Posted on 12/26/2025 8:40:08 AM PST by MtnClimber
Of all the wars I have covered over the past 50 years, this is one of the fiercest and, to be sure, the most forgotten.
“Do you know,” says Suliman, former attaché at the Sudanese embassy in France, who joined the army as soon as the fighting began, in April 2023, and will accompany me for a large part of my reporting, “that this war—the fourth the country has known since its independence—has already produced 12 million displaced people and 150,000 civilian victims?”
We are in the arrivals hall of Port Sudan International Airport, 20 kilometers south of the city, which is “international” only by virtue of a few uncertain routes connecting it to Istanbul, Doha, Jeddah, and Addis Ababa, and which, otherwise, is totally cut off from the world.
Wandering there, in stifling heat and under the watch of heavily armed police, is a crowd of men in immaculate white jalabiyas, those long cotton tunics that are the traditional dress in the Nile Valley. Gaunt boys in T-shirts riddled with holes like fishing nets who do not look like travelers about to depart. Emaciated cats slipping out from beneath the baggage carousels. One never knows, says a local legend, if they are ghosts, supernatural spirits, or djinn. And veiled women, many veiled women, sometimes from head to toe, who, seated on the few plastic seats—sometimes broken or chipped—wait for who knows what.
That all of this functions, that planes take off and land, that passengers receive boarding passes and pass through security arches that seem to work more or less, that this gateway into Sudan, the one and only, should still be ajar, borders on the miraculous, if I judge by the damage done outside by the latest rain of drones fired from the sea by the army of Mohammed Daglo, or “Hemedti,” the former camel driver-turned-general who has entered into rebellion against Sudan’s President, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Shrapnel scars the cracked walls of the departure, arrival, and baggage-claim halls.
Outside, the control tower looks like a decapitated blast furnace, which the government forces have repaired with hastily mortared cinder blocks, without paint. Some of the fuel tanks outside have exploded. Others were buckled, like enormous beached sperm whales, by the force of the strikes. We wander among the craters, still black from the fire that burned for 10 days.
We try to understand how drones of such power could have struck, with such precision, the provisional capital of Sudan: Chinese CH-95 or FH-95 drones, long-range and satellite-guided? Reconditioned drones—but by whom—flying at very low altitude, skimming the water and escaping radar? And then where was the point of departure? A phantom ship? The Bosaso base, in Somalia, not far from Aden? The island of Tala-Tala, a crossroads of regional drug trafficking, 150 kilometers from the port of Aqeeq, farther south?
And then, again, why is Port Sudan so vulnerable? Why is the anti-air defense so rudimentary here? And why is there no ally, no regional and friendly coalition, scrambling to provide Patriot batteries to populations threatened by the deadliest war of the moment?
“150,000 dead,” says Suliman, impassive, very British, staring at the reddish sand before us, swept by the wind, stretching to the horizon at the airport exit.
In Port Sudan, the country’s provisional capital city, the airport was destroyed by a drone attack
Three times the dead of Gaza, I tell myself—and no one, on American campuses or in Hollywood, among the Greta Thunbergs and other French extreme leftists, seems to care in the slightest. No protesters in the streets of New York, London, or Paris decry the murder of millions of Africans. A daily martyrdom, a boundless savagery, with barely the odd wire dispatch, and a generalized “quiet on the set, we’re killing!”
Who could have imagined,17 years ago, when, reporting for the Financial Times, I set off for Amarai, then Khortial, Deissa, Beirmazza, those humble capitals of a Darfur where the war had already claimed 300,000 dead, that we would, today, still be here, in the middle of a brutal and unending war?
Earlier still, in 2001, reporting for Le Monde, I crisscrossed Christian South Sudan (2 million dead—2 million!—and 4 million displaced) and then the Nuba Mountains (organized famine, forced exodus of women and children sold into slavery in the markets of Kordofan, three-quarters of the population decimated by slow extermination). Could I have foreseen for a single instant that a quarter of a century later we would have let this carnage continue?
I think of those “wars of a most unforeseen logic” foretold by Arthur Rimbaud, who, after Aden, passed through Port Sudan.
I think of John Garang de Mabior, the big-hearted warlord who firmly believed that with South Sudan’s independence—his fixed idea—the cycle of massacres would finally stop.
And of Abdel Aziz Adam al-Halu, the Nuba military commander, who told me about the blockade; the total encirclement; the hamlets where, in the dry season, people were reduced to digging in the sand with their bare hands to find a little water; the fields they had to burn, for fear the army, once it occupied them, would advance under cover right up to the villages.
Unlike Garang, al-Halu is alive. But desperate as he was, he, like Garang, would never have imagined that the slaughter could be endless.
