KHARTOUM, 17 Apr (Xinhua) -- Time flies so fast! The armed conflict in Sudan has been going on for a whole year. As a 52-year-old Sudanese, I don't know when I will be able to reunite with my family.
On April 15, 2023, fighting suddenly broke out in the southern suburbs of Khartoum. The initial clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were less than two kilometres from my home. The headquarters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is located near the Al-Azhari area, where my home is located, and the area around my house has become a battlefield and it has been devastated for a few days. As a journalist, I sneaked into the nearby streets to photograph, and the unburied corpses were scattered on the ground, and the air was filled with gunsmoke and the smell of corpses.
Shelling and air strikes continued, schools, shops, factories were closed, water and electricity outages became the norm, food supplies were scarce, and the health care system almost collapsed. Armed gangs also took advantage of the chaos to smash and loot. Life is unsustainable, lives are not secure, and many families are forced to leave Khartoum. After more than a month of hard work, my media colleague Mohieddin Djibril fled with his family. Before leaving, he asked me: "Haven't you thought about leaving? I can't stay in Khartoum for a day without water and electricity and lack of food!"
In fact, as the conflict intensifies and spreads to other regions, I am not sure where Sudan is safe and I cannot predict the dangers I will encounter along the way. Due to the extreme lack of food, my family and I can only eat one meal a day, and sooner or later it will be unsustainable. Soon, my family also had to flee, and my wife and 4 children went to relatives in Kusti, White Nile State. The average temperature in Khartoum in June exceeds 40 degrees Celsius, and the humid and hot weather is breathtaking, but my family had to go.
It was June 13th, and I stayed up all night and ventured out to find a car before dawn. The city of Kusti is about 320 kilometers from Khartoum, and it took me more than an hour to find a car whose owner promised to take my family out of Khartoum. I chose to stay and stay on the front line of journalism. In my 31-year career, I have experienced a total of three wars, and this one can be described as an "all-out war". Watching the car carry the family away, the reluctance, loss, pain, and endless worries all haunted our hearts, but we had no choice.
On the way home alone, I watched as military planes whizzed overhead, gunfire and explosions were heard incessantly, and smoke billowed from a short distance. There were a large number of soldiers on the road, as well as many civilians who fled with their families.
Both sides of the conflict severely restrict people's freedom of movement, have limited access to communications, and access to information is even more difficult. A journalist's sense of mission drives me to venture out and cover from time to time. Every time I had to disguise myself as a journalist and say that I was an ordinary person.
In early February, almost all of Sudan was cut off from the internet due to severe damage to communications facilities. Once again, the traditional means of communication by writing letters has become a reluctant choice for Sudanese in this Internet age, so much so that people often receive the bad news only two weeks after the death of a loved one. For at least a month, I couldn't get in touch with my family, and I had to comfort myself countless times that no news might be the best news.
The armed conflict has dragged on for a year, killing nearly 15,000 people and displacing more than 8.6 million people, nearly 1.8 million of whom have fled to neighbouring countries such as Chad, Egypt and South Sudan. The United Nations World Food Programme warned in March that about 18 million people in Sudan face severe food shortages and that the East African country could fall into "the world's largest hunger crisis".
Sudanese see no hope of an end to the conflict. When will we be able to reunite with our families? There is still a big question mark on this question. I prayed in my heart a thousand times: I hope this day will not drag on for too long. (Translated by Zhang Meng)