War has turned this African capital into a city of graves

KHARTOUM, Sudan — The diggers were efficient, cramming in so many graves that, from above, the field near the University of Sudan’s medical campus looked like a frieze of an undulating, gravel-brown sea.

“There’s another one over there that’s even more crowded than this,” a campus caretaker said, pointing to an adjacent lot a few hundred yards away. He trudged back to his post by the campus gate before delivering a laconic response to a reporter’s question.

“How many corpses here?” he repeated. “Hundreds? Thousands? Who knows.”

More than a year after Sudan’s army overwhelmed a rival paramilitary faction and seized Khartoum, the gaping holes in the walls and the shredded pavement bear witness to the fierce battles that turned the Nile-front boulevards of this capital into a charnel house.

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In some neighborhoods, it appears no surface was left unscarred by ordnance and shrapnel. The commercial district stands gutted, looted and torched. Even the ancient statues in the capital’s National Museum — those that weren’t stolen — weren’t spared.

Its international airport — which only recently reopened — has the remains of propeller planes carelessly tossed to the side of the runway, their bodies riddled with bullet holes and their wings askew. Taking off, you see the carcass of an exploded jet, its fuselage filleted open like a fish.

But above all, Khartoum is a city of graves.

It took almost two years of vicious, take-no-prisoners combat for the army to finally push out the militia that was once its ally, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, from Khartoum. Those residents who couldn’t flee the city after the war erupted in April 2023 found themselves trapped in homes that had become a frontline.

With cemeteries inaccessible, they resorted to schools, mosques, backyards, sidewalks. All became makeshift burial sites, even as the death toll climbed into the tens of thousands. So bloody was the fighting that many corpses were left on the streets.

“I saw everything: detainees, bound and executed. RSF militiamen buried with their bedroll as their shroud. Corpses half-eaten by dogs, cats, rodents, birds,” said Hisham Zain al-Abidin, head of the State Forensics Authority, his voice even but weary.

“This is war.”

Sitting in a tired-looking office painted in beige and brown, al-Abidin said his agency dispatched forensic experts along with officials from Civil Defense, the Sudanese Red Crescent and neighborhood committees in July to scour parts of the capital for hundreds of mass graves. Since then, some 23,000 corpses were collected from roads, homes and looted areas and reburied in cemeteries.

Authorities have yet to remove the two graves near Omar Abdullah’s house. None of his neighbors know to whom they belong, nor where their families might be.

(Nabih Bulos)

But untold numbers of corpses remain. Some estimates put the dead at 400,000 since the conflict began four years ago, more than 61,000 of them in Khartoum state and its environs. More than 12 million have had to flee their homes, earning Sudan the unfortunate privilege of having the world’s worst displacement crisis.

The mass grave by the University of Sudan, which was near a building the RSF commandeered as a detention center, likely contains thousands of corpses, al-Abidin said.

“They buried prisoners they killed and also their fighters. You see one grave on the surface, but you dig and you’ll find five corpses inside,” he said.

“Assume you have 500 graves there, we’re talking about roughly 2,500 people.”

Shortages in material and equipment — including body bags — meant that exhuming and reburying all the remaining corpses around Khartoum exceeded his agency’s resources, al-Abidin said. There were plans for fundraising campaigns in the coming months.

As for identifying the dead, that too will have to wait, probably for years. All the State Forensic Authority’s DNA analysis labs were looted and destroyed in the fighting.

“All we can do now is take the body from where it is and put it in a numbered and marked grave for unidentified bodies so families can find them later,” he said. Samples would be taken from bones for DNA analysis in the future.

And even when bodies could be identified, few people could afford to pay for the transfers to be done privately.

That’s what happened to Omar Abdullah. In June he fled his hometown of El Fasher in western Sudan to neighboring Chad, before the RSF blitzed into the city and massacred thousands of residents.

A few weeks ago, he decided to relocate with his family to Khartoum and rented a house in Omdurman, a city that forms one of the capital’s three parts. Khartoum, a metropolis of 7 million, sits at the confluence of tributaries, a sort of Pittsburgh-on-the-Nile.

Abdullah’s house, like all the others near it, was pockmarked by bullet holes; still, “it was acceptable inside,” Abdullah said. But when he went to tidy the land just outside the house, he discovered two graves — one of them small enough for a child — near the shell of a looted car.

“I couldn’t bring my kids to that. They already saw enough in El Fasher,” Abdullah said.

None of his neighbors knew to whom the graves belonged, or where the families who had lived in their immediate vicinity might be.

Determined to have the bodies transferred, Abdullah approached the authorities. But he found it would cost more than $200 to move each body. The graves are still there.

“I can barely pay to rent the house and support my kids. How can I pay for this?” he said. “This is the work of a government, not me.”

Other neighbors were equally desperate, including Mohammad Izzo, 69, a school caretaker forced by the exigencies of war to become a groundskeeper for a makeshift cemetery at the campus located a short distance from Abdullah’s house.

The first person to be buried at the school was his brother.

One August afternoon in 2023, Izzo was staying in the school with his brother, Hassan, who also served as a caretaker. It was a few months into the war, and the RSF had seized control of their neighborhood.

Hassan had just woken from a nap and went to get water when a shell smacked into the dirt of the school’s playground, spraying shrapnel into his body. Izzo and his sister Ikhlass were inside the building and sprinted out to help. But nothing could be done. Hassan was dead.

The nearest cemetery was 9 miles away across the Nile into Khartoum’s downtown district, but going there essentially would be a suicide run, Izzo said.

“There was so much artillery. Standing outside — like we’re doing now — just wasn’t possible,” he said. Even if it was, the RSF wasn’t allowing residents to move around. Besides, there was no transportation or any guarantee of protection.

The family decided to bury Hassan in the school’s backyard.

Izzo leaned on his cane, its end digging into the soft earth as he trudged to the back of the school. A tile stuck in the ground marked Hassan’s grave, now obscured by a chaotic overgrowth of weeds. Ikhlass joined him.

“We had no choice,” Ikhlass said. “No one would let us pass. What else could we do?”

As the fighting stretched on, other grieving families asked to bury their dead beside Hassan. Izzo initially allowed it but then refused more, fearing the effect of being around many graves on Ikhlass’s kids, who were living with her and Izzo in the school.

Residents resorted to burying the bodies just outside school grounds; more than 20 graves run parallel to the school’s outer wall, each marked with a broken cinder block.

With schools set to reopen, Izzo hoped the bodies buried there could be moved. But he too would wait for the government to do it.

“I guess it doesn’t matter to me where they put him. His body is here, but his soul is with Allah. And that’s what matters,” he said.

He turned to Hassan’s grave, his sun-grizzled face looking down at the mound of earth as he stood in silence.