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Artwork by Galal Yousif Goly Artwork by Galal Yousif Goly

‘Why are the mountains grumbling like a charged diarrhea?50jili

How long shall I walk these winding roads of displacement?

I behold cracked feet and broken faces,

Starveling children clinging to dehydrated mother’s breast,

Can’t you see the eyes baked white in hunger?’

—‘The Meditation of a South Sudanese Refugee’ by Geraldine Sinyuy

Flickering lights, just a few kilometres away in the middle of a desert in the dead of night, were all 31-year-old Nooraldeen Awad had as he crossed a border he had to. It was September 2023. He was alone, with only some food and water in his bag. He wasn’t scared—he had nothing to lose.

A Sudanese national, Awad entered Egypt illegally in July 2023, three months after a horrific civil war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war triggered what has been described as the worst displacement crisis in the world since the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced at least 15 million people.

The Sudanese civil war has already displaced over 12 million since April 2023—a quarter of the country’s population. The two months Awad spent in Egypt gave him no hope. He decided to try his luck in Uganda. But to get there, he first had to cross Sudan and then South Sudan. In September 2023, when an Egyptian car dropped Awad about 90 minutes from the Sudanese border at 2 am, he had to rely on himself.

It was dark and quiet. The lights at the Argeen checkpoint on the Egypt-Sudan border appeared like distant stars. But he couldn’t go straight towards the light. He would get caught. He had to reach the border at a distance from the checkpoint where he could slip through the barbed wires in the dark. When he finally reached it, a Sudanese soldier guarding the border pointed a gun at him. “I was still not afraid. I don’t know why,” Awad says.

After a month-long journey through war-torn Sudan and South Sudan, Awad entered Uganda with a valid visa. He has since settled in Kampala, working as a Monitoring and Evaluation Associate and Emergency and Protection Officer at the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) network, a civil society coalition of African women.

“In Sudan, the young have only two choices – either join the war on any side or leave the country. Most have chosen the latter,” Awad says. “We have been living through one war after another since 1955, with brief interludes, but the current one is the mother of all wars.”

While Awad found safety, many Sudanese faced harsher fates. Some drowned in the Mediterranean, others died in refugee camps or desert crossings and many were imprisoned. Awad’s younger brother, now in Libya, survives by offering cheap or unpaid labour.

Connected Crises

Sudan’s crisis quickly spread to its neighbours, with millions seeking refuge. However, Sudan is not alone in Africa, where many countries suffer from wars and displacement. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data’s (ACLED) global conflict index, released in December 2024, ranked Sudan, Nigeria and Cameroon at ‘extreme’ conflict levels and Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Burkina Faso at ‘high’ conflict levels. Chad, Uganda, Libya and Central African Republic are experiencing reduced conflict. Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are mostly conflict-free.

Sudanese are seeking refuge in countries facing less severe conflict, but these nations are also under strain due to displacement from other war-torn regions. Egypt, for instance, also hosts displaced people from Syria and Palestine.

“There has been a doubling in the forcibly displaced population in Africa since 2018,” said a statement from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in September this year. According to the Center, the number of Africans forcibly displaced by conflict and repressive regimes rose for the 13th consecutive year, reaching over 45 million people in 2024. This figure includes refugees, internally displaced persons and asylum seekers, marking a 14 percent increase from the previous year.

South Sudan, with 1.1 million internally displaced and 2.2 million externally, has 30 per cent of its population forcibly displaced. The country, carved out of Sudan in 2011 after years of violent conflict, quickly descended into civil war. Five million Somalians—about 28 per cent of the population—are displaced internally and externally. One-fifth of the Central African Republic’s population is displaced, along with millions in the DRC Democratic Republic of Congo , Nigeria, Ethiopia and other nations. Each crisis burdens neighbouring countries with refugees.

As the Sudanese civil war erupted in April 2023, Sudanese refugees found few places to go. The harrowing journey of 30-year-old Sudanese Khalil Hussain Hassan Obaid, who left Sudan in late 2022, illustrates this struggle.

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Obaid first entered Libya illegally via Egypt. He moved from city to city—Kufra, Jalu, Augila, Benghazi, Tripoli and Zawiya—before heading to Algeria, then to southern Tunisia’s Medenine and finally to Tunis, the capital. He registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and sought asylum.

In Tunis, he lived in tents in a park in the Al-Buhaira neighbourhood with other Sudanese refugees, including women, children and the sick. But in May 2024, when more refugees began arriving from Sudan, Tunisian security forces evicted them, briefly detained them and then dropped them outside Jendouba, near the Algerian border, about 150 km from Tunis.

From then on, their misery deepened. The long walk back to Tunis began. Among them were children, elderly women and a nine-month-pregnant woman, but they were denied access to any public transport. They slept in farmlands and along roadsides. They faced attacks from locals and robbers in every neighbourhood they passed through—stoned, beaten and robbed.

After another attack in Manouba, near Tunis, security forces detained Obaid and others, sending them to court and then to an overcrowded prison. Lawyers defended them, highlighting Tunisia’s commitment to refugee rights. The authorities separated the young men and Obaid and others were dropped near the Tunisia-Algeria border.

