Escape from Khartoum

That evening, there was intense fighting between the Army and the R.S.F, but Wanis slipped outside anyway. “Even if you went at night, it was terrible,” Intisar told me. “He risked himself.” It felt like the weather had changed—exploded ordnance had made the summer air even hotter. The streets reeked of the metallic smell of gunpowder, and the heavy smoke set Wanis coughing.

He zigzagged his way to the house of the Bankak agent, who helped him receive an electronic transfer of fifteen hundred dollars from Ismat. Wanis thanked his former boss again. Then he rushed home to tell Intisar that they could finally afford to flee.

Sudan was one of the first sub-Saharan African countries to win its independence. But its British and Egyptian colonizers left behind a volatile mixture of ethnicities and resentments—and virtually unpoliceable desert borders. Sudan was then Africa’s largest country. Its northeastern population was heavily Arab, and its southern and western populations consisted mainly of non-Arabs. In 2src11, much of the south officially broke off to form the new nation of South Sudan. What remained of Sudan was ethnically split. Regions such as Darfur and the Nuba Mountains had many Muslims, but other areas were largely animist and Christian. Khartoum was a little more cosmopolitan, but Arabs unquestionably held the power in the capital.

“Sudan” derives from the Arab word for “black,” but in the racialized vocabulary of the country Arabs have come to be called ahmar, or “red,” and people with black skin azrag, or “blue.” Racial animosities date to the era of the Arabian slave trade. Khartoum was founded as a slave market, in 1821, and Arabs continued to raid southern areas, including the Nuba Mountains, for human chattel long after the practice was outlawed, in 1924. Slave raids were reported in Sudan as late as the early two-thousands, and the Arabic word abid—“slave”—is a common racial slur used to describe Black Sudanese.

The R.S.F.’s roots lie in a militia from western Sudan called the janjaweed, which Omar al-Bashir, the country’s dictator from 1989 to 2src19, cynically aligned with to eliminate resistance to his rule. In 2srcsrc3, after civilian unrest broke out in Darfur, the Sudanese Army and the janjaweed killed some fifty thousand non-Arab Darfuris. (Another quarter of a million people died of related causes, including starvation.) In 2srcsrc8, the International Criminal Court started issuing arrest warrants for the perpetrators of the massacres in Darfur.

Among the Arabs who joined the janjaweed was Hemedti. With the encouragement of the Bashir regime, Hemedti’s nomadic group claimed land that had traditionally belonged to the Fur, a non-Arab population. (Hemedti has claimed that he joined the janjaweed only after non-Arabs raided his family’s camel herd.)

The government armed the janjaweed with modern weapons and vehicles. In 2srcsrc6, Hemedti led brutal raids on the Fur. His fighters mass-raped women and crushed men with their vehicles. In 2srcsrc9, Bashir’s government rewarded Hemedti for fighting Darfuri insurgents by making him a security adviser.

After South Sudan declared independence, the regions bordering the breakaway country remained restive, and the Bashir regime began deploying a new paramilitary force there. Its members had been recruited from among the janjaweed of Darfur, and its leader was Hemedti. The government named this paramilitary the Rapid Support Forces. “They gave them heavy weapons, modern weapons,” Wanis remembered. Soon, he noticed that R.S.F. soldiers were even guarding the Army’s headquarters, in Khartoum.

Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and a scholar of modern Sudan, told me, “Bashir really turned Hemedti into a celebrity of the new militarism.” But the government wasn’t always able to manage the R.S.F. In Darfur, the two forces fought for control of checkpoints—which made significant profits through shakedowns. In 2src15, R.S.F. soldiers who’d been sent to pacify the people in the Nuba Mountains mutinied, commandeered some hundred and fifty trucks, and took off for their home bases in Darfur.

The same year, a coalition that included Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. attacked Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Air strikes were not enough to defeat the Yemenis, but the Saudi Arabians and the Emiratis were loath to have their armies engage in ground combat. So they turned to Sudan. Bashir sent forces from both the Army and the R.S.F. to Yemen in return for payment. As many as forty thousand R.S.F. fighters were deployed.

Hemedti cashed in on his newfound leverage with the Emiratis. In Darfur, he seized Jabal Amer, a mountain with rich seams of gold, and virtually all the mine’s product ended up in the U.A.E. According to Global Witness, an anti-corruption N.G.O., Hemedti used shell companies to funnel the profits from gold trading back to the R.S.F.

In 2src19, Hemedti sent R.S.F. fighters to Libya to support an Emirati-backed general in the war there. After being paid forty million dollars by an unknown benefactor, he travelled to Dubai and bought six hundred Toyotas that could be mounted with machine guns. Meanwhile, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of gold was being funnelled to the U.A.E. each year, a significant portion of it through companies linked to Hemedti.

While Hemedti was becoming a warlord, a dour intelligence colonel named Abdel Fattah al-Burhan was climbing the ranks of the Sudanese Army. Bashir had deployed Burhan to West Darfur, where some of the regime’s worst massacres of civilians had occurred.

