Life in the capital of Sudan after its recovery: NPR

Johannesburg, South Africa – “I felt that the air was lighter, I felt very happy. I felt a lot of emotions, I was overwhelmed this morning.”

This is how Duaa Tariq, a resident of Khartoum, described the feeling when the Sudanese capital was released by almost two years of brutal paramilitary occupation more than a week ago.

Tariq, who gave birth to his first child while Khartoum was as a seat, played an active role in emergency intervention rooms, a community group which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for their rescue work during the civil war. Throughout this period, NPR remained in contact with it.

The paramilitary forces of rapid support (RSF) had dominated the capital during most of the war, the Sudanese army forced to create a war center in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.

But last week, the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) finally broke the dead end and regained control of the chief of the city and the army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan returned to the presidential palace.

The conflict in Sudan broke out in April 2023 in the midst of a power struggle between the SAF of General Burhan and the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. So far, the war has killed up to 150,000 people (although the figure is probably much higher) and moved some 15 million, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.

Tariq, an activist at the start of the thirties, said that in the days following the resumption of the RSF army, she liked to do the ordinary things that were impossible when Khartoum was a conflict area.

“I did a bike and went shopping without hiding the money in my chest. I laughed in the streets, I played music,” she told NPR. “I took my phone with me when I went out because there were no soldiers to loot him. I did simple things, but it was so different.”

“There are a lot of people in the streets now. We feel perfumes, people wear perfumes now, wearing very beautiful clothes,” she adds. “We hear the joy and the sounds of children.”

Khartoum, a formerly charming and vibrant city at the confluence of the banks of the white and blue niles, is now a shadow of its old self, after years of bombing by reducing a large part of the rubble. After the army took over the city, he also found that the National Museum, which housed invaluable antiquities of the Nubian kingdom, had been looted by the RSF on a large scale.

While Khartoum’s report is a symbolic and strategic victory for the army, the wider war is far from over. Elsewhere in the country rich in gold, the RSF remains in control, including in the Darfur region west of the country where it was accused by the United States of committing a genocide.

“We must ask ourselves if the RSF while they are retiring to the west will connect with the forces already there and if they will try to make Darfur a fief,” an American scholar who looked for Sudan told NPR.

At the same time, the Sudanese armed forces, which were also accused of war crimes, are “anything but good,” he said. He added that even if the successes in Khartoum were important, “it is the center and the Sudan has always been defined by the central-peripheral conflicts”.

There have already been accusations of atrocities of the Sudanese army in Khartoum. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, published a statement on Thursday, condemning “the credible reports of numerous summary execution incidents of civilians in several areas of Khartoum, on apparent suspicions they collaborated with the rapid support forces”. He called for a complete investigation.

“We are at a new stage in the war,” Ahmed Soliman, a researcher in Africa, told the British reflection group Chatham House. Soliman said that the RSF will now have to “regroup and consolidate, then we will see what the new phase of the conflict looks like and if the army itself sees it as a moment to try to defeat the RSF in its Bastion in Darfur”.

“Or if he returns to more proven and tested routes or not, which is to promote the insurrection and to use allied militia forces … to fight against conflicts in the peripherals of Darfur,” he continued.

The RSF also said that it intended to form a parallel government, which the African Union warned could risk distributing the country.

Back in the capital Khartoum, Tariq takes advantage of this moment of joy. “The place looks festive. It is completely destroyed, but people are festive.” But she, like others, knows that there is a lot to rebuild.

But what resonates the most for her is all the friends she will never see now that war in Khartoum – but not the country – is fundamentally finished.

“We have lost many volunteers in our emergency intervention rooms and we have lost so many people, family members, relatives, friends, neighbors. I cannot forget the faces of the people I knew,” she said.