Sudan : In Time of War
Giles Clarke // UK
Venue - State Art Gallery, Hyderabad
Date - 20 Nov 2025 - 04 Jan 2026 / 11 AM - 6 PM
Sudan’s latest civil war has now been raging for over two years and, to date, has left tens of thousands dead. The fighting erupted on the streets of Khartoum in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the country's military, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which former Sudanese leader Omar Bashir created to quell anti-Arab insurgents in the Darfur region approximately 25 years earlier.
The entire population of Khartoum, a city of some seven million people, was taken by surprise on the morning of April 15, 2023, as airstrikes and ground fighting engulfed the center of the city. The International Airport was shut down after it was attacked by hordes of RSF fighters, having engaged with SAF forces around government ministry buildings in the city center.
As the conflict intensified in the weeks and months that followed, the civilian casualty numbers ballooned as running street battles and the continued aerial bombings decimated entire neighborhoods, as fighting swept through many of the cities, towns, and villages in the states of Khartoum, Gezira, and Sannar that lie south of the capital. The UN estimates that approximately 13 million people were displaced at the height of the conflict, with around four million now living outside the country.
Following the liberation of Khartoum from RSF forces by the Sudanese Armed Forces in April of 2025, civilians who fled the beleaguered city during the fighting in 2023 have begun to trickle back. Almost all are returning to neighborhoods that were looted and stripped to the bone, uninhabitable houses and apartments with a completely crippled infrastructure that includes no water or plumbing, power, or even electrical wiring.
The added complication of all the widespread looting, other than material and infrastructural loss, came in the form of destruction of the city's business and cultural history, along with judicial and civilian archives. An already wounded population has barely any official records created before April 2023. Entire civil and government archive buildings, from areas such as birth, marriage, and land registry titles in commercial and personal housing ownership, have now been destroyed and lost. Pending legal trials, all criminal records, and even the names of prisoners who have since fled detention or been recruited into militias, have been erased from records.
