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Notes from a Wartime Memory:
I wasn’t sure what woke me that morning. Then I heard the explosions. I got up and walked out. A large cloud of black smoke against Khartoum’s bright blue skies slowly rose before my eyes.
I later learned that some of the smoke I had watched rise that morning was from the RSF’s attack on the home of Burhan, the army’s commander. Our home was close to the Military Headquarters.
As I stared that moment at the clouds of smoke spreading over the military headquarters, my mind suddenly went back to all the discussions, analysis and speculation that had consumed my colleagues, friends and so many Sudanese in the weeks before - about the political situation, the security situation - what might be coming.
The signs of the tension between the two sides have been visible to most of us in the streets of Khartoum as we went about our daily lives: the military presence, the movement of forces from both sides around strategic areas in the capital - all signaled to most of us that something was building up between the two camps.
We had seen it. We had talked about it.
I thought of the many interviews I had conducted weeks earlier with senior political actors for my article on the ‘Framework Agreement’ - and of the two questions I had asked every interlocutor: Was the tension between the two men real? Could it become armed confrontation? Some politicians told me the two men had stopped talking altogether - that when they were in the same room, they would not even meet each other’s eyes.
I was called in the first hours of the fighting by BBC Radio to speak about what was happening. I gave the interview while pacing up and down our courtyard. Some of the explosions were so loud they shocked me into swearing in the middle of it into the microphone. Concerned, the interviewer told me she could hear the sounds of explosions clearly and urged me to go somewhere safe and ended the interview. Later, they removed my swear word before airing it.
Over the coming days, the two former allies, Burhan and Hemedti spoke on Arab television channels in terse, heated exchanges- each furiously insisting the other had made the first move and that their own actions were just a reaction and nothing more. Sudanese across the country listened to them. They heard Burhan say angrily, ‘They attacked my own home.’ They heard Hemedti snap at a presenter: ‘They attacked us. What did you expect us to do?’
Many Sudanese were plunged into a world they had historically been shielded from. Dominated by the sounds of projectiles fired from cannons and tanks, anti-aircraft artillery, strikes of MiGs and Sukhoi fighter jets, the doshka (DShK) and the klashinkovs of the two sides fighting in the streets around us.
In our home, we got to learnt the timespan between the army’s military jets flying over their houses and the RSF’s anti-aircraft firing against it.
We slowly realised that our neighbourhood had become a war zone. Around us, buildings the RSF had occupied and were using as bases were being shelled and bombed by the army. In the streets outside, fighters exchanged Kalashnikov fire.
Power and water were cut in many neighbourhoods. Once the sun went down, we were left with a heavy, dreary darkness filled with sounds of shelling.
It was the last days of Ramadan. Food started running out. Old people broke their fast with warm water.
The RSF entered the neighbourhood on motorbikes, weapons in hand. They shot the guard of a neighbouring house. When I walked the street, I passed his body. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt. And was lying on his back. One of his arms was thrown across his face.
Shrapnel from a shell struck our home, damaging part of the roof. Later, the house was hit again by multiple projectiles destroying large sections of it.
In the months that followed - what Sudanese in other states went through -would make all this seem like nothing.
To be continued perhaps- elsewhere
#Sudan
#KeepEyesonSudan
Nada.@NadaWanni
We managed to leave our home & our street with the dead body & go to another neighborhood which is ‘safer’ for now. Ours was occupied. This is the accurate word I think. Some neighborhoods are occupied & besieged by RSF. Thank you so much for your words & support. They helped
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