or any arrangements made and that soldiers agreed to stay behind to secure the withdrawal. These soldiers were not told that they were going to stay behind to secure the withdrawal, they were just left behind. So when I look at it, I definitely see an abandoned command and I also see the sacrificing of junior troops and civilians to basically salvage the top brass and senior political leaders like the mayor at the expense of the troops on the ground and the civilians who'd been staying put in holding tight with the faith that the military and the joint task forces would keep the city safe. In terms of their arrangements in the deal, it's still unclear whether arrangements were made on an individual level between commanders and senior RSF guys on the ground. It does not appear to me to be a deal between army command and RSF command at the HQ level. But we need to remember that these forces had been working side by side for many years, right? The army and the RSF, they've been security partners for decades. So there are interpersonal relationships between these troops and this isn't the first time that we see a withdrawal that is coordinated between the army and the RSF in a city or town in that fort. A soldier in Kutum told me that the army sold the garrison. We saw in Erdemata that there was a very abrupt withdrawal and some troops were left behind to die and were rounded up by the RS and killed in Erdemata and the Jinena. We also saw withdrawal in Nihala. And I've been looking at the army's approach to cities and that fort compared to Khartolmer or cities in the north or central part of the country. And there is a sense that the armed forces will sacrifice a city in the west to regain control in the center. And so the inevitability of the fall of a fashard may have come into their decision-making, but the way it was carried out was a survivalist approach that very likely to have relied on pre-existing relationships. And I think the defection of the command in order to go by that led operational fashard to now join the armed forces definitely feeds that suspicion that the army used an inroad with the RSF on the ground to get their senior command out and save them. So they wouldn't be killed by other RSF forces. In the aftermath of these killings, the takeover of Elfashard and then the massacres, it does seem that at a minimum thousands were killed during this capture. But there is also all these tens of thousands or even more that appeared to be unequivocated. for or missing in the aftermath of El Fasher has it become clear in the months and really the year since what happened to those people, what what accounted for those many missing numbers? I still have friends and colleagues who have no idea where their loved ones are and I think that's because you can't get into the city. You can't go to the grave site and see who's been killed and we have seen satellite images shared by Yale humanitarian labs that show sites that look like places where corpses have been burned. In the beginning there was a very shocking divergence between the number of people we knew were leaving El Fasher and the number of people arriving to Toilet the nearest kind of IDP point, right? So that was very scary. Eventually people turned up in a debba but I still think that there are thousands of missing people that are unaccounted for and because we can't get into El Fasher we don't know who's actually been killed or who's just gone off the map or who's detained, right? We just heard two days ago that someone held in an RSF prison in El Fasher has died in custody and there was also the prison in Nial as well that has large numbers of people including journalists who are captured in El Fasher including Mahmoud Abrahim, a journalist that's been held since the day of capture. So we haven't really been able to consolidate the numbers. There's still large numbers of children turning up on a company from El Fasher in these camps whose parents are missing and so even though it's close to a year now since it happened the chaos has never really settled. There's still these kind of severed ties still families who are completely estranged and people who don't know genuinely do not know if their loved ones are dead or not and I think this needs to be reintegrated. We need to actually go back to the numbers and look at how many have turned up in at the bar because more of them turned up in the bar than the wheeler because of the wheeler being still parallel to RSF control and look at how many are still missing and start to actually try and get names and start seeing if we can link people up. You know you're reporting on Sudan it's a very intense civil war and war zone and you are Sudanese and your story is interwoven with Sudan's story. At the start of the war you were reporting from Jeddah as Sudanese fled the country and you bumped into your uncle who had managed to escape you had to convince your parents to flee cartoon at the beginning of the war and help them get out. You've gone back to cartoon and found your family home looted so first of all this all must have been a lot in your reporting and in this conversation you can feel the weight of all of that. How are you doing you know and as a journalist covering a war in your own homeland that's also even affected your own family home what has that been like? It's been formative for sure look I moved to Sudan as a trainee journalist and I remember being like very naively. I want to cover all the great things about my country or the beautiful things the