Death strikes at every corner in devastated Khartoum – Technologist

The body arrived, but the grave was not yet ready. The gravediggers dug like hell to complete their work. The procession was already approaching, slaloming between the graves that stretched as far as the eye could see, spaced just a few centimeters apart. The funeral took place not inside the Ahmed-Sharfi cemetery, but outside its walls. Inside this necropolis nestled in the heart of Omdurman, the city that borders Khartoum, there was no more room. Eighteen months of war have filled the cemeteries of the capital of Sudan and its suburbs. Burials now take place along the stone wall, on a vacant lot where local youngsters used to come to play football.

At around 3:30 pm on Thursday, October 24, Mohammed Adam, a 65-year-old carpenter, had been dismembered by mortar fire. The shell landed in the courtyard of his house while he was resting on a bed. His daughter, Imane, was bringing him coffee when the courtyard was blown away. With dust in her eyes, the young woman and her neighbor, Oussama, picked up the pieces. Two hours later, his mortal remains, wrapped in a shroud, made their way to his final resting place, carried by a handful of men whose sandals sank into the still-fresh earth of nearby graves.

There were no eulogies. Just the duaa prayer recited by the site supervisor, Abdeen Dirma, a towering man with a cavernous voice. “These days, we’re burying more and more dead because of the artillery,” he said soberly.

October was one of the deadliest months for Sudanese civilians since the war began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan, and the paramilitary militias of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, aka “Hemedti.” In Khartoum, the paramilitaries have been relentlessly shelling areas controlled by the regular army. Every day, munitions have fallen indiscriminately on homes, football pitches and schools populated by people displaced by the fighting. Meanwhile, the FAS air force is stepping up its bombardment of enemy positions, causing dozens of civilian deaths.

In four weeks, more than 700 of them have been killed, according to Le Monde‘s estimates, while battles have intensified on multiple fronts across the country. While the United Nations continues to put the death toll at around 20,000, there are no reliable statistics for the Sudanese conflict. The war may have claimed more than 150,000 civilian lives through bombardments, massacres, starvation and disease.

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