Without the internet or the phone, and in the crossfire of the Sudanese army and warring paramilitaries, in Darfur there is only one way left to catch up with each other: handwritten letters delivered by shared taxi drivers.
Ahmed Issa left Nyala, the capital of South Darfur where he has always lived, several days ago, leaving behind him relatives and many friends. Today, in the shelter of Ed Daein, nearly 150 kilometers east of Nyala, he writes missives in a small beer garden. “Already, at the start of the fighting, it was difficult to contact people from other neighborhoods inside Nyala itself”, tells AFP this 25-year-old Sudanese man, shirt with colorful patterns on the back and carefully degraded afro. size.
Today, the news is even more uncertain in Darfur, a region of western Sudan the size of France where a quarter of the 48 million Sudanese live in cities ravaged twenty years ago by a very bloody civil war. .
“Sometimes a letter takes a week to reach its addressee, and even if he receives it, there is no guarantee that he too will be able to send a letter back to him,” the young man continues, folding and refolding a letter that just wrote on a lined notepad sheet.
No more water or electricity
Because the roads to and from Nyala are strewn with pitfalls. After El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, which in June became the martyr city emblematic of the return of ethnic violence in Darfur, Nyala is now at the heart of clashes between the army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) .
In ten days in August, more than 50,000 people fled Nyala, Sudan’s second most populous city after Khartoum, reports the UN. Dozens of civilians were killed. The water and electricity networks no longer work, a disaster in a city where, already before the war, one in four inhabitants depended on humanitarian aid, adds the UN.
On Sunday, the conflict reached a new level in Nyala: for the first time since the start of the war in April, the air force joined the fighting. Its planes hit several residential areas held by the FSR, residents report to AFP.
This information is coming in drop by drop and often very late, says human rights activist Ahmed Gouja on X (formerly Twitter), himself out of Nyala but trying to alert the world to the killings taking place there. take place.
Only one dream: to have news
A week ago, he reported the death of “five entire families” in the violence. “I spent sixteen days without any news from my relatives living in Nyala,” he wrote, before receiving a message “from one of my brothers who found the Internet in Ed Daein.” “We die every moment that passes without news from our families: we only dream of one thing, to know how our loved ones and friends are doing,” he continues.
For weeks, Souleiman Moufaddal has seen families scroll through his small office with decrepit yellow walls anxious to know how those left in Nyala are doing. “With the telecommunications cut, people started writing letters again to hear from their loved ones,” he told AFP, sorting through the envelopes on which the addresses of the recipients are carefully noted, before to send them in a car to Nyala.
The drivers who work with him return regularly from Nyala and “often they deliver letters. In general, the addressee himself immediately writes a response which he gives to the driver”. It is up to him to then succeed in getting back on the road. A challenge under the bombs and when the rainy season regularly puts roads out of use.