music that are the culture not in isolation to what was happening in Dad Ford and the Kuwaiti fan region but I was trying to in mesh those stories into what was happening in the capital and consolidate my two worlds right the warmth and the love of home and the happiness and the community with the politics and geopolitics of it all but when the revolution started it was very clear that I couldn't just take a rosy feature approach to Sudan in any way that I have to roll up my sleeves and get in there and count the dead and look at shoot to kill and all of these things that have been actually a pervasive part of our civic life almost normalized part of our civic life every time protests would erupt people were getting killed and we just absorb the blow and keep going so the revolution definitely prepared me for covering the war because I think I could see that the story of Sudan is not just one shade it's not just war and suffering and conflict and drought and floods all of these extremes it is also determination and courage and poetry and love and care and all of the things that makes it unbeautiful and warm and home and I think the war was a huge wake-up call because it became very clear to me I would not be able to separate the personal and the professional and that I had to accept that and continue to make it about the people in the country and not about myself so I've been quite intentional about when to share and what to share and why I'm sharing so if I'm sharing my home ransacked and it is one of thousands if not millions of homes that have been ransacked across the country and looted and so it's just kind of a conduit this one is the all we've had to do that across Sudan because you don't get access to everyone and you don't get access to everywhere and so we try through these human stories to show everyone this is what's happening to people and to civilians and each story is a national story is a communal story and so it's not that it's not exhausting or draining it's that what it requires of me is something that I should aspire to anyway just sensitivity and care for the people that we work with and work for it's those real close to home stories that we hope make people perk up and listen and not just listen with their minds and their ears but with their hearts and that is something that I hope to bring to any country that I report on and what is it now like in cartoon when you do go back what is the city like and what are the prospects for all the Sudanese including your family for instance who have fled to return it's a very fragile and manufactured sense of safety civilians are being encouraged on a state level to return to Khartoum they're being told that they have to return to Khartoum as they're being rejected by neighboring countries right Egypt is deporting people back to Khartoum Chad is increasingly hostile and under-resourced to deal with the number of refugees fleeing there and also has ties with the RSF and has a political agenda I remember the first night we got back to Khartoum to Umdurman and we always stay with this one family Umdurman that we first met at the start of the war and we've been through the war with them so Khartoum Fatima who kind of cares for us and cooks for us lost her husband who we had met and stayed with at the start of the war she was trying to get her daughters out and eventually we were able to help her get them out to Roranda to study there so we've lived the war through this family as well as my family or my friends and we go back and I sit with her and she's sleeping outside because rainy season and it's much nicer outside at night than it is indoors and there's limited powers for the generator weren't fuel all the air conditioners and she just says what do we do there's no power there's no water there's no work no one wants us outside countries don't want us what do we do we're exhausted and in that moment I just felt the weight that people have been carrying and they're carrying it to sustain the whole country to sustain the spirit and story of a country and there's pressure on them to do that because if they leave there's nothing to rebuild and nothing to regain and I just really felt the deep fatigue of surviving this war and this is where where it's like resilient or tolerant they really don't capture the active effort it takes to survive a war and to survive as a human being and with your humanity and with your dignity and not be either broken and killed or join the very forces that are destroying your city and your country right so Khartoum when we went back to my house it was completely militarized you couldn't get in without a military escort last year now we go in and there's civilian traffic and you cross the bridge over Mugren where the nails meet and you go into the kind of northern tip of Khartoum city and there's a flow but it's almost like a trickle of normalcy and I remember looking at people walking along the big towers like most of our big towers Pockmark destroyed burnt out still standing but definitely damaged there was one man who was just hunched and just half broken walking through there was another younger man whose eyebrows were like he just looked concentrated focused but definitely in his head and just kind of pushing on and then there were the women who just had sadness on their face but we're just like continuing and so the army and Burhan and pro army people will say millions have returned to Khartoum and Gadar if in Medinion all these places but no one will ever say the conditions that