For the last six months Aisha*, 59, has been plagued by recurring visions of her murdered son talking to her.
She cannot sleep or think clearly, she says, stumbling to a halt. “Some days she is entirely mute,” a concerned friend continues, as Aisha stares into space.
The grandmother is one of around 100,000 displaced people who have limped into El Obeid in south-central Sudan after long marches along roads lined with corpses.
She has come here looking for shelter in this frontline town, which has only just survived a siege and is itself under regular drone fire and shelling.
El Obeid is the capital of North Kordofan state, which has become the epicentre of one of the deadliest, yet most forgotten, civil wars of the 21st century.
In the blistering heat of the day, Aisha describes how paramilitaries from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) slaughtered her son and extended family as they tried to flee their village in a tuk-tuk.
“They dragged them out, lined them up, and shot them. In front of me,” she says blankly.
Even though some of the wounded were still alive, she was forced to leave them behind, and that still haunts her. She describes watching from afar as the fighters looted the bodies, picking their way through the growing pools of blood.
“I grabbed my youngest daughter,” she continues. “There was no way to carry them all.”
Fighting erupted in Sudan in April 2023 between the paramilitary RSF and the Sudanese army, known as the SAF, after years of a bubbling power struggle in the wake of a 2019 uprising which unseated the country’s longtime autocrat, Omar al-Bashir.
Over the last three years, the internecine brutality has left at least 60,000 people dead, but the real figure is likely to be more than double that. An estimated 14 million people have been forced to flee their homes.
It has sparked the worst displacement crisis, and the largest humanitarian and hunger crisis, on the planet right now. Experts have accused the RSF of committing a likely genocide, the army and affiliates of atrocities, and the UN has declared famine in pockets of the country. That will have a devastating impact on generations to come, doctors tell us: in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) shrivelled newborns look otherworldly.
And so the people of Sudan see this less as a civil war than a war on them. And, for Aisha, she is tormented by her dead son talking to her.
“I am completely shattered, distraught. I don’t even know what I am doing. It is as if I am in a daze,” she says haltingly.
“When I remember him, I cannot hold myself together. In the middle of the night, I wake up crying. I ask God for forgiveness.”
In El Obeid, this is not really a camp. Families are living in mudbrick huts abandoned by residents who fled the area when the fighting came here. There is also very little aid. Everyone says they registered with UN agencies and NGOs but have received no support: Sudan remains one of the most underfunded conflict zones right now.
And the stories are chilling: summary executions, starvation and mass rape. The UN has said conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan is unprecedented in terms of the scale, prevalence and brutality of its widespread use as a weapon of war, particularly by the RSF further west in El Fasher, Darfur.
There, the UN children’s agency has documented cases of rape of babies as young as one, and Sudanese officials in Khartoum tell The Independent the oldest rape survivor they have documented is 85. They worry the same will happen to El Obeid, home to half a million people, including tens of thousands of displaced.
Zaina*, 37, says she only just managed to rescue her daughter from being abducted by the RSF, who were taking women and girls from families who didn’t flee fast enough.
“I watched them abduct the women, screaming and begging, and take them to a ravine and rape them,” she says with a chilling calmness.
The problem was, the mother-of-seven continues, there was no one to stop them.
“There were no men to help. It was a matter of life and death.”
Riham*, a 30-year-old mother-of-eight, says her father and uncle were “shot to pieces” by RSF soldiers when they tried to stop them abducting female relatives.
“It was a bloodbath. Blood was splattered everywhere. Their brains were spilling out. It was a horrific scene.”
Until very recently, El Obeid was almost completely surrounded by RSF fighters, who had to tried to lay siege to and regularly bomb the strategic town, which has become a forward operating post for the Sudanese military and is crawling with soldiers.
Just a few hours after we visit the makeshift displacement camp, drone strikes pound the city centre and a neighbouring town, destroying a university and killing over a dozen people.
