My bedroom in Sudan was a refuge. A quiet space with dark curtains, lit by the dim lights draped around the painting above my low Japanese-style bed. I would collapse onto that bed and get under the covers to escape the demands of the roaring world. The anxious job hunt after university. The chaos and violence on the streets of Khartoum during the 2019 revolution. The family arguments that made me storm into the room in anger and then come out to make peace.
Many of the experiences I had outside that room became formative only after I processed them safely within it. But one day, when I was not there, the world crashed in uninvited.
Two years ago, war broke out in Sudan. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began battling the Sudanese army for control of the capital. Airstrikes, shelling and house-to-house fighting started closing in on our neighbourhood.
Elbagir, left, with her family in their living room before the war
My siblings and I spent hours on the phone trying to convince our parents to evacuate the home they had spent much of their lives building. We could hear explosions on those calls. Their road to safety was dangerous and riddled with militia and army checkpoints, but eventually they joined the 13 million people displaced by Sudan’s catastrophic war.
At some point after they left our house, like so many others, it was looted, defiled and destroyed.
Over the past two years, our Sky News team has covered horrifying stories of brutality and dispossession here. We have watched the world’s largest humanitarian crisis explode and spread.
Refugees in Sudan’s western Darfur region last month
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Few, if any, Sudanese people have been spared by the violence. Our family, friends and neighbours all ache from helplessness and loss. Last week, after walking into the battered homes of so many people across the capital and the country to report the news, it only felt right to witness and share the wreckage of my own.
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When I entered the front gate, the gnarled, dried vines and hard ground of our once lush green garden were a stark warning. This was no longer the place I lived in and loved. The hollowness of the living room made me gasp. Before the war, the house had rarely been empty. It was full of furnishings, photographs and tabletop plates brimming with biscuits and sweets. People came in and out without calling ahead. It was a collective space for our family and friends, and also the journalists who worked at my parents’ newspaper and would come to