they're returning to no one will say how difficult it is to go to back to your house in your neighborhood in Khartoum where there's absolutely no power there are thieves there are people who might take over your house there are armed actors who are completely independent of any military force but just have cheap guns on the market and your house if you manage to get panels and light it up is the only light in the neighborhood and the target And so the exposure that they are expecting people to be okay with is unfathomable. And also drones are still every now and then hitting the capital, our self drones. How do you think this war will end? It's gone over now for over three years, which in the history of Sudan's wars is sadly not that long in a sense, but it's also a much different kind of war than Sudan has ever faced, especially in the way, you know, that it started in the capital cartoon itself. The army still demands the RSF's total surrender more or less in terms of withdrawing and demobilizing to end the war. Various pushes for peace talks are mostly all stuck in the mud at the moment. One can say, but there's definitely no traction on that front. And it's more and more of a regional war as we talked about. Of course, there's the massive UAE intervention on the site of RSF, which of course the UAE has always denied, and then more and more countries coordinating really in their support for the army and the government. So when you think ahead, how do you see this war finally ending? I think the fighting could end, but peace will continue to be very elusive. And I think the military's approach at the moment is to denigrate the ranks of the RSF through these defections, right? And they're doing it quite successfully. And when we were on the ground, we kept hearing about how the RSF has more military equipment than they have personnel. I saw one video of men who say that there are RSF troops yelling about not having enough food and not having any support. And we're hearing credible reports of infighting in Niala, the RSF capital between RSF command and that cease government and also infighting within those as well. So the RSF is being eroded. The military strategy is absolutely questionable in the social, political and legal sense, right? Because you've got now commanders who've committed atrocities in huge cities like El Fashir, living side by side with people from El Fashir, who are seeking refuge in the capital. So you've created proximity once again. And you've also now granted amnesty at a national level that then could be in conflict with any local courts that want to bring these people to justice for their crimes. It's so contentious and it also for me is morally contentious on the grounds that hundreds of women and civilians are being arrested and being called collaborators. When you've actually got the actual culprits working with you hand in hand and the military justification for that is meant to supersede the survival of people who had to live with the RSF in their communities, right? So across the board their strategy is dubious. But it could be militarily effective in putting the RSF in a position where it has to negotiate because of the ground reality, even if drone warfare could keep this up for longer, the armies also working with Turkey to use Turkish drones, even in interception Turkish drones are being used to bomb the RSF drones out of the sky. I think we could get to a point where the fighting stops next year potentially. And I think this is the first time that I'm seeing that that could happen because of the weakened position of the RSF on the ground. We're seeing that Borhan, the army chief, is potentially heading to New York, but what is interesting that I think we need to know is that he's written an op-ed for foreign policy. And I studied it this morning before I spoke to you, and he's saying that he's presented a ceasefire plan to the UN Security Council that will mean that the fighting ends and the guns are put down and that peace will come to Sudan. But there's no ceasefire in it. I read it also this wording and it's a ceasefire without a ceasefire. A hundred percent a ceasefire without a ceasefire. It is more of a, we want to chair this conversation around the political solution now that we're in a better military position, right? But also the irony of saying that you want the guns put down. When you are putting guns in the hands of people who are either civilian recruits and are young kids even, but also you are absorbing the armed actors that destabilize the country in the first place. But what that says to me is that, "Borhan feels like he's in a stronger negotiating position, which is helpful, because according to Masad Bulos, the U.S. envoy, and according to other civilian sources and people involved, he has been the block in moving forward ceasefire negotiations because of the military reality and the feeling that the RSF has an advantage in those talks at those times. Do I see a world where him it is going to turn around and get to go to the negotiation table? Possibly. I think he possibly could because of his lack of manpower right now. But it's a question whether the UAE, his main backer, who I have to say vehemently denied backing either warring party. It's a question whether the UAE will be okay with him doing that given the sunken costs of this war. But I think we're getting to a place where there is a sense that Bulhan doesn't have a chip on his shoulder as much as he used to because of the advancement and because he has