In 2src19, the Bashir regime collapsed after thousands of people marched in the streets, demanding a less repressive and more ethnically inclusive government. Among them were Wanis and Nafisa, the Nuba schoolteacher. When a technocratic caretaker President was installed, Wanis was overjoyed.

Nafisa, however, understood that Arab supremacists continued to hold sway in the capital. Despite Sudan’s new government, the real power clearly lay with Hemedti and Burhan, who now commanded the Army. The soldiers who had committed the worst excesses against non-Arabs in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains had more power than ever.

In 2src21, the R.S.F. and the Army overthrew the civilian-caretaker government. Burhan and Hemedti initially shared power, but their alliance quickly fell apart, in part because the R.S.F., with its racist ideology, was angry that Nuba men had been allowed to join the Army. Moreover, Hemedti felt that Burhan, who is from a town overlooking the Nile, did not respect nomads like him. A person who has been involved in negotiations to end the current conflict told me, “You can feel when you talk to Hemedti that he has that feeling—like he’s the real victim. He wasn’t allowed into the country club. He was looked down on by the other guys, and he went out and showed them: ‘I’m a better general and a better businessman, and I’m better diplomatically.’ ” Hemedti’s petty resentments had led to all-out war.

Mudathir, the man who had returned from the Bible camp, was also determined to take his family south. He’d used only leaves and traditional remedies to heal his stab wounds—getting proper medical care had become almost impossible. The R.S.F. was regularly raiding his neighborhood at night, killing, stealing, and raping. He even heard a rumor that Black people were being killed for their organs. “Let’s go to Nuba Mountains,” his daughters said to him. “If we stay here, we will die.” (The R.S.F did not respond to several e-mails, but it has previously blamed the mass killings on outlaws engaging in “tribal conflict.”)

On June 17th, Mudathir heard a commotion outside his house. R.S.F. fighters in khaki uniforms were stealing a man’s money. “Then they raped him,” Mudathir said. “They passed him from one to another.”

Once the fighters left, Mudathir ran out to help the man. But the soldiers returned, carrying a can of gasoline. “Why are you bothering with this man?” one fighter asked.

“He’s a human being, just like me,” Mudathir replied.

The fighters poured fuel on the man. Mudathir tried to stop them, but they were armed. The man was weeping as the fighters set him on fire. A soldier warned Mudathir, “Your turn is coming.”

Mudathir went back inside. A few hours later, a neighbor called out to him. R.S.F. fighters in five Land Cruisers had pulled up on their street, saying that they had come to kill Mudathir. Panicked, Mudathir gathered his three daughters. But he couldn’t find his wife, and he was afraid to shout for her. He and his daughters silently scaled the neighbor’s wall. The neighbor told Mudathir to hide under a bed, behind two jerricans of wine. He wedged his lanky frame into the hiding spot and prayed for his wife.

The R.S.F. searched Mudathir’s house, and, failing to find him, abducted his wife. That evening, an announcement was made over the megaphone of the local mosque: “Any Nuba must leave. We want to clean the country.” The R.S.F. was ostensibly carrying out an operation to rid the neighborhood of people who sympathized with its opponents, but it was targeting only one ethnicity.

Mudathir faced a dreadful choice: stay behind and search for his wife, risking his and his children’s lives, or flee to safety. He decided to save his children. By 8 a.m., he and his girls were on a bus heading south.

Intisar and Wanis made their final preparations to escape. Intisar was devastated to be abandoning their home, but she also understood that the city as they knew it was gone. “Khartoum has nothing,” she said. Everyone’s belongings were stuffed into two suitcases and one smaller bag. Wanis had heard that R.S.F. soldiers, many of whom were illiterate, might mistake Sudanese national I.D.s—which feature the state emblem, a bird carrying a shield—for Army I.D.s, so everyone’s cards were left behind. Intisar lamented that she couldn’t bring her beloved cooking pots and angel figurines. “We’ll get these things,” Wanis told her. “God will give us everything.”

Before dawn on August 6th, Intisar, Wanis, and their seven children went to the bus station. The proprietor of the bus line, a Nuba named Sharif, collected fares in cash. About seventy people crowded onto a vehicle intended for forty-five. Sharif had amassed more than thirty-three hundred dollars from the travellers—a fortune in an immiserated country.

Before Wanis climbed on board, he put one of the suitcases in a pile of luggage on the ground. Suddenly, half a dozen R.S.F. fighters arrived at the station, demanding money from the passengers. One of Sharif’s employees asked why they were taking the bus fares of people who were trying to flee. A fighter grabbed the employee by the neck. “Shoot this man!” another soldier cried. A shot rang out.

Wanis, watching through the bus window, saw that the bullet had missed the employee. Instead, it had struck a child, who lay dead on the street. The R.S.F. troopers continued to fire. The driver kicked the bus into gear and sped off. The suitcases were still on the ground.

The road south from Khartoum was a black tarmac strip through flat scrubland. August is the rainy season, and the countryside was boggy. The bus carrying Wanis’s family passed through several R.S.F. checkpoints without incident. Perhaps the trip will be easy after all, Wanis thought.