Escape from war to its repercussions

Youssef Hamad

Badr al-Din said in an exhausted voice, Ah... This is an experience I will never repeat, and I will not recommend it to anyone! However, neither Badr al-Din nor any other exhausted and disgruntled person has the luxury to avoid this harsh and painful experience. Perhaps they would repeat it a thousand times if it meant seeking survival or preserving their belongings, no matter how meager and trivial they may be, amidst the open theft and looting.

Badr al-Din escaped, just as I did, and so did thousands of others. We fled from a conflict that is considered the bloodiest and most destructive to the city since the Battle of Kerreri in 1898 when the English occupation forces violated the newly emerging Mahdist state, declaring the end of the Mahdist state and the end of the project of the two friends, Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi and Abdullahi al-Taaishi.

Sudan began as a modern state about 200 years ago, but no one was able to dismantle this country and obstruct its development opportunities as the current army commander, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former ally (current enemy), the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, did.

On October 25, 2021, the two allies carried out a coup against a promising transitional civilian government, killing hundreds of peaceful young revolutionaries who resisted the coup with their peaceful processions. And less than two years after the coup, the two allies engaged in a war against each other for power motives, resulting in a toll of 3,000 deaths, 3 million displaced and refugees. 70 percent of the hospitals are out of service, and 3 million people are threatened with starvation.

The World Food Program says that 40 percent of Sudanese people will suffer from hunger due to this war, the highest rate the country has ever recorded. Perhaps it is the highest rate since the Six-Year Famine when people were said to have resorted to eating animal hides, as claimed by the British intelligence officer, Selim Pasha, author of the book The Sword and the Fire.

We fled from Khartoum, leaving behind the war raging between the two enemy allies, the army, and the Rapid Support Forces. We left thousands of uncounted families in the neighborhoods. We left those families waiting, hoping for the fighting to stop, for the severed electricity to return, for the depleted water to flow, and for the many aids announced to arrive in numbers. But nothing of this will come before death accompanied by human vices rather than virtues.

We fled, aiming to reach Shendi, north of Khartoum, to be able to move in the shape of a question mark (?) and then let the end of this sign take us back to the villages and towns located south of the capital. It was difficult for us to cross the White Nile to Khartoum and head directly south, to the states of Gezira, White Nile, and Sinnar.

So far, these provincial areas are relatively safe and generous in their ability to provide services to families fleeing the hell of war. If there are no relatives and acquaintances, there are prepared shelter centers in schools, clubs, and abandoned old houses.

The absurd and wretched war violated what is familiar to us, and it deserved its name and description, as it turned everything upside down. It was like running north to reach the south, or expecting democracy from a mercenary militia owned by a single man, who lacks honesty and ethics.

Just one day after Badr al-Dins terrifying advice, I found myself in the midst of the warned experience. Badr al-Din had barely made it from Shendi to the city of Al-Hisahisa, south of Khartoum on the western bank of the Blue Nile River. My journey required me to traverse the rough desert road to reach a city further away: Al-Managil, an extension of the Gezira Project.

My means of travel was a public bus for passengers, manufactured around the 1990s. The bus stood alongside others at a newly established transport station, a result of the war, connecting Shendi to the Gezira State.

Before this desolate desert road, my previous trip from Omdurman to Shendi in the River Nile State was neither easy nor smooth. A so-called truce was declared between the warring parties, but it was fragile and illusory, similar to its predecessors, as it did not prevent the exchange of fire or facilitate safe passage for those who wanted to leave.

Amid this fragility, I hurriedly boarded the bus, bound for Shendi, the city closest to Omdurman from the north. I paid three times the usual fare, but these multiples meant nothing to a man seeking survival.

The throats were dry, filled with the hot desert air, and none of the passengers on the crowded bus felt inclined to comment on anything. Only the eyes moved wearily within their sockets, listless, expressionless, tearful, suffering, and broken.

Gunshots and explosions were sometimes distant and sometimes near, all crystal clear. It was a clarity inspired by experience, not the abstractions of the mind and imagination. Here was a war raging in the midst of neighborhoods, fueled by rape and deadly weapons. Here, people died without apparent reason, and one could become one of the dead, food for stray dogs at any moment!

We were expected to reach Shendi within two hours, under the worst assumptions. However, it took us eight hours to arrive due to the buss slowness and the presence of multiple military checkpoints extending far beyond Omdurman. The presence of checkpoints was understandable as our route passed through a large military area!

The road from Omdurman to Shendi is dotted with impoverished villages that lie a little distance away from the course of the Blue Nile on the western bank. The houses in these villages are old and faded, yet they hold a certain beauty simply because they are intimate and safe, untouched by direct warfare.

Everything in the villages located west of the Nile maintains its ancient ways and resists modernization staunchly, responding to changes slowly, except for the mosques. The mosques always stand out as something new and remarkable. A seventy-year-old man, who hosted our bus for a few minutes while we quenched our thirst, said that the war prevented them from marketing vegetables and milk in Omdurman and Khartoum. This reason alone is enough to curse the war and stop it, let alone the killing, death, and burning of factories.

However, my journeys were lighter in burden compared to others who chose to escape from Khartoum to towns and villages in the Darfur and Kordofan regions.

We arrived safely in Shendi and rested before starting our journey again on a dirt road outside the city. We had to head east with a significant turn to avoid the extended military operations of Khartoum and reach the city of Wad Madani in the Gezira State.

At the beginning, we followed alongside electric poles that stretched defiantly across the desert, adjusting our path according to the bumps on the unpaved road. Among the locals there, it was rumored that these electric poles were constructed under the instructions of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nafi Ali Nafi, during his reign. The poles were built to electrify a village in this adjacent area to Abu Duleig, in the middle of the Batana plain.

I asked the bus driver how much time it would take to reach our destination. He said, I dont know that in terms of hours, but when you look at these faces covered with sticky dust, preventing you from discerning their owners, thats when well know weve arrived.

Here, villages become scarce as you move away from the course of the Nile and delve into the Sudanian belt desert. There is no shelter from the sun... No shelter but the hot shade inside the bus... Nothing to captivate the eye... Miserable small trees, neither alive nor dead... The car travels for hours without encountering a human or an animal.

In modern times, this road would only be remembered in the epics of the Batana poets or in the verses of the poet Ibrahim Al-Abadi, who narrated the story of the deaths of Taha Al-Batahani and Wad Deqin Al-Shakri around the beauty Ria, the daughter of Ab Kabus.

Taha Al-Batahani left the outskirts of Batana to Shendi and its neighbor, the city of Al-Matammah. He was holding the hand of his cousin Ria, who was cherished by the leader Wad Deqin, surpassing the traditions of love and lawful marriage. On the way, Wad Deqin caught up with Taha, and a swordfight ensued, ending with the death of the passionate lover, Wad Deqin.

And perhaps along some parts of this desolate road, the proud tribal leader Mak Nimer also marched during his journey to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) after killing Gazee Ismael Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the first colonial ruler of Sudan.

If the poets of Botana and their storytellers traverse these plains at their leisure, as the days and hours dictate, the bus needed 13 continuous hours in the desert region to reach its final destination safely, avoiding the reaches of the war.

After all this, can we, in a pessimistic manner, associate this road with death, fighting, and crises? Perhaps not yet.