She fled war in Sudan. Now she grapples with returning.

This is the third of four articles from Sudan that we are publishing this week, highlighting that country’s travails and citizens’ efforts to overcome them. Read the first two articles here and here.

Ru’a al-Natheer lay beneath a pile of carpets and blankets on the floor of her family’s chicken coop and listened as the footsteps approached.

She knew what the soldiers would do if they found her and her sisters.

“You have beautiful daughters,” they had told her father, the implication dangling unspoken in the hot Khartoum air.

For six months, Dr. Natheer and her three sisters had been hiding in the coop whenever the men came to the house, but it never got easier. As the footsteps came closer, the young women shivered violently, as though it were 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside instead of 100 F.

Then the footsteps suddenly began to retreat. The sisters listened with a mixture of relief and horror as the soldiers, members of a Sudanese paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, moved through the rest of their house, smashing windows and destroying furniture.

When the men were finally gone, the women emerged to find their father collapsed on the floor, sobbing. The soldiers had left him with a warning: If he didn’t turn his daughters over by the next day, they would execute the entire family.

Their mother told them to pack quickly. They were leaving that morning.

Since civil war broke out between two rival factions of Sudan’s military in April 2023, the conflict has forced more than 11 million people to flee their homes. To date, as many people have been uprooted by Sudan’s war as by Ukraine’s against Russia, in half the time.

As the crisis deepened this summer, the Monitor spoke with several Sudanese and those who had smuggled them along one popular escape route – across the country’s northern border to Egypt – to understand what one of the world’s worst displacement crises looks like for those living through it.

A quiet life 

For Dr. Natheer, Sudan’s civil war sliced suddenly through a life of quiet ambition. A veterinarian in her early 20s, she lived with her parents and five siblings in a tidy suburb of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. She had recently landed a job as a researcher at the Ministry of Animal Resources, and her salary helped support her younger siblings’ education.

“I was extremely happy about that,” she recalls.

Everything changed when fighting tore through the capital in April 2023, after a power struggle between Sudan’s two top generals exploded into open warfare. Suddenly, the neighborhood was filled with gunfire and explosions. Paramilitary fighters regularly stormed their house looking for “girls and gold,” Dr. Natheer remembers.

On that frantic November morning when the soldiers issued their ultimatum, the family members fled so quickly they didn’t even stop to lock the doors behind them. “We left like thieves so no one would notice us,” says Dr. Natheer.

The family boarded a bus headed north with no real plan. But as they crawled along crowded roads, one military checkpoint after another, Dr. Natheer began searching Facebook for smugglers who could take the family across the border to Egypt.

By the time they arrived in the northern town of Sidon eight hours later, a driver was waiting.

The Natheers handed over $2,600 – about half their life savings – and climbed into the back seat of his truck.

“Unofficial” crossings

Until recently, Sudan and Egypt had an agreement that allowed their citizens to cross freely over their shared border, able to live, work, and own property on both sides. But shortly after the war began, in June 2023, Egypt abruptly suspended the policy, citing security concerns.

As a result, nearly “all opportunities for legitimate entry for Sudanese have been closed,” explains Amira Ahmed, a scholar of migration at the American University in Cairo and an activist for refugees. Instead, she says, people were increasingly forced to turn to what she calls “unofficial means of entry.”

The Facebook page Dr. Natheer found is one of many that organize these “unofficial” crossings, ferrying migrants to the border in large, open-back trucks called “Fly Boxes,” a euphemistic reference to an airline popular in the region, Flydubai.

On his page, “Sudanese Refugees Platform in Egypt,” smuggler Abdel Rahman Farouk arranges for his customers to be picked up at various points in Sudan and driven to the border. Then Egyptian smugglers take them to the city of Aswan.

In total, the trip from the border to Aswan should take 12 hours. But the smugglers cannot use official border crossings or roads, and vehicles frequently break down in the desert. 

Sudanese who took the same route with other smugglers say they were subjected to barbaric conditions on the journey. They describe being given water to drink from dirty fuel cans and having to wear diapers because their drivers would not stop to let them relieve themselves.

At night, “We were terrified by the howling of the wolves,” recalls Salah Ibray, a car mechanic from Khartoum who made the journey last November.

For many smugglers, the work is morally complex. “These are my fellow countrymen,” says Mohamed al-Rashidi, a smuggler who also regularly rescues migrants stranded in the desert, according to several local sources. He wants to help people survive the war, he says, not to extort them.

On one recent trip, he recounts, as the desert temperature climbed to 122 F, he arrived at a marooned Fly Box to find a group of migrants suffering badly from the heat.

He did what he could, he says. He took the living to the nearest hospital, and paid their bill. Then he buried the dead.

For his part, Mr. Farouk says he always organizes a convoy of five or six cars to avoid leaving passengers stranded because of mechanical issues.

But in June, he had an experience that upended his life forever. During a heat wave, he says, he was driving for another smuggler when the convoy ran out of water. A 12-year-old boy with a health issue in his truck died first, and then his 9- and 6-year-old brothers.

“The wailing of their mother and sister has not left me, and it never will,” Mr. Farouk says.

Finding home 

Six hours into the Natheers’ drive, their car broke down in a desolate, mountainous area on the Sudanese side of the border. 

The driver announced he was going for help. But as the hours ticked past in the frigid desert night, they realized he was never coming back. By the time another passing car took pity and picked them up four days later, Dr. Natheer says, they were “on the brink of death.”

When the family at last reached Cairo, things seemed better, at first. They rented an apartment and registered as refugees with the United Nations.

But Dr. Natheer says Egyptians harassed them “constantly,” hurling racist remarks and telling them to go back to their own country. They struggled to find work, and their savings dwindled.

After six months, the family began considering the unthinkable: returning to Sudan.

When the Sudanese military retook Omdurman, a city just west of Khartoum, in mid-April, the Natheers decided this was their chance. Dr. Natheer, her father, and her two brothers went home, promising to send money to those who remained in Cairo.

In Omdurman, they moved into a family house abandoned at the beginning of the war. They swept the glass from the floor, and started raising chickens in the backyard coop. Dr. Natheer’s father found a job as a bus driver.

It was a shadow of their former life.

But at least, they told themselves, they were finally home. 

Staff writer Ryan Lenora Brown contributed to this report from Montreal. This article was published in collaboration with Egab.

Part 1: A journalist recounts his daughter’s miraculous birth in war-torn Sudan

Part 2: ‘They are our people’: How community kitchens are piecing Sudan back together