The body arrives but the grave is not ready yet. Gravediggers dig like demons to complete their work. The procession is already approaching, slaloming between the graves that stretch as far as the eye can see, spaced a few centimeters apart. Funerals do not take place within the boundaries of the Ahmed-Sharfi cemetery, but outside its walls. Inside this necropolis located in the heart of Omdurman, the border city with Khartoum, there is no more space. Eighteen months of war have filled the cemeteries of Sudan’s capital and its suburbs. The burials are now carried out along the stone wall, in a vacant lot where the young people of the neighborhood came to play soccer.
At around 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 24, Mohammed Adam, a 65-year-old carpenter, was dismembered by a mortar shot. The projectile fell in the patio of his house while he was resting in a bed. His daughter, Imane, was bringing him coffee when the yard was blown up. With dust in their eyes, the young woman and her neighbor, Osama, picked up the pieces. Two hours later, his shroud-wrapped remains headed toward their final asylum, carried by a handful of men whose sandals sank into the still-fresh earth of neighboring graves.
No funeral prayer. Only the duaathe prayer, spoken by the site supervisor, Abdeen Dirma, a hollow-voiced colossus. “Today we are burying more and more deaths due to artillery”he points out seriously.
The month of October 2024 was one of the deadliest for Sudanese civilians since the start of the war in April 2023. between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane, and the paramilitary militias of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, alias “Hemetti”. In Khartoum, paramilitaries bomb areas controlled by the regular army. Every day, ammunition falls indiscriminately on homes, soccer fields and schools inhabited by people displaced by the fighting. Opposite, the FAS aviation increased its bombing of enemy positions, causing dozens of civilian deaths.
In four weeks, more than 700 of them were killed, according to government estimates. Worldas battles escalated on multiple fronts across the country. If the United Nations continues to report a death toll of around 20,000, there are no reliable statistics in Sudan. The war may have caused more than 150,000 civilian casualties in bombings, massacres and counting deaths from hunger and disease.
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