Watching my country fall apart day-by-day
By Zeinab Mohammed Salih
I’m not supposed to cry as a journalist when I am covering stories, but I have been crying a lot lately.
Before December, when I travelled on a reporting trip from my home in the Sudanese city of Omdurman – just across the river from the capital, Khartoum – the only people I would see from my window were those carrying the dead bodies of loved ones on their shoulders.
They were looking for a roadside space to bury the corpses as going to a proper cemetery was too dangerous.
The dead civilians, many killed by bullets and shells, were the collateral damage of a war that began exactly a year ago, when Sudan’s two leading military men fell out over the country’s political future, after seizing power together in a coup in 2021.
I have lost many friends and acquaintances.
The bustle of my close-knit, working-class neighbourhood was replaced by silence, sometimes interrupted by the sound of a military plane foreshadowing an airstrike as the army would be targeting an area controlled by fighters from the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
People would flee their homes fearing that they would be hit.
On 15 April last year, I remember looking forward to breaking the Ramadan fast in the evening with some fellow journalists. I was planning later to reunite with a long-lost childhood friend.