And the Darfur insurgents, Commanders Rocco, Nimeiry, and Tarata, who took charge of me after my clandestine crossing of the border with Chad: Did they not feel they had seen and lived through the worst that man can do to man?
I believe that I am among the few Western reporters to have covered all the recent Sudanese wars. Having traveled there in every direction, I know that if there is any place in the world that seems struck by a damnation without end or reason, it is Sudan. With a heavy, melancholic heart, I hurry off to see the president, with whom I had managed, from Paris, to arrange a tentative meeting.
PThree times the dead of Gaza, I tell myself—and no one, on American campuses or in Hollywood, among the Greta Thunbergs and other French extreme leftists, seems to care in the slightest. No protesters in the streets of New York, London, or Paris decry the murder of millions of Africans. A daily martyrdom, a boundless savagery, with barely the odd wire dispatch, and a generalized “quiet on the set, we’re killing!”
Who could have imagined,17 years ago, when, reporting for the Financial Times, I set off for Amarai, then Khortial, Deissa, Beirmazza, those humble capitals of a Darfur where the war had already claimed 300,000 dead, that we would, today, still be here, in the middle of a brutal and unending war?
Earlier still, in 2001, reporting for Le Monde, I crisscrossed Christian South Sudan (2 million dead—2 million!—and 4 million displaced) and then the Nuba Mountains (organized famine, forced exodus of women and children sold into slavery in the markets of Kordofan, three-quarters of the population decimated by slow extermination). Could I have foreseen for a single instant that a quarter of a century later we would have let this carnage continue?
I think of those “wars of a most unforeseen logic” foretold by Arthur Rimbaud, who, after Aden, passed through Port Sudan.
I think of John Garang de Mabior, the big-hearted warlord who firmly believed that with South Sudan’s independence—his fixed idea—the cycle of massacres would finally stop.
And of Abdel Aziz Adam al-Halu, the Nuba military commander, who told me about the blockade; the total encirclement; the hamlets where, in the dry season, people were reduced to digging in the sand with their bare hands to find a little water; the fields they had to burn, for fear the army, once it occupied them, would advance under cover right up to the villages.
Unlike Garang, al-Halu is alive. But desperate as he was, he, like Garang, would never have imagined that the slaughter could be endless.
And the Darfur insurgents, Commanders Rocco, Nimeiry, and Tarata, who took charge of me after my clandestine crossing of the border with Chad: Did they not feel they had seen and lived through the worst that man can do to man?
I believe that I am among the few Western reporters to have covered all the recent Sudanese wars. Having traveled there in every direction, I know that if there is any place in the world that seems struck by a damnation without end or reason, it is Sudan. With a heavy, melancholic heart, I hurry off to see the president, with whom I had managed, from Paris, to arrange a tentative meeting.
Greta Thunbergs and other French extreme leftists, seems to care in the slightest. No protesters in the streets of New York, London, or Paris decry the murder of millions of Africans. A daily martyrdom, a boundless savagery, with barely the odd wire dispatch, and a generalized “quiet on the set, we’re killing!”
Who could have imagined,17 years ago, when, reporting for the Financial Times, I set off for Amarai, then Khortial, Deissa, Beirmazza, those humble capitals of a Darfur where the war had already claimed 300,000 dead, that we would, today, still be here, in the middle of a brutal and unending war?
Earlier still, in 2001, reporting for Le Monde, I crisscrossed Christian South Sudan (2 million dead—2 million!—and 4 million displaced) and then the Nuba Mountains (organized famine, forced exodus of women and children sold into slavery in the markets of Kordofan, three-quarters of the population decimated by slow extermination). Could I have foreseen for a single instant that a quarter of a century later we would have let this carnage continue?
I think of those “wars of a most unforeseen logic” foretold by Arthur Rimbaud, who, after Aden, passed through Port Sudan.
I think of John Garang de Mabior, the big-hearted warlord who firmly believed that with South Sudan’s independence—his fixed idea—the cycle of massacres would finally stop.
And of Abdel Aziz Adam al-Halu, the Nuba military commander, who told me about the blockade; the total encirclement; the hamlets where, in the dry season, people were reduced to digging in the sand with their bare hands to find a little water; the fields they had to burn, for fear the army, once it occupied them, would advance under cover right up to the villages.
Unlike Garang, al-Halu is alive. But desperate as he was, he, like Garang, would never have imagined that the slaughter could be endless.
And the Darfur insurgents, Commanders Rocco, Nimeiry, and Tarata, who took charge of me after my clandestine crossing of the border with Chad: Did they not feel they had seen and lived through the worst that man can do to man?
