Three years of messages at once - a chronicle of Sudan's war pours in as trapped reporter's phone turns on

When Mohamed Suleiman inserted a new SIM card into his phone at a telecoms office in Port Sudan on 13 January, he broke down in tears. For nearly three years, the journalist and academic had been trapped in the western city of el-Fasher, cut off from the world by a communications blackout as Sudan's civil war raged around him. As his phone sprang to life, it delivered an avalanche of three years' worth of messages — news of colleagues who had died, friends asking whether he was still alive, and pleas that had gone unanswered. "I was flustered because people were talking on their phones (inside the office)," he tells the BBC. "Throughout the past three years, my phone was silent. After I inserted the SIM card, my tears flowed." Suleiman's story is a harrowing chronicle of Sudan's grinding civil war, which enters its fourth year on Wednesday. The conflict, born from a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group on 15 April 2023, has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Millions have been scattered, many outside the country, as the nation effectively partitions between army and paramilitary control. El-Fasher, located in the western region of Darfur, became one of the war's most brutal chapters. Suleiman describes the silence imposed by the communications blackout as nearly as deadly as the violence itself — "a suffocating feeling because I was watching systematic killings through drone strikes and bombs or deadly killing through the tight siege" imposed by the RSF for 18 months. When the RSF finally took over the city in October last year, "It was like the Day of Judgment on Earth," he says. "We witnessed the Day of Judgment on Earth." Civilians were caught between the RSF and local armed groups defending the city. As the siege tightened, a UN-backed food monitor declared famine conditions. The daily trauma of death and hunger exploded into apocalyptic scenes as people desperately tried to flee. "We saw dead children in the streets," Suleiman says. "We saw women crying from extreme hunger and thirst, too weak to carry their children, so they left them in the road." There were "people we know by name and know their fathers, we cannot provide anything for them". "There is no food, no water, no first aid to save them, or to carry them with you. You cannot do anything. So you step over them, jump over them, cry, and continue walking," Suleiman says. The road to the nearest safe place, the town of Tawila, was littered with the dead and injured — "very, very large numbers, countless numbers". If there had been any way to call for help, Suleiman says, they would not have had to abandon so many wounded. "There are things I cannot describe because they are inhumane. I cannot talk about them. And the regrettable thing is that the audio-visual media did not convey the scene. "Until now, the world does not know what happened in el-Fasher city, nor does the state know." The RSF leadership has admitted "individual violations" during the takeover but says these are being investigated and claims the scale of atrocities was exaggerated by its enemies. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including mass civilian casualties from air and drone strikes. Communications in el-Fasher deteriorated rapidly after the war began, crippled by fighting and fuel shortages. A full blackout set in when the RSF laid siege in May 2024. Some people smuggled in Starlink satellite devices, but they were expensive, restricted by the army, and confiscated by the RSF. Journalists who managed to access one faced deadly risks from both sides. "The Rapid Support Forces consider you affiliated with security agencies and accuse you of using it for espionage," he tells the BBC. "As for the army, they consider that when shelling begins, you are accused of being a spotter," he says, referring to someone who identifies targets for the enemy. "The accusation of being a spotter harmed many journalists and harmed the transmission of truth from el-Fasher. "And the military authorities did not give you a permit to convey the truth. So, you hide, and when you try to convey the news secretly, you expose yourself to risks." Suleiman himself survived a shell landing less than two metres from him in July 2025. He lay on the ground for half an hour, holding a phone that could not call for help. "If I had been injured, I would have died," he says. He could see drones approaching but had no way to warn anyone. Even the glow of his phone screen risked drawing fire. You had to "go under the bed and cover yourself with a blanket", he says. "When the shelling starts, you hide in rooms and under beds. Or in a trench under the earth, or take shelter in anything, sometimes for up to seven hours in very hot weather. You remain silent, unable to speak. And you cannot convey what you are seeing." He witnessed the death of many children — "even if a donkey cart is moving, and a drone hits it, it contains children". Under such conditions, people turned to faith. "We remembered God Almighty night and day. Neighbours would come to the Quran circle in the house," Suleiman says. "After Asr (afternoon) prayer, we would read a part of the Quran, while the shelling was ongoing. If the shelling came from the north, we would move south; if from the south, we would move north." It took Suleiman more than two months, traveling through Chad, to reach Port Sudan in January. "As soon as I arrived in Port Sudan, I prostrated in the airport and cried intensely because I never imagined I would reach a safe haven," he said. But safety brought its own battles. He had lost all identification documents, and retrieving them meant navigating a bureaucratic maze. "I spent 22 days going around offices," he says. "The last regrettable thing they said to me was to bring my mother. And to bring a number of witnesses. Thank God I have witnesses and I brought them, but what happens to the person who comes out of the war and has no one?" Special procedures announced by officials for exceptional cases, he says, were just talk. He called on the state to provide identification documents to people emerging from war zones without charge. Now reconnected to the world, Suleiman feels the world has not returned to him. "There is no international law in the world," he says bitterly. "There is no such thing as the United Nations. If there were human rights international organisations, no day would pass in el-Fasher with people dying, hungry and thirsty, bombed by shells and drones." "There is no ceasefire, no medicine, no basic necessities of life." The international community has profoundly failed to meet Sudan's enormous needs. Hampered by fighting, bureaucratic restrictions from both sides, and a lack of funding, only 16.2% of the UN's $2.87bn needs assessment for 2026 has been met. A peace plan put forward last September by the so-called Quad nations — the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — has gone nowhere. US envoy Massad Boulos is now trying to secure at least a humanitarian ceasefire. The Sudan Suleiman now experiences is a fragmented country with its people scattered. But he finds purpose in bearing witness. "There are events that happened that no-one is left to narrate, and the memory remains only with us... until we die, we will convey the truth to correct the situation for the next generation, so they live dignified and honoured in their homeland."