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

Soon after Mohamed Suleiman entered the telecoms office in the coastal city of Port Sudan on 13 January he started to cry. He hadn’t heard his phone ring for most of Sudan’s civil war, which began exactly three years ago following a power struggle between the army and its then-ally, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. The journalist and academic had made it to Port Sudan after being trapped in the western city of el-Fasher, largely cut off from the world by a communications blackout and unable to convey fully the horrors he was witnessing.

“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.” When his phone finally sprang to life, it was pinging with three years’ worth of messages, an inventory of loss: news of colleagues who had died, friends asking whether he was still alive.

“A few days ago, a person called me saying he thought I had died,” he says. “Some people had told him that I was in Port Sudan, so he called me, but he didn’t believe (it was me) until I called him back by video, then he broke down in tears.” In some ways the silence was almost as deadly as the violence, Suleiman says. He describes it as “a suffocating feeling because I was watching systematic killings through drone strikes and bombs or deadly killing through the tight siege” imposed on el-Fasher by the RSF for 18 months. And when the RSF finally took over the city in October last year, “It was like the Day of Judgment on Earth,” he says.