I believe that I am among the few Western reporters to have covered all the recent Sudanese wars. Having traveled there in every direction, I know that if there is any place in the world that seems struck by a damnation without end or reason, it is Sudan. With a heavy, melancholic heart, I hurry off to see the president, with whom I had managed, from Paris, to arrange a tentative meeting.
President al-Burhan receives me at nightfall, in a modest residence, barely guarded and plunged in semi-darkness against the risk of being hit by drones.
He is tall. Dressed in fatigues. His chest bedecked with medals. He has the profile of a Nilotic condottiere. And all at once, I sense that he has neither the taste for nor the habit of interviews.
If there is any place in the world that seems struck by a damnation without end or reason, it is this one: Sudan
He speaks to me of President Macron, one of the few Westerners he has met in four years and of whom he has had no news since their singular meeting. Of the difficulty of waging the fight, alone or nearly, in the world’s indifference and silence, against an enemy that permits itself and thrives on all the war crimes and crimes against civilians. And then, with a note of bitterness in his voice, of the mystery of the United Arab Emirates, that once “friendly” state, which, via Chad, supplies most of the assassins’ provisions and arms: “Why? It’s incomprehensible … We have so many common struggles … starting with the fight against terrorism…”
I push him on the ties he is said to have with Iran and the fact that the ayatollahs would be using Port Sudan to have a presence in the Red Sea, to limit the movements of their regional adversaries, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to extend deep into Africa. He categorically denies it. He steps out of the cautious reserve he had imposed on himself since the beginning of the conversation and almost flares up. “Iran opened an embassy, that’s true, but nothing more,” he says—“no military experts, no arms deliveries, no Shahed drones, nothing, contrary to what the attackers’ disinformation claims and alas, what the Western press too often repeats.”
I question him about the Abraham Accords, which Sudan signed at the same time as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco but never completely ratified. “Only the civil war,” he replies, with an air of impatience in his voice, “has delayed the process; but I am ready, against the common enemy that is terrorism and which, beyond Sudan, threatens Chad, Libya, and the entire region, for all security cooperation with the State of Israel—I know this choice is not always popular here, but it is my choice; I stand by it.”
I tell him that I am surprised at his style of government.
I say to him: “You overthrew, in April 2019, with the support of a popular revolt—and that was good—the dictator al-Bashir, accused of crimes against humanity and genocide and who should be rotting today in a cell of the International Criminal Court in The Hague; but then, on Oct. 25 of the same year, you dissolved the transitional authorities, decreed a state of emergency, and sidelined all the civilian figures who emerged from the popular revolt; then you promised a very rapid return to normalcy, to constitutional order and to democracy; yet you did not keep your word, the military are still there and, four years later, that return is still awaited—why?”
The outskirts of Khartoum at night. The city lies in ruins. Members of Hemedti’s militias remain there, their snipers at the ready.
He sinks into a long silence. He stands. And, as if his impatience has reached its limit, heads for the door. I think I have asked one question too many, and that the interview may be over. The advisers, who are attending the conversation and taking notes, close their notebooks and fidget, a bit embarrassed, on their chairs or sofa. But no. He turns back as if he had forgotten me or changed his mind. And he signals to us, still without a word, to follow him.
With my friend Gilles Hertzog, Marc Roussel (our photographer), and Olivier Jacquin (the cameraman) who came with me from Paris, we accompany him to the end of the arid garden, still without lights. And, escorted by a handful of young soldiers, barely armed, he passes through the main gate to the corniche where the city’s inhabitants often come, with their families, to seek a bit of evening cool.
Young people recognize him. Dozens. Soon hundreds. First a murmur. Then a chorus of acclamations, youyous, hand-clapping, more or less improvised slogans, “Long live Sudan,” “Mabrouk,” or “Freedom! Peace! Justice.” Mobile phones rising above the heads like pale torches, they take endless, joyful selfies. “That’s democracy, sir!” he shouts to me, very loudly, trying to drown out the hubbub and pulling me very close to him, joyfully, fist raised! Then, with a grand and benevolent gesture sweeping the people on the corniche, and no doubt telling himself that the spectacle of this rejoicing is not enough to convince me (on this precise point, he is wrong and the spectacle of this improvised walkabout impresses me, on the contrary, rather a lot): “Remind the propagandists who speak without knowing, and without deigning to inform themselves, that a prime minister has been appointed, Mr. Kamil Idris, a renowned professor of law, a senior international civil servant—and that he has formed a 100% civilian government, baptized the ‘government of hope’! Does that suit you?”
Most of the ministers have indeed been appointed. They are technocrats, trained, some of them, like Kamil Idris, formerly of Ohio University, in Western schools. In any case, this government is infinitely more presentable than the parallel government, called the “government of peace and unity,” that Hemedti set up at roughly the same time, and which is, for its part, an amalgam of tribal notables, religious fanatics and bandits.