hartoom and that the RSF might be also a bit more amicable because they have a fashion. Again, it's looking at motivations and what the prize is for each group. So I think this is probably the time where we've got in the closest to them being in a position to want to reach a political solution after exhausting all the military solutions. I also think it was telling for me when we were reporting on a fashion that we had a soldier tell us in an interview there's no military solution there's only a political solution. And so I just wonder how far up that goes. How much that exhaustion is also permeating at that top level where everyone is fighting but also knowing that they can't fight forever. I've always been very cynical about any of these ceasefire talks or any of these peace talks because I didn't ever feel that there was any interest for either party in actually sitting down and speaking but I think we're now seeing that interest catch up. And so I have hope that the fighting might end but I don't have hope in peace which is the sad reality of seeing these wars up close. From your conversations what do regular Sudanese if I can use such a term on the ground what do they think when you talk to them about the war because they are the ones as you mentioned and as your reporting shows are obviously in the thick of it who are really suffering caught between two warring parties at times and sometimes just besieged by the RSF in many cases. But those insights you Dan you meet I imagine they want the war to end and yet you've had Burhan often refusing various ceasefire proposals at various points. Have the Sudanese you've met on those front lines have they been sympathetic to the army's reluctance to enter peace talks or do you think they broadly wished that this war just ended as soon as it could. They broadly wished that this war could end as soon as it could. We saw the sympathies at the start of the war and all the way up to the capture of Huttolm right I think that's where the army's popularity was at its height and that's where you had people who were anti-military rule protesting on the street being like okay we need to rely on our national institution the army to get us out of this mind and almost having that kind of selective amnesia that the army is the reason that the RSF exists and has these capabilities and has this legitimacy and is gone from being a militia to a paramilitary group. So yeah so the sympathies towards the army have waned a lot and what I found on the ground is that people consistently say to me that they feel like they're pawns in a game and that they feel like they are at the mercy of the army and the RSF the RSF probably more in a visceral brutal way through these ransackings and these massacres but at the mercy of the army through arbitrary detention through constant militarization and heightened security protocol in their cities and in their towns and at the mercy of a war that they don't feel like the army necessarily has an interest in ending. So there's a heightened awareness about the zero-sum game being played right now and I think the war fatigue that has set in has made it very difficult for people to have any sense of patience any longer and this again I think lends itself to why Bullhahn could now come out and say we want a civilian transition we want the ceasefire to be considered and we want to share that discussion because I think he might be increasingly aware that he's overplayed his hand now and that he should start thinking about the post-war discussion and what happens next so that they can remain at the center of it. What's your read on General Bern himself and his ambitions will he ever leave power or put another way do you think he'd ever choose a path of peace if it required him to lose that power he's acquired. I struggle with trying to understand Bullhahn because I think he has two faces he has a kind of strategic mindset of like what is the best outcome and that is often at the expense of as we've seen other cities other assets and so he's constantly garnering towards the best outcome. but he also was one of Bashir's top officers, right? I always wonder if that control is literal where people think he's controlled by the Islamists or it is a innate instinctive autopilot of doing things in line with the Islamists because that's what you've always done. One thing that is undeniable is that the entitlement to power by Sudan's military elite, very much with Burhan at the helm of that since the sort of post-2019 or Ahmed Bashir ouster, is that I don't see a world where Aburhan will relinquish power. And I think that we saw that with October 2021 coup where him and him it teemed up to derail the civilian transition a month before they were meant to hand it over to civilians, right? To civilian authority. So I think that Aburhan might not necessarily want to be at the forefront and the de facto president of Sudan as he's been since Aburhan Bashir was ousted but I think he will always want to be behind the scenes pulling the puppets strings playing a pivotal role because there is this very disturbing mindset that the military elite have always had in Sudan is that they are the only ones that can keep us safe and they're the only ones that can govern the country. As you know recently there has been a lot of controversy around the allegations that the army used chemical weapons or chlorine bombs and the U.S. Even at the end of the Biden administration had leveled sanctions on Burhan and others related to this and the Trump