Marhaba,

This is the 54th issue of Atar English, published by the Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It reaches you every two weeks with reporting from across Sudan.

This issue opens in Al-Obeid, where drones have become an increasingly familiar sight in the skies above. Fuel stations burn, prices rise, and residents watch as military pressure tightens around the city. Yet life goes on. Markets open, traders go about their business, hospitals admit new patients, and buses depart carrying people who have decided they can no longer afford to wait and see what comes next.

Wars can be understood through maps, frontlines, and military statements. But for those who live through them, wars are something else entirely. They are measured in the price of water, the availability of fuel, the condition of a road, the ability to reach a farm, attend a school, or remain in one’s home.

The stories in this issue are, in one way or another, stories about these realities, where people’s lives are increasingly shaped by two forces: the drone overhead and the dollar in the marketplace.

In Darfur, farmers are preparing for another planting season amid growing insecurity, displacement, and economic decline. The land remains fertile, but cultivation now depends on more than rainfall or seed. It depends on whether farmers can reach their fields and return safely.

Water follows a similar path. Across Darfur, people spend long hours searching for a resource that once seemed far more secure. Wells have broken down, fuel has become scarce, infrastructure has deteriorated, and displacement has placed additional pressure on already limited supplies.

Our investigation into Sudan’s fuel crisis examines another layer of this reality. Fuel is not simply a commodity. It has become one of the channels through which the country’s wider political and economic crisis moves through society. The struggle over foreign currency, imports, and regulation ultimately finds its way into transportation costs, agricultural production, and access to water itself.

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between uncertainty and persistence clearer than in the examinations organized in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces. Many students do not know whether their certificates will ever be recognized. Yet they sat for the examinations anyway. There is a political meaning in that choice. In a landscape of fragmented institutions and uncertain futures, people continue searching for ways to claim a future for themselves.

That search extends beyond Sudan’s borders. In Libya, Sudanese refugees who fled war now find themselves confronting hostility, arrests, and the threat of deportation.

Taken together, these stories remind us that war brings another struggle, one fought to create and preserve the conditions that make life possible. Water, food, education, mobility, work, and safety are not secondary humanitarian concerns that emerge after the fighting ends. They are part of the conflict itself.

From Al-Obeid to Darfur and beyond Sudan’s borders, the people in these stories are confronting that reality every day.

It is the story of people trying to preserve a sense of continuity in a nation where the promise of unity has long competed with the realities of fragmentation.

As always, thank you for reading.

The Atar English Team