The “president of the transitional sovereignty council” plunges back into his crowd bath, shakes hands, embraces, takes more selfies—prolonging the pleasure of the moment, and not unhappy to display his undeniable popularity.
For my part, I am reassured. A current of sympathy having passed between us, he promises, back at his residence, as we nibble sunflower seeds and pistachios served with thick coffee, to help me, the very next day, to get out of Port Sudan and make it to the field—which for me, was the essential point.
Sudan is a vast country. It was the largest country in Africa, in fact before the secession of the South, in July 2011, after 20 years of an atrocious war that, I repeat, barely stirred global opinion. And it is by air—first with a domestic flight, then, made available by the president’s office, in a military helicopter with open portholes to let in a bit of cool air. Flying at treetop level to avoid Hemedti’s missiles, we reach Omdurman, the country’s administrative capital, and from there, on the other side of the Nile, Khartoum.
How to describe the spectacle of desolation and horror that presents itself to our eyes, on both banks of the Nile?
In northern Khartoum, a family driven out by militias returns home to a city where famine ravages
It is Bakhmut, in Ukraine, which I filmed at length in the first months of the Russian war of aggression, at the scale, this time, of a megalopolis that still counted, before the latest war, 7 million inhabitants and where one now meets only lines of women, rendered skeletal by famine. They have been waiting since dawn, along a scabrous wall that shelters them a little from the sun, for humanitarian aid that does not come. This morning, there is only a hawker selling peppers charred by the heat and, for the most destitute, fruit reduced to its peel and roots.
It is, in the Nubawi district, in the northwest of Omdurman, I find another Mogadishu—a city I have also reported from—where a torrent of fire swept over the labyrinth of streets and carried everything away in its path, leaving behind only remnants of façades and roofs of burned sheet metal creaking in the hot wind. There, an old man, the only one whose house remained more or less standing, comes to meet us. He explains that he was the director of the National Mint, and tells us, in excellent French, of the advance of Hemedti’s armored vehicles. They crushed everything in their path. They fired their guns as much as they could. And left the inhabitants no choice but to flee, to abandon everything, or, like him, to take refuge in his cellar, for several days, with makeshift rifles so as, if they reached him, to sell his skin dearly.
It is Phnom Penh, the city that the Khmer Rouge emptied of its inhabitants in 1976 to punish it for having been a capital of the “old world,” and whose ghost-town aspect I find again in the depopulated neighborhoods of Karari and Salha, where only gaunt-flanked dogs remain, watching you with terrifying avidity. The same deathly silence reigns.....SNIP
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This is a long article. It is an eye opening story that our press does not cover. It is worth reading the whole article.
Isn’t this the same way the 16th & 17th Arab slave-trade started in Africa; warring tribes?
16th & 17th \century\ ...
“Isms” that don’t care if you die for opposing them. Communism, socialism, Islamism.......
The Khartoum Islamist Arab government was responsible for a genocide that killed off some two million Christian and animist Black South Sudanese. Today, South Sudan is independent while the same ethnic Arabs are at war with one another; with the Arabs of the West also waging war against the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa African ethnicities. The Nile River Arabs are barely holding on as the United Arab Emirates funds the militarization of the West (seemingly, in return for gold from the new finds found in North Darfur). The Sudan would appear to be destroying itself, if it weren’t for the fact there are so many Sudanese to destroy. The authors of this article want the West to get involved; but on whose side? Generally speaking, and tragically, there is a pox on both their houses.
I am reminded of the “River War” by Winston Churchill. In comparison the Colonial Period, was not that bad.
Westerners (whether left or right) want virtue to guide their focus.
If they cannot mark something with virtue (to show how wonderful they are) they tend to ignore it.
Spotify link: How I Long For Peace by Rhiannon Giddons, Resistance Revival Chorus, and Crys Matthew.
YouTube link: How I Long For Peace
It was written by Peggy Seeger in 2007 (Pete Seeger was her half brother). Rhiannon Giddons and the Chorus sing it in a southern spiritual / gospel style. Here are the chorus and first verse...
[Chorus]It honestly makes me ponder what the world would be like without war.
O how I long for peace
Among the peoples and the nation
How I long to halt the plunder
Of the wonders of creation
O how I long for peaceI cannot understand
How the sisters, wives and mothers
Cannot stop the slaughter
Of the husbands, sons and brothers
Great long article. Thanks to Bernard-Henri Levy for writing his experiences.
One of the good movies about African warfare is “Beasts of No Nation”, which is a very watchable and well made movie.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1365050/
Sudan...
Will do.
Good question.
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