At a makeshift clinic in Sudan’s battle-torn capital, a determined young woman rushed to save fighters and civilians alike.
She had no formal medical training. But as beat-up cars skidded to a halt outside the clinic’s door, disgorging the wounded, she did her best to treat them — stanching gunshot wounds, changing dressings, improvising blood tests with her cellphone.
Drones buzzed overhead. Snipers perched on rooftops. Explosives struck the clinic, and more than once, the woman, Amal Abdelazeem, thought she was going to die.
The war has remade her. “I’m a different person now,” she said, days after escaping the city.
Hers was the generation that was supposed to save Sudan. They thronged the streets and toppled a dictator in 2019, in a moment of audacious hope that promised a sparkling future to wash away the decades of stale autocracy. Ms. Abdelazeem, then in college, attended one protest. “We needed a new Sudan,” she said.
But the old Sudan returned quickly, and with a vengeance. The civil war that erupted last year between rival military factions not only split a giant African nation in two — it also derailed an entire generation, forcing young Sudanese to make painful choices as they navigated a war that few wanted.
Democracy activists picked up guns to fight alongside the soldiers they once despised. Artists set up food kitchens. Lawyers collected rape testimony. Millions fled Sudan.
But millions more, like Ms. Abdelazeem, who is 26, had to stay. She was trapped in a neighborhood that had fallen to the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the fearsome paramilitary group that is battling Sudan’s military for control of the country. Such areas are the conflict’s blind spots, so dangerous that even local reporters dare not venture there.
She had no money to run, and the war quickly presented a series of excruciating choices. It split her family — one brother was detained by the R.S.F., while another brother joined them. It forced her to choose between food and safety.
And she felt buffeted between the two sides, patching up fighters while being targeted by them, viewed with suspicion at every turn.
One morning at a checkpoint, a young R.S.F. fighter brusquely demanded to know why Ms. Abdelazeem insisted on wearing a niqab, the face veil that showed only her eyes. Was she spying for the other side? He tugged the veil from her face.
Enraged, Ms. Abdelazeem grabbed the fighter’s rifle, turned it around and pointed it straight into his face.
“I wanted to shoot him,” she recalled, blinking through tears. “But I couldn’t.”
Saucepan Helmets
Ms. Abdelazeem knew what it was to struggle.
She had grown up on the western edge of the capital, Khartoum, where the urban sprawl blends into the desert, in a family of working-class strivers who prized education. She graduated with first-class honors in laboratory sciences in 2020.
After college, she also began to wear the niqab, a decision that horrified her mother. Ms. Abdelazeem said she had always been strong-willed. But she gave herself easily to stories, devouring thrillers, philosophy and internet culture that fed her restless curiosity.
She loved frothy American sitcoms like “Friends” — although she didn’t approve of how the characters slept around. She preferred the pop stars and television shows of South Korea, whose culture she saw as more innocent and sweet. She taught herself the rudiments of Korean from YouTube and got her first passport in 2022 in the hope of traveling to the country.
But a year later, war broke out, and those plans were shelved.
At first, she stayed out of it. Fighting was concentrated across the River Nile, in downtown Khartoum, and her neighborhood in Omdurman was relatively quiet.
But then government warplanes bombed an R.S.F. base nearby, scattering fighters across the area. They ransacked homes, stole cars and broke open a prison in search of recruits. Beggars were executed by fighters who accused them of spying for the military. When thunderous gunfire erupted outside her family’s home, she cowered under the kitchen table, gripping a stick against potential rapists. Her mother wore an upturned saucepan on her head to protect against bullets. “Ridiculous, I know,” Ms. Abdelazeem said, chuckling at the memory.
In fact, the joke was on the R.S.F., she said. It turned out that the fighters were firing in the air to celebrate reports they had killed Sudan’s military chief — which turned out to be wrong.
The war closed in on her family. Ms. Abdelazeem’s mother fell sick and died suddenly. They started to run out of money. She sold her laptop and phone, for a pittance, to an R.S.F. fighter. But he was killed before paying the full amount.
As she grew desperate, Ms. Abdelazeem heard about a job at a makeshift private clinic in an abandoned clothes factory near the front line. She took it.
“I figured it was better to die from bullets than from starvation,” she said.
The Clinic
A small team of medics ran the clinic, offering to help wounded fighters for money, and local residents for free. Most fighters arrived with gunshot wounds, Ms. Abdelazeem said, while some had been stabbed in disputes or injured in car crashes as they careened through empty streets.