Without food or water, they walked for days before reaching Tebessa, where they were rearrested and deported to Tamersat. Two days later, they were dropped near the Algeria-Niger border, forced to walk into Niger. In June 2024, they found shelter at a refugee camp in Agadez, Niger, but the living conditions are so bad that they do not want to live there anymore. They fear further deportation.

“It’s unliveable. The situation here is catastrophic,” he tells Outlook over the phone in December. He adds that the camp, located 20 km from Agadez in the middle of the desert, lacks even the bare minimum facilities for survival. “We live with storms hurricanes, dust and extreme weather, with little access to food, water, sanitation and healthcare. Many people, including newborns, have died due to the lack of medical facilities,” Obaid says.

Most Sudanese refugees have no hope for an end to the conflict anytime soon. The war is being fought on Sudanese soil but is supported by external forces, including the UAE, Egypt, Turkey and Russia-backed private militias.

The Inextinguishable Fire

Wars are almost as old as civilisations themselves. All great empires were built through wars. However, the industrial revolution in the West, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, transformed warfare forever.

Industrialisation gave industrial powers a significant advantage — modern weapons, railways and steam-powered ships — over non-industrialised nations. It also increased the destructive capacity of wars. Moreover, wars and industries developed a symbiotic relationship. The industrialisation of warfare facilitated the spread of Western colonial powers across Asia, Africa and South America, which boosted industrial production in colonising countries, including the booming weapons industry. Mass factory production requires a continuous demand for goods and wars became a constant source of that demand.

The news of Assad’s fall resulted in long queues at Syria’s borders, with refugees rushing to return. The early enthusiasm soon faded as it became clear that Syria would have to deal with foreign aggression, if not internal conflict, as well.

In the 20th century, events such as Italy and Germany’s colonial interests in Morocco (1911), the Italy-Ottoman conflict over Libya (1912) and the Balkan Wars (1912-13) paved the way for World War I (1914-18). Even as the global war paused, the Russian Civil War (1917-1923) claimed millions of lives. This was followed by the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937), the Italy-Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

While World War I sowed the seeds for World War II (1939-45), even this devastating war did not halt global conflict. Post-WWII, national liberation struggles, power struggles within new nations and the global ideological war between capitalism and communism (known as the Cold War, 1945-89) took centrestage. This period saw deadly wars in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Algeria, Bangladesh, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran and many others.

At the end of the Cold War, US support for the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation in the 1980s led to the rise of Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the 1990s. The September 11, 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda in the US triggered the ‘Global War on Terrorism,’ creating a chain of reactions. Afghanistan became a land of ruin. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq contributed to the rise of ISIS and further destabilised West Asia.

Israel’s wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, starting in October 2023, have worsened the situation. Israel enjoys strong support from most Western powers, especially the US. According to ACLED’s December 2024 index, Palestine is now considered the most dangerous place in the world, with Palestine, Syria and Lebanon classified as facing “extreme” conflict and Iraq and Yemen as facing “high” conflict levels.

This has contributed to the global displacement crisis, alongside ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Myanmar, Mexico and Cameroon.

Every conflict has claimed countless lives, destroyed infrastructure and displaced millions. ACLED estimates 2,33,000 deaths worldwide in these internal and international wars in the past year, with 50,000 deaths occurring in Gaza alone.

ng slot Connected (Mis)fortune

On December 8, 2024, after Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad fled the country in the wake of the rapid capture of city after city by the rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Syrian refugees around the world celebrated. Finally, Assad’s brutal war on his own people, which began in 2011, had ended.

“Have you ever seen a country smiling?” asked Syrian writer Sanaa Aoun, who has been living in Norway since 2016, in a Facebook post. She answered, “Syria is smiling today, I’m seeing it with my own eyes!”

“To see the revolutionary flag flying in my hometown of Tartous is something I still can’t believe,” said Berlin-based Syrian journalist-filmmaker Saeed Albatal, who fled Syria in 2014, in a message on October 8.

But the same development threw Palestinian refugees into deeper anxiety. Palestinian resistance against Israel relies heavily on support from the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and Iran. Iran had been backing Assad’s regime in Syria and used Syrian territory to supply weapons to Hezbollah. With Assad gone, Iran would find it difficult to maintain that supply to Hezbollah.

Even the Syrians’ celebration was cut short. While Assad’s ally, Russia, withdrew forces from Syria, Israel carried out intense bombardment targeting Syrian military facilities and even seized some of its territories. The US bombed other parts to supposedly contain ISIS militants. Turkey bombed parts targeting Syrian Kurdish forces, which Turkey views as a threat. The new ruling force, HTS, faces the challenge of forging national unity and taking different ethnic and religious groups into confidence.

The news of Assad’s fall resulted in long queues at Syria’s borders, with refugees rushing to return. The early enthusiasm soon faded as it became clear that Syria would have to deal with foreign aggression, if not internal conflict, as well. As we enter 2025, the prospect of further escalation in West Asia looms large, with US President-elect Donald Trump, set to take office in January, likely to back Israel more strongly and possibly pressure Iran over its nuclear weapons programme.

(This appeared in the print as 'For Whom The Bell Tolls')50jili

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