International

Inside Sudan’s army-controlled capital as civil war enters fourth year

Comments:

by Laura Kelly - 04/26/26 6:00 AM ET

Comments:

Link copied

by Laura Kelly - 04/26/26 6:00 AM ET

Comments:

Link copied

NOW PLAYING

KHARTOUM, Sudan – One year since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) retook the capital, large parts of the ravaged city are a ghost town. The shell of the grand presidential palace is stained black from fire and smoke, its windows and floors blown out, its Islamic-style arches and columns crumbling.

Posters of martyred soldiers, some looking barely into their teens, are seen across the capital. The street signs and concrete buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes. Carcasses of burned-out vehicles have been dragged to the side of the road or dumped in empty lots. Bombed-out planes still line the tarmac at Khartoum International Airport, which only resumed domestic flights in February.

A few days in the city is plenty of time to realize just how difficult the road ahead will be for Sudan’s military government and its people. And fighting continues to rage in much of the country, with no end in sight three years after this brutal civil war started.

The Hill joined a rare delegation with five other foreign journalists on a weeklong trip sponsored by the ONE Campaign, the nonprofit advocacy organization co-founded by U2’s Bono and focused on health and economic development in Africa.

The SAF-dominated government exercised tight control, facilitating the transportation, recommending interviewees and closely observing some of the independently organized meetings. Still, the conversations in Khartoum and Port Sudan showed there are still extraordinary people fighting for peace and a new Sudan.

‘Either there’s Sudan or not’

Sulaima Elkhalifa Sharif is the General Director of the Combating Violence Against Women Unit under the army-controlled government. (Laura Kelly)

On April 15, 2023, open conflict erupted in the capital between the country’s leading generals, the SAF’s Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and Mohammed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

What has unfolded since amounts to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, fueled by foreign powers and largely ignored by the Trump administration as it focuses on conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran. The global community has failed to step up and fill the gap.

“This is intentional. It’s not forgotten; it’s there, everybody knows what’s happening but it’s intentionally because of the politics,” said Sulaima Elkhalifa Sharif, general director of the Combating Violence Against Women Unit under the SAF-controlled government.

“Even the humanitarian aid is manipulated politically.”

While Sudan’s civil war is often cast as a battle between two generals — Burhan and Dagalo — it’s complicated by a range of militias on both sides, armed tribes, and an increasing number of foreign powers.

From the Middle East to Sudan’s neighbors, these countries are jockeying for interest in a resource-rich land plagued by conflict.

Sharif was critical of the recently held Berlin conference on Sudan, a major fundraising forum that excluded representatives from both the SAF and RSF for their failure to come to a ceasefire. But the forum included the war’s main foreign backers: the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which supports the RSF, and Burhan’s allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Sharif is also critical of the Sudanese political opposition in exile, called the Somoud Alliance.

“The international community is actually ignoring the fact that things are not the same after the war. Those are not the prodemocracy people we want,” she said. “There are other prodemocracy people. There’s other people in Sudan … they are prodemocracy, but they are not part of this alliance.”

Sharif represents some of the hard trade-offs within the SAF-controlled civilian government — working with the people who have tried to kill her and imprison her. In 2019, Sharif survived an RSF-led crackdown on peaceful protesters in Khartoum, where an estimated 118 people were killed. In 2022, she was detained by the Burhan-controlled government for exposing sexual violence committed by military forces.

“There’s people in Sudan still, they’re still working with this government … it doesn’t have to be elected but they know its transitional government and things will change somehow and Sudan needs time to breathe actually,” she said.

“For me as a Sudanese, I don’t want to be governed by the army. No one wants to. But actually we don’t have any options. Either there’s Sudan or not.”

The Trump administration has said there are no good actors on either side of the war. The SAF, like the paramilitary rebels