In Shambat al-Aradi, a tight-knit neighbourhood in Khartoum North once known for its vibrant community gatherings and spirited music festivals, two childhood friends have suffered through confinement and injustice at the hands of one of Sudan’s warring sides.
Khalid al-Sadiq, a 43-year-old family doctor, and one of his best friends, a 40-year-old musician who once lit up the stage of the nearby Khedr Bashir Theatre, were inseparable before the war.
But when the civil war broke out in April 2023 and fighting tore through their city, both men, born and raised near that beloved theatre, were swept into a campaign of arbitrary arrests conducted by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The friends were detained separately and tortured in different ways, but their experiences nonetheless mirrored one another – until they emerged, physically altered, emotionally broken and forever bound by survival.
Imprisonment and ransom
Al-Sadiq’s ordeal began in August 2023 when RSF forces raided Shambat and arbitrarily arrested him and countless other men.
He was crowded into a bathroom in a house that the RSF had looted along with seven other people and was kept there for days.
“We were only let out to eat, then forced back in,” he explained.
During his first days of interrogation, al-Sadiq was tortured repeatedly by the RSF to pressure him for a ransom.
They crushed his fingers, one at a time, using pliers. At one point, to scare him, they fired at the ground near him, sending shrapnel flying into his abdomen and causing heavy bleeding.
After three days, the men were lined up by their captors.
“They tried to negotiate with us, demanding 3 million Sudanese pounds [about $1,000] per person,” al-Sadiq recalled.
Three men were released after handing over everything they had, including a rickshaw and all their cash. Al-Sadiq and the other remaining prisoners were moved to a smaller cell – an even more cramped toilet tucked beneath a staircase.
“There was no ventilation. There were insects everywhere,” he said. They had to alternate sleeping – two could just about lie down while two stood.
A few kilometres away, al-Sadiq’s friend, the musician, who asked to remain anonymous, had also been arrested and held at the Paratrooper Military Camp in Khartoum North, which the RSF captured in the first months of the war with Sudan’s military.
That would not be the only time the musician was taken because the RSF had been told that his family were distantly related to former President Omar al-Bashir.
“They said I’m a ‘remnant of the regime’ because of that relation to him even though I was never part of the regime. I was against it,” he said, adding that he had protested against al-Bashir.
Months into the war, his family’s Shambat home was raided by the RSF and his younger brother was shot in the leg. To keep everybody safe, the musician quickly evacuated his family to Umm al-Qura in Gezira state, then went home to collect their belongings. That was when he was arrested.
During his time at the military camp, he told Al Jazeera, the RSF fighters would tie him and other prisoners up and lay them facedown on the ground in the yard. Then they would beat them with a “sout al-anag” whip, a Sudanese leather whip traditionally made of hippo skin.
The flogging lasted a long time, he added, and it was not an isolated incident. It happened to him several times.
In interrogations, RSF personnel fixated on his alleged affiliation with al-Bashir, branding him with slurs like “Koz”, meaning a political Islamist remnant of al-Bashir’s regime, and subjecting him to verbal and physical abuse.
He was held for about a month, then released to return to a home that had been looted.
He would be detained at least five more times.
“Most of the detentions were based on people informing on each other, sometimes for personal benefit, sometimes under torture,” al-Sadiq said.
“RSF commanders even brag about having a list of Bashir regime or SAF [Sudan armed forces] supporters for every area.”
Forced labour
While he was held by the RSF, the musician told Al Jazeera, he and others were forced to perform manual labour that the fighters did not want to do.
“They used to take us out in the morning to dig graves,” he said. “I dug over 30 graves myself.”
The graves were around the detention camp and seemed to be for the prisoners who died from torture, illness or starvation.
While he could not estimate how many people were buried in those pits, he described the site where he was forced to dig, saying it already had many pits that had been used before.
Meanwhile, al-Sadiq was blindfolded, bound and bundled into a van and taken to an RSF detention facility in the al-Riyadh neighbourhood.
The compound had five zones: a mosque repurposed into a prison, a section for women, an area holding army soldiers captured in battle, another for those who surrendered and an underground chamber called “Guantanamo” – the site of systematic torture.
Al-Sadiq tried to help the people he was imprisoned with, treating them with whatever they could scavenge and appealing to the RSF to take the dangerously sick prisoners to a hospital.
But the RSF usually ignored the pleas, and al-Sadiq still remembers one patient, Saber, whom the fighters kept shackled even as his health faded fast.
“I kept asking that he be transferred to a hospital,” al-Sadiq said. “He died.”
Some prisoners did receive treatment, though, and the RSF kept a group of imprisoned doctors in a separate room furnished with beds and medical equipment.
There, they were told to treat injured RSF fighters or prisoners the RSF wanted to keep alive, either to keep torturing them for information or because they thought they could get big ransoms for them.
Al-Sadiq chose not to go with the other doctors and decided to cooperate less with the RSF, keeping to himself and staying with the other prisoners.
Conditions were inhumane in the cell he chose to remain in.
“The total water we received daily – for drinking, ablution, everything – was six small cups,” al-Sadiq said, adding that food was scarce and “insects, rats and lice lived with us. I lost 35kg [77lb].”
Their captors did give him some medical supplies, however, when they needed him to treat someone, and they were a lifeline for everyone around him.
The prisoners were so desperate that he sometimes shared IV glucose drips he got from the RSF so detainees could drink them for some hydration.
The only other sources of food were the small “payments” of sugar, milk or dates that the RSF would give to prisoners who they forced to do manual labour like loading or unloading trucks.
Al-Sadiq did not speak of having been forced to dig graves for fellow prisoners or of having heard of other prisoners doing that.
For the musician, however, graves became a constant reality, even during the periods when he was able to go back home to Shambat.
He helped bury about 20 neighbours who died either from crossfire or starvation and had to be buried anywhere but in the cemeteries.
The RSF blocked access to the cemeteries without explaining why to the people who wanted to lay their loved ones to rest.
In fact at first, the RSF prohibited all burials, then relented and allowed some burials as long as they were not in the cemeteries.
So the musician and others would dig graves for people in Shambat Stadium’s Rabta Field and near the Khedr Bashir Theatre.
He said many people who were afraid to leave their homes at all ended up burying their loved ones in their yards or in any nearby plots they could furtively access.
The friends’ ordeals lasted into the winter when al-Sadiq found himself released and the RSF stopped coming around to arrest the musician.
Neither man knows why.
Both al-Sadiq and the musician told Al Jazeera they remain haunted by what they endured.
The torment, they said, didn’t end with their release; it followed them, embedding itself in their thoughts, a shadow they fear will darken the rest of their lives.
On March 26, the SAF announced it had recaptured Khartoum. Now, the two men have returned to their neighbourhood, where they feel a greater sense of safety.
Having been detained and tortured by the RSF, they believe they’re unlikely to be viewed by the SAF as collaborators – offering them, at least, a fragile sense of safety.
