Nearly a year after the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) retook the capital from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), bringing an end to direct clashes within the city’s limits, Khartoum remains eerily suspended between war and recovery.
Vast stretches of its streets and apartment blocks lie deserted. The city center stands mute and desolate, save for scattered pockets on the periphery. Its residents ask, with a mixture of fatigue and defiance: How are we to live?
Today’s Khartoum offers neither viable sources of income nor stable employment. Living costs have soared amid the collapse of alternatives, the erosion of public services, and the disintegration of everyday infrastructure.
The normalization of life in Khartoum faces formidable obstacles: the uncontrolled proliferation of weapons and the spectre of renewed violence; deepening economic hardship and shrinking labour markets; rising unemployment across broad social sectors; rampant inflation; and the near-collapse of health and educational institutions.
Atar team observed that most returnees have gravitated toward the city’s fringes, north of Bahri, the far south of Khartoum, and northern Omdurman.
Within Khartoum proper, residents cluster in older neighbourhoods such as ar-Rimeila, al-Shajara al-Hamadab, and Al-Jereif West, while districts like Burri, Arkawit, al-Manshiya, al-Sahafat, and al-Ma’moura are nearly abandoned.
A hesitant return
I decided the children will remain in Egypt to secure their education and future. That decision is final.
Hassan al Mahi
“When do we return?” asks Suleiman al-Waseela, formerly a resident of al-Ushra in southern Khartoum.
He has, in fact, returned multiple times from Shandi, where he was displaced to, to repair his vandalized home. Yet permanent resettlement has proved elusive.
He now stays in al-Kalakla to oversee renovations, while his family remains in Shandi. The reasons are many: the children’s schooling, the low rate of neighbours’ return, and the profound paralysis of life in a neighbourhood whose rhythms he once knew intimately.
“This is not the quarter where I was born,” he said. “I knew the scent of its homes, its streets, its people. It has changed completely. The market is perpetually still and shuttered. Houses are empty. No neighbours, no conviviality, no transport, no electricity or services. No life. No work.”
Al-Waseela recounted how he lost his capital and his shop in al-Sha’abi market, itself slowly and painfully re-emerging after being looted and burned to the ground. A swift resumption of business is impossible, he explained, as surrounding districts: al-Sajana, ad-Diem, al-Sahafat, Arkawit, remain largely depopulated. Their residents are scattered between internal displacement, asylum, and migration abroad.
In the war’s early months, Hassan al-Mahi fled with his young family to Cairo, leaving behind everything he had built over a lifetime: a carefully constructed home in al-Kalakla East, a wholesale shop in al-Mahali market, and a white car that served as both reserve savings and conduit to work and kinship ties. All of it vanished in his forced absence. The house was flattened by an airstrike; not a single wall remains standing. Furniture and car were stolen. Merchandise was looted from warehouse and storefront alike.
After two years in Cairo, al-Mahi returned alone, this time to Atbara, hoping to chart a new beginning. Khartoum’s markets and daily life, he told Atar, remain far from viable, even after the government resumed operations from alternative headquarters.
“I follow developments in al-Mahali market closely,” he said. “It is not fit for the return of traders or purchasing power. There is no buying or selling. Nothing. Even the dry port is as silent as a grave.”
He visited his ruined home only once.
“I came back in a terrible psychological state,” he recalled. “I decided the children will remain in Egypt to secure their education and future. That decision is final.”
Back to work, but….
I must take six buses a day, costing around 9,000 pounds. It does not align with my income or the costs of supporting my displaced family.
Muawiya, novelist and university lecturer
Muawiya, a novelist and university lecturer, cut short his arduous displacement to the Northern State as soon as Khartoum was retaken. He returned to his home in al-Azhari, south of the capital, leaving his family behind to assess the damage and resume teaching at a private university that recently reopened in Omdurman.
When asked how he found the city, he recounted arriving at his house on foot, “My eyes filled with tears as I entered. Thieves and bandits had looted almost everything. They left three metal bedframes and a single mattress on the floor. The stove remained, and a wardrobe with three shirts and a somewhat worn pair of trousers. Some kitchen utensils survived. The library was spared from theft, but the books were strewn across the floor.”
In the days immediately following the RSF withdrawal, Khartoum appeared even more destitute than it does now.
“Finding ice in the markets was nearly impossible,” he said. “I drank from clay water jars. Potable water was available only from vendors roaming the streets with donkey carts.”
The situation has since improved with the reactivation of water stations in al-Mogran and Soba, though electricity remains cut off across most of the capital. Restoration efforts continue, slowly.
Muawiya now resides alone in his home while teaching in Omdurman, where life appears markedly more normal than in Khartoum. Yet his daily commute from al-Azhari to Omdurman is punishing.
“I must take six buses a day, costing around 9,000 pounds. It does not align with my income or daily personal expenses, nor with the monthly costs of supporting my displaced family. Living in Khartoum is expensive; prices keep rising. I must also replace my household furniture—appropriate to my social standing, acquired through years of labour abroad. In these conditions, I cannot hope to restore it.”
Unemployment and pitch darkness
Most residents in al-Azhari, Muawiya said, are unemployed, preoccupied solely with securing food since most communal kitchens have closed. They remain confined to their neighbourhoods; transport to al-Arabi Market costs 2,000 pounds, and the same again from the central market to al-Kalakla. Poverty and isolation prevail.
At sunset, the city falls prey to absolute darkness. Few venture out after nightfall. The silence is broken only by intermittent barking dogs and the passing hum of vehicles, usually army or police patrols. Some households rely on solar panels for light.
Muawiya noted a perceptible increase in returnees in recent weeks. But their return is fraught. Malaria and typhoid are widespread. Cooking gas, petrol, and other fuel products remain scarce.
The decision to return to the capital, he argued, is deeply personal. Those without homes or stable livelihoods in displacement zones are more inclined toward voluntary return. Yet a formidable obstacle remains: education. Schooling in Khartoum State is still faltering, compounded by the fragility, or absence, of other essential services.
As Muawiya concluded, “People return to Khartoum only to find themselves estranged from it. And it from them.”
