Inside Sudan’s City of the Dead

KHARTOUM, SUDAN. Omer Abd Alghader, aged 42, who is a Sudanese soldier who started his professional career fighting in Darfur during the 2002 war in the country's troubled west. In 2008, he became a military cameraman for the Sudanese Armed Forces. He was severely injured during a missile strike on an armored army vehicle on September 26, 2024, that killed three other colleagues with whom he was traveling. "I heard the whistling sound of the rocket and managed to jump out before it hit." He spent two months in a military hospital and now acts as SAF media liaison for national and international journalists covering the war.

Driving into Khartoum in early April, just days after Sudan’s army ousted rebel forces and ended their almost two-year occupation, photojournalist Giles Clarke found a haunting emptiness. Mile after mile, he passed scorched hulks of tanker trucks and bullet-riddled vehicles twisted into strange shapes, with no people in sight. Having waited for weeks to gain access, Clarke was raring to document the aftermath of brutal fighting in Sudan’s capital — until he encountered the smell on its outskirts. “I just remember driving through this wasteland, and then I opened the window and I almost gagged,” he recalls. “The overpowering stench of death.” Inside the battered city, hastily dug burial mounds edged the streets and the bodies of rebel fighters littered the ground.

In the shadow of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan’s civil war grinds on at a devastating cost. Since fighting erupted in April 2023 in Khartoum between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), more than 150,000 people have been killed and 12 million displaced (some four million are refugees outside the country). Clarke toured relief camps and was one of the few foreign journalists to capture the destruction around the capital — what he calls “the post-conflict, pre-clean-up hell.” Over the course of two trips spanning eight weeks, he photographed desperate families collecting aid, children suffering from malnutrition, and the hellscape of Khartoum, a once bustling city of seven million now inhabited by “weary soldiers and a few extremely weary civilians.”

And then there are the graves. During months of fierce urban warfare marked by aerial bombardments and running gun battles, thousands perished. Unable to reach cemeteries, besieged residents buried loved ones in parks, backyards, wherever they could find free space. At the scene of one roadside gravesite, Clarke was told “there’s probably three, maybe four people underneath each mound, and they hadn’t got around to going through them all.” Authorities have also discovered mass graves around the capital and Khartoum State, some near former RSF bases where evidence of torture and starvation was found.

On July 19, Sudan’s prime minister, Kamil Idris paid his first visit to Khartoum since assuming power in May, pledging to rebuild. Clarke’s stark images show how incredibly difficult restoring the capital will be. “The city is completely uninhabitable,” he says. “There are no services, no water, no power.” Hospitals, schools, and government ministries lie in ruin, entire neighborhoods “stripped to the bone” by RSF looters. The erasure of Khartoum’s cultural heritage is compounded by the loss of judicial and civilian archives: birth and marriage certificates, land registry titles. Scarcely any records remain of life before the war. “We did everything on paper,” a lower court judge told Clarke in Port Sudan, the temporary capital.

People trickling back into Khartoum and those stranded in relief camps can count on even less to ease their plight. Sudan is a vast country where famine is deepening and 30 million people, or half the population, require assistance, the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. USAID provided nearly half the world’s humanitarian support last year for Sudan — a lifeline for the hungry and sick — and the Trump administration’s January decision to slash agency funding is having a mortal impact that Clarke likens to “a seismic fucking wave.” In the absence of soup kitchens and medicine, severe infant malnutrition is surging and people are dying from treatable conditions as disease spreads unchecked.

Meanwhile, fighting has intensified south of the capital in the oil-rich, strategically vital Kordofan region. Satellite imagery confirms that the RSF, which stands accused of genocide by the U.S. (and is backed by the United Arab Emirates and mercenary forces), has razed several villages in recent weeks, including a July 12 massacre, one of the deadliest yet recorded in the conflict, of more than 200 people in Shaq al-Noum. Government airstrikes have also killed civilians. “Whoever controls the oil has basically got the upper hand,” says Clarke, who plans to return to Sudan in the coming months. “The war is far from over; it’s just moved.”