Marhaba,

This is the 55th issue of Atar English, published by the Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It reaches you every two weeks with reporting from across Sudan.

War does not only destroy cities. It also rearranges time. It delays harvests, interrupts education, uproots families, redraws borders, and quietly transforms what people come to expect from the future.

We begin in North Kordofan, where the Khor Abu Habl Agricultural Project stands as a reminder that food security depends not only on rainfall, but also on institutions. Once among western Sudan’s most important irrigated schemes, the project now faces the consequences of systematic destruction, looted machinery, damaged irrigation networks, and the disappearance of federal support. Yet its administrators and farmers continue preparing for another agricultural season, convinced that cultivating the land remains an act of both economic necessity and social resilience.

The question of rebuilding takes a different form in Abu an-Naja Camp in Al-Gadarif. There, displacement is no longer simply an emergency, but an evolving social condition. Families who fled Khartoum, Sinnar, Darfur, Kordofan, and other parts of Sudan have gradually transformed a collection of temporary shelters into a community held together by mutual assistance. The camp reveals something humanitarian statistics often overlook. After the initial shock of flight, people begin almost immediately to reconstruct the social networks that make life possible. Aid remains essential, but solidarity itself has become one of the camp’s most valuable resources.

The war has also reshaped time. Our feature on Sudan’s university students follows a generation whose lives have been repeatedly interrupted, first by revolution, then by the COVID-19 pandemic, political instability, and finally war. Degrees once expected to take four or five years have stretched into eight or nine. For many students, graduation has become less a milestone than a distant horizon that continually recedes. Their stories are not simply about delayed education, but about postponed adulthood, interrupted careers, and the psychological burden of watching one’s peers move forward while one’s own future remains suspended.

Beyond Sudan’s borders, the consequences of displacement continue to unfold. Our report from Libya examines new administrative restrictions requiring foreign students to hold long-term residence permits before enrolling in school. For thousands of Sudanese refugee families, the decision threatens one of the few forms of stability they had managed to preserve. The story reminds us that displacement does not end upon crossing an international border. Instead, it often evolves into a prolonged negotiation with new legal systems, bureaucracies, and political climates, each capable of reshaping lives as profoundly as the violence people fled.

This issue also follows the war’s rapidly changing geography through our weekly news coverage. From renewed drone attacks and continued siege conditions in Ad-Dalang, to mounting fears that Al-Obeid could become the next major city trapped by war, and growing military tensions in northwestern Darfur, these reports document a conflict that continues to expand even as public attention increasingly shifts elsewhere.

Alongside these developments, our latest Price Bulletin continues to record another dimension of the war, the economy of survival. Prices, exchange rates, fuel costs, medicines, and construction materials reveal patterns that military maps cannot. Together, they illustrate how inflation, disrupted supply chains, and currency instability continue to shape the daily choices of households across Sudan.

Taken together, the reports in this issue are linked by a common thread. They are all, in different ways, stories about institutions under strain, whether agricultural projects, universities, displacement camps, schools, markets, or local administrations. They remind us that war is measured not only by territory gained or lost, but also by the condition of the institutions that sustain everyday life.

Atar Editorial Team