administration has doubled down on those sanctions and then we've seen recent news reports in the New York Times and Washington Post with this dossier which interestingly seems to be a not very well disguised leak from Israel which is interesting in itself. What have you made of all of this and those specific allegations? So I think that the chemical weapons conversation and the controversy around it speaks to how sanctions steer public opinion of any revelations around the military. So the fact that the chemical weapons allegations came out around the Biden sanctions in January 2025 created a charge around it and evidence has been building and we've seen individuals and analysts attacked for saying that this chemical weapon use took place and it is not the first time that the Sudanese armies accused of using chemical weapons. So I think that for me the more interesting part of this is how the conversation is being wielded and shut down and looking through evidence in the dossier. I think the most compelling part of it for me are the intercepted messages right because the messages suggest how high up the instructions came that all the way from Abulhan. So that kind of surveillance and that kind of evidence is probably all anyone has right now in terms of the chemical weapons allegations as it's incredibly hard to prove chemical weapons use. But it's how defensive the army gets around it that is what concerns me because it shows that they will do anything to shut down any information that risks their not only their legitimacy but their economic longevity. So they talk about a civilian transition and authority but essentially are concerned about sanctions diminishing their own authority and their own longevity with this war ending. So that's the sensitivity around it. When I speak to anyone from the sovereign council office or anyone close to the army command it is a point of rage. They will say that it is a conspiracy and that it's clearly Israel on behalf of the UAE. Again it's this thing of you know everything is stacked against them and that does trickle down to some civilians who have lived through sanctions and understand how suffocating and difficult sanctions are and so they're also using that discontent and that history of sanctions survival to ramp up their campaign to dismiss any allegations. So it's concerning that we move away from whether this actually happened to why it's coming out and who's pushing it and that it just becomes about the geopolitical game and the positioning for Sudan with the US and with the West rather than this huge violation of warfare did that actually happen. So if and when this war does eventually wind down and there is at least a ceasefire or above that some sort of overall peace deal then what what do you think would be most important looking at day after scenarios for Sudanese to then begin to peace together Sudan again in the aftermath of this war. It really is just about people being able to safely rebuild, safely return and I don't even take it as okay my loved ones returning or my parents returning. I'm talking about how a city revives itself, how life can be given a chance to return. At the moment you see that happening in spite of the constant assault and so it's very difficult for a life to come back when it's constantly under threat and the problem with the drone warfare is that I don't know if that threat will ever go away or if it will go in the near future but the difference I would say for a L'Obiad civilians and residents when they went from being fully encircled to half encircled with still having that aerial siege and still having the threat of drones is I think the difference between on-ground fighting ending and drone warfare not ending. There's still relief when you know the land is no longer the arena for the war. There is relief that you can actually travel down a road and if you keep your eyes on the sky you could be okay rather than they're going to erupt in fighting. One of the things we were worried about more than anything if we went to a town that had been recently recaptured what's stopping an RSF ambush in an attempt to take over and while we were in a L'Obiad our RSF fighters on motorbikes were attacking towns south of L'Obiad and people were fleeing. So those incursions if those incursions cease that would be very helpful. I don't think that that would stop the military from still doing the arbitrary campaigns that it does against civilians and throwing people in prison without enough evidence and all the things that it has always done. So safety and civic life is always going to be an issue and it has always been an issue even before this war but I think we just need to take it down several marches and get to a point where people are navigating obstacles and militarization that will obviously continue without the constant grave assault and the threat bodily harm. So let's just start like reducing bodily harm and take it from there and I think that's really a sad place to work from but that's where we are and to have gone this far with that single cease fire, a single loving fighting you know more than three years I think it's insane it is unfathomable and it should not have happened and it needs to stop. Yousra, thanks so much for coming on our podcast and spending all this time with us. Thanks for reading me out. Thanks for listening. You can find out more about crisis group or readout reports at crisisgroup.org. Once again I'm Alan Boswell and the horn is produced by Mae Francis and Ida Halli-Nohui.