I’m not supposed to cry as a journalist when I am covering stories, but I have been crying a lot lately.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They were looking for a roadside space to bury the corpses as going to a proper cemetery was too dangerous.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I have lost many friends and acquaintances.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
People would flee their homes fearing that they would be hit.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We never met and I have not seen him to this day. He left the country while I remained.<\/p>\n