Suha Diab, a former humanitarian affairs manager with MSF in Sudan, has worked with MSF on multiple assignments in Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Iraq, Greece, and in the Central Mediterranean. She shares her experience returning to work in Sudan in late 2025, and finding Khartoum unrecognizable from her memories of working there between 2021 and 2023.
In the summer of 2025, when Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) asked if I was interested in going back to Sudan, I said “yes” in a heartbeat. I had lived and worked in Sudan during a previous assignment with MSF from September 2021 until March 2023; long enough for Khartoum to become familiar: the tea ladies, the falafel vendors, the late-night rooftop conversations after work. It was a city that grew on me quietly, until it felt like home.
When I ended my first assignment in Sudan on March 31, 2023, I left behind a suitcase in the MSF apartment in Khartoum. Inside were two things I cared about: an indigo-blue scarf that a dear friend had given me years earlier, and a brown leather bag — a goodbye gift from my Sudanese team when I finished my assignment. The war, which broke out in April 2023, changed everything. The suitcase stayed behind, its fate as uncertain as everything else that unfolded in Sudan.
Nearly 11.8 million people have now been uprooted across Sudan — a number roughly equal to one-third of Canada’s population, my residency country — almost 4.25 million forced across borders, while millions more live in fragile conditions exposed to preventable but deadly diseases. What began as a struggle for power quickly became a war on civilians — a conflict defined by siege warfare, drone strikes, starvation, and the systematic destruction of essential services. Almost everyone who fled Khartoum returned later to find their houses looted. Many Sudanese people spoke of a quiet absence — of things, routines, and familiar corners of life.
A somber reunion with colleagues
When I arrived in Port Sudan on June 3, 2025, the city felt both familiar and foreign. The heat was suffocating, the air heavy with salt. But among the staff were a few familiar faces from my earlier time in Sudan, people whose lives had changed dramatically in the two years since I had last seen them. Almost all of them had been displaced during the assaults on Khartoum and other major cities in 2023 and 2024. Many had relocated their families to neighboring countries.
The stories they told me were harrowing: fleeing under gunfire, negotiating passage at checkpoints, whispering rushed goodbyes, or risking dangerous border crossings to deliver their loved ones to safety. Some were beaten, intimidated, interrogated, or even imprisoned. Each story carried its own weight of courage, exhaustion, and loss.
A couple of weeks later, in the middle of last year, I traveled to Khartoum with a colleague and found it unrecognizable — a city hollowed out by war. Burned cars blocked the roads, buildings were riddled with bullets, and entire neighborhoods stood silent. Even the stray cats and dogs were gone. As we approached the city, I found myself wondering about the apartment and the bag I’d left there — a trivial thought in the face of so much destruction, yet impossible to dismiss. A small part of me still hoped, irrationally, to find it, to defy what the war had already made clear.
According to International Organization for Migration, more than a million people have returned to Khartoum city and the surrounding areas. But they have come back to a city with almost nothing left to support life: contaminated water systems, streets littered with unexploded ordnance, burned markets, and virtually no functioning health care. Hospitals that once anchored the health system have been destroyed, occupied, or abandoned.
Cholera, dengue, measles, and malaria continue to spread in recurring waves, driven by mass displacement, a lack of clean water, and the collapse of disease surveillance. Acute hunger has surged, with more than 20 million people now facing crisis-level food insecurity.
Twelve days after the fall of El Fasher on October 28, 2025, I left Sudan again, with a heavy heart. Reports of massacres, burned camps for displaced people, and executions of civilians continued to surface. As I scrolled through updates from Khartoum, Darfur, and Kordofan, I recognized a pattern I had seen before: civilians calling for help while the world hesitates, debates, or looks away.
The feeling was unsettlingly familiar — most recently in Gaza — where people endured unimaginable violence in full view of the world. That same paralysis, that same silence, seemed to echo here too. It is staggering how little we learn from our own history, how often the world waits until atrocities are undeniable, until it is too late to act, and then responds reluctantly, if at all. As fighting spreads from Darfur into Kordofan, civilians are once again trapped between drone strikes, siege, executions, disease, and starvation. Memories of a quieter time, before the war, now feel impossibly distant.
I never found my bag. Between contamination risks and administrative restrictions, returning to the old MSF apartment was impossible when I was there. Some of my international colleagues teased me, saying they probably saw my blue scarf “flying somewhere” in Khartoum’s sprawling stolen-goods market. My Sudanese colleagues, though, urged me to keep hope — not out of naïveté, but because they genuinely wanted me to find it and believed there might still be a chance, however small.
I like to think they’re right. Because in that quiet insistence on hope, even amid the ruins, lies the resilience that has kept Sudan alive. And maybe, just maybe, this war could end — if those with the power finally chose to, the same actors whose weapons, funding, and silence have kept it going.