A majority of the fighters in that area were Libyan, she said — one of numerous foreign contingents in a war that has drawn mercenaries from Africa, Russia, Ukraine and even Colombia. “They drank a lot,” she said.
She learned on the job, treating wounds and dispensing drugs, but also drew on her training to set up a laboratory for blood samples, improvising tests with a technique that used the flash on her cellphone camera. Many fighters had syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections, she discovered.
That clinic’s work turned it into a target for Sudan’s military, she said. When she went onto the roof in an effort to grab the weak cellphone signal, she removed her white lab coat to reduce the risk of being hit by drones firing bombs.
Nearly half of all hospitals in the capital area have been damaged in the war, targeted by both sides, according to a recent report from the Yale School of Public Health.
Sometimes, Ms. Abdelazeem earned as little as $2 a day. But she also found purpose in the work, especially when injured children were saved. A strong camaraderie developed among the besieged medics, driven by the adrenaline that comes from living on the edge.
“To be honest, it could be fun,” she said. After close calls, “it made us appreciate life.”
Brothers
To help feed the family, her 21-year-old brother, Yassin, took odd jobs. But that raised the suspicions of R.S.F. fighters, who beat and detained him three times, he said in an interview. Once, he escaped by ambushing an R.S.F. guard and throttling him. “I didn’t look back,” he said.
But another brother, Mohamed, 25, joined the R.S.F.
Mohamed had always been trouble, Ms. Abdelazeem said, and in the war fell in with a group of R.S.F. fighters who roamed their neighborhood. He was assigned to an internal R.S.F. unit charged with reining in the widespread car theft that made the group unpopular, she said.
Then Mohamed looted his own family’s home, she said, walking out with a fridge and a TV, brushing past his sister as she implored him to stop.
The violence drew dangerously close. The clinic pharmacist died, she recounted, after a bomb hit the bus she was traveling in. A friend who was a nurse said she was nearly raped by an R.S.F. commander. The clinic shut down after being struck by a volley of drone strikes.
One day, Ms. Abdelazeem was visiting another hospital when Libyan mercenaries rushed in carrying a seriously wounded fighter. A doctor did his best to save him. But after some minutes, one fighter, apparently believing his comrade could not survive, pulled out a gun and shot him dead.
“In the heart!” Ms. Abdelazeem said, crying softly and kneading her hands as she spoke. “You can’t kill someone just because there’s no hope,” she added. “Where is God in that?”
It was the final straw. Gathering up her last belongings and five family members, Ms. Abdelazeem boarded a bus for Port Sudan, 500 miles by road to the east. At a checkpoint, Sudanese Army personnel held up the bus while they interrogated her about the medicines in her bag, suspicious she had aided the other side.
Exiled to Casablanca
Perched on the Red Sea, Port Sudan is the Casablanca of Sudan’s war — a place where people from across Sudan blow in, seeking shelter or fortune or travel papers enabling them to flee the country as quickly as possible. The wealthier ones lounge by the sea in the evening, drinking coffee and dangling their feet in the Red Sea. But Ms. Abdelazeem and her family couldn’t afford any of that.
They found lodgings in a sweltering university hostel crammed with 1,500 displaced women and children. That’s where we found Ms. Abdelazeem a week after her family arrived, remonstrating loudly about the poor conditions. Fights regularly erupted between the women, who hailed from across Sudan’s ethnic and social divides, she said. Children played in dirty corridors. Flies buzzed in toilets. Food was scarce.
She had been reunited with an older sister at the hostel — a bittersweet moment because the sister had attempted suicide weeks earlier, following a difficult divorce.
They all had to move again in December, when the authorities shifted the dormitory residents to a tented camp a few miles away. On a video call, Ms. Abdelazeem offered a tour of the desolate encampment, which had a single toilet for 200 families.
She was grateful to be alive, even if her family had joined the sea of 11 million Sudanese displaced by the war.
If she had learned one thing, she said, it’s that were no good guys in war. Both sides committed numerous atrocities. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to hate them, or even to root for one side.
“In the end, they’re all Sudanese,” she said. “I feel sorry for them.”
That included her brother, Mohamed, who days earlier had called, saying he had had enough of fighting in the war and wanted money to get out. She barely had enough to feed herself and her family members. Still, she clung to the idea of saving him.
“He’s stupid, I know,” she said. “He’s irresponsible, I know.”
But, she added, “He’s still my brother.”
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