And so the families who flee the front line feel like it is chasing them, explains Abida*, who arrived after RSF soldiers shot dead her mother, laid siege to her village, looted everything “and burned the houses to the ground”.
“A few days ago I was almost killed by a drone here in El Obeid. The shock wave was so strong it threw me into the air. I was carrying my two-year-old daughter when it hit, the smell of gunpowder filled the air.”
Sudan’s most recent slaughterous war was sparked when tensions between the army, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the powerful paramilitary RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or “Hemedti”, exploded into open fighting across the country.
The two generals had initially joined forces and formed a joint military civilian government in 2019 after toppling al-Bashir. Two years later, the two men staged a coup. A vicious struggle between them reached breaking point in early 2023, mainly over plans to integrate the 100,000-strong RSF into the army.
Fighting initially erupted in the capital, Khartoum, and quickly engulfed the entire country. Conflict monitor Acled has been trying to keep track of the number of people killed, but aid groups say the death toll is likely to be close to 150,000.
That has since metastasised into an international conflict, with Human Rights Watch finding evidence that the UAE is bankrolling the RSF, which was accused of atrocities and crimes even before this war erupted. The Emirates denies this, and the RSF has, in turn, claimed the military is supported by Egypt and Iran.
The war has displaced a quarter of the population, and pushed parts of the country into famine.
Both sides, and their affiliated groups, have been accused of committing atrocities and war crimes, which both vehemently deny in statements to The Independent.
The UN and the US government have both accused the RSF and its allied militias of a systematic targeting of non-Arab communities that likely amounts to genocide in Darfur, during its 18-month siege of El Fasher. The RSF, again, has repeatedly denied this, but the fear is the same tactics will be used in North Kordofan.
In Dabbah refugee camp in the north of the country, families describe RSF slaughter but also coming under military fire.
One girl, Sara*, says she lost her entire family in an army mortar attack during fighting in Darfur, which left her gravely wounded as she hid in a shell hole.
“It was a direct hit. The shock wave threw me to the ground. Many people were torn apart. My brother-in-law’s abdomen was torn open and his legs shredded by shrapnel,” she adds quietly.
“I was injured around 1pm and stayed like that until 5pm... They prevented people from coming to help me.”
“I was the only survivor,” she continues, breaking down in tears.
The next catastrophe on the horizon is famine. Families we spoke to talk of trying to survive on one meal a day or even resorting to eating animal feed.
This man-made food crisis, driven by sieges, is being made worse by the climate crisis. The Super El Niño has caused severe drought affecting more than half of Sudan, leading to crop failures, according to the IPC, the UN-backed global hunger monitor.
Carl Skau, then acting head of the World Food Programme (WFP), warns that Sudan is already “the largest hunger crisis in the world right now”.
But aid agencies are not equipped to respond: the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Sudan is 40 per cent unfunded.
“Twenty million people are acutely food insecure. Some 14 million people have been displaced, and there are still pockets of famine,” Skau tells The Independent from El Obeid. “And we’re struggling to meet these needs. We’re doing our best. There is access to many parts, but the funding is not there.”
That is most starkly seen in the maternity wards. At two NICUs in Omdurman, Khartoum state, severely malnourished babies are too weak to cry, their faces contorted in pain and their skin drawn tight across their skulls.
Dr Rehab Sid Ahmad, an obstetric anaesthetist who herself was nearly killed by RSF strikes and raids on the Omdurman maternity hospital, explains that this will impact Sudan for generations to come.
“The mothers have suffered from poor nutrition, so when they give birth, the children will face other issues – nutritional problems, developmental issues, and so on. They won’t develop properly – their growth will be affected,” she explains.
“This doesn’t end here but is impacting the generations being born now.”
Back in El Obeid, the scant humanitarian aid available is doing little to ease the nightmare.
Families still recovering from the massacre of their loved ones describe how they are surviving on grain.
And the front line is stalking them.
“People keep moving from place to place, but there’s no real safety anywhere,” Abida says quietly. “Nowhere is safe.”
