Marhaba
This is the 40th issue of Atar English magazine, from Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It will be coming to you on Monday, every two weeks.
Atar celebrated its second anniversary on 12 October and released its 100th issue (Arabic version) on 6 November.
Reaching this milestone is certainly a reason to celebrate, but more importantly, it is a moment to reflect on our experience, assess what has passed, and think carefully about what comes next.
Because of this context, Atar inevitably became a product of a harsh moment. The war shaped our reporting, our editorial decisions, and the small practical details of our daily work.
Yet that very hardship made the experience more honest and more connected to lived reality. Every story, report, or testimony published in Atar has been an extension of people’s daily lives, and each new issue an attempt to capture Sudan’s pulse during a period of collapse — and the resilience of its people in the face of widespread destruction.
Since its first issue, the magazine has tried to follow professional and ethical journalism standards, using facts and data as our entry point for understanding events. Today, those same standards help us make sense of our own journey.
Sudan Facts Center for Journalism — the publisher of Atar — was founded with a strategic aim: to build a media institution capable of training and producing a new generation of journalists equipped with the technical and cultural knowledge needed for independent and professional work.
Four cohorts have graduated from the Center’s Fellowship programme “Zamala“, launched in 2020. Twenty-five journalists have benefited from the programme, many of whom now form the core of Atar’s network and editorial team.
We began with no more than ten journalists scattered by the war across Sudan’s cities and villages. Today, Atar’s reporting network includes more than 60 correspondents inside and outside the country. The magazine publishes its Arabic edition weekly and its English edition biweekly from Nairobi, where the Center relocated after the outbreak of war in April 2023. The Center was originally founded in Khartoum in 2018 and completed its registration in Sudan in 2020.
Throughout our war coverage, we pursued accuracy to the best of our ability and focused on offering essential knowledge about post-war Sudan. After more than two years of organised work, our team gained deeper insight into Sudan’s social, economic, and political dynamics — insight that now carries its own responsibility: what do we do with this information, and what does it reveal to us?
Below is an overview of our journey: the scale of our coverage, the subjects we addressed, and the areas we reported from. More importantly, we ask: what do these numbers say about Atar and about our story with Sudan during wartime?
What did we cover?
Number of articles published in each issue during the past year
Classifying a year’s worth of material is not easy, given the overlap among issues and themes. The data reflects this overlap, especially since Atar covered a wide range of topics. The first issue was published on 12 October 2023. By October 2024 — at the end of our first year — 49 issues had appeared. Across the 100 issues, we published 737 pieces, including 382 articles in the 51 issues released during the second year. The following statistics are based on those 382 pieces.
Number of articles for each of Atar’s themes
A significant portion of our coverage focused on livelihoods and politics: 111 livelihood-related pieces and 98 political ones. We published 37 cultural articles, including book reviews; 33 pieces on displacement and the diaspora; 27 stories highlighting Sudanese resilience during the war; 13 pieces on environmental issues; and 10 articles about grassroots relief efforts. Another 53 stories combined multiple themes.
Number of articles by the topics falling under themes
The magazine produced 38 reports on wartime events and published 36 political analyses. Agriculture was the most covered livelihood issue, followed by health, the broader economy, education, markets, child-related issues, energy and electricity, and water.
Books formed the core of our cultural coverage: 20 pieces reviewed books or covered book fairs. We also published seven stories on cultural figures, six on exhibitions and artistic events, and six on visual work.
Where did we report from — and how did that change?
Number of articles that covered events in each state of Sudan
Khartoum was the most covered state in the past year, with 72 pieces addressing events there. It was followed by North Darfur (43), Al-Jazirah (38), North Kordofan (36), River Nile (32), White Nile (22), South Darfur (20), and South Kordofan (19). These numbers include both reports and news items.
All of these states experienced armed conflict last year. Khartoum received especially intense coverage because of the government’s focus on reconstruction, which generated numerous economic and social issues. Coverage was also more extensive in areas under army control than in areas held by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), mainly because access and reporting were easier in the former.
The time-average of the number of articles covering each of the seven most frequently featured states in Atar
Atar’s coverage map shifted as the frontline changed. In Khartoum, coverage increased sharply in January 2025, when the army regained control of Khartoum North, and again in May 2025 when it secured the entire state. Coverage remained high afterward due to reconstruction challenges — such as the removal of informal settlements, the expulsion of foreign nationals, and the severe health and environmental crises in the summer of 2025 linked to the deterioration of water and electricity services.
Coverage of North Darfur expanded dramatically in the months before El-Fashir fell to the RSF, during which we documented the siege and the suffering of its population. In Al-Jazirah, we reported on the war at its peak and on the agricultural sector as it struggled to survive. A similar pattern emerged in North Kordofan, where our coverage closely tracked the intensity of military operations.
Distribution of article topics in each state of Sudan
Topics varied based on location. Wartime reporting dominated our coverage of the Darfur and Kordofan states — accounting for 100% of our material from East and Central Darfur, and more than 70% from South and North Darfur. Other states had lower proportions of war-related coverage, including Khartoum and Al-Jazirah. Agricultural issues received substantial attention in Al-Jazirah, Sennar, Gedaref, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile, while White Nile saw the least agricultural coverage.
Energy issues — especially electricity — featured heavily in reporting from Red Sea, Sennar, Kassala, River Nile, and Northern State, all of which suffered from RSF drone strikes. Education coverage concentrated on states where public schooling continued and Sudanese exam papers were delivered. Health coverage increased in states affected by outbreaks of disease.
Our coverage sought not only to reflect events but also to understand the deeper structure of the crisis: how economies function when the state collapses, how communities reorganise, and how solidarity becomes a form of governance.
What did we learn from the experience?
Across 100 issues, Atar was not merely a witness to the war but also a space for inquiry — a testing ground for what journalism can mean in a moment of national breakdown. From this experience, four principles emerged as essential for rebuilding Sudan:
- Decentralization, enabling people to manage their lives locally rather than from distant centres of power;
- Transparency, ensuring public resources are a shared trust rather than fuel for conflict;
- Social solidarity, a foundation for recovery and community cohesion;
- Knowledge and accountability, conditions for a state built on truth instead of denial.
The war showed that recovery begins with people, not institutions, and that rebuilding requires local trust networks that return a human dimension to politics. Through hundreds of stories and testimonies, Atar became a space documenting this transition — from displacement to production, from economic struggle to cultural life, and from war to national cohesion.
In this sense, the magazine has become more than a journalistic project. It is now a living national archive of Sudanese experiences during the war — and a reminder that knowledge itself can be a form of resistance, and a starting point for recovery.
What do we want in the future?
What Atar has achieved in 100 issues is not an endpoint. It is a starting point for a new vision of journalism as essential collective national work — using knowledge as a tool to rebuild the country from the ground up. The experience showed that recovery cannot be imported, nor directed from centres of power. It must grow from the stories of people in markets, and from the persistence of artisans, farmers, and teachers who stayed in their communities.
We believe journalism should help overcome tragedy rather than simply report it — and that rebuilding Sudan will only be possible through justice, accountability, and the determination to live, all of which these pages have documented over two years.
As we close our 100th issue, we are not merely marking what has passed. We are outlining the road ahead: a path that begins with knowledge and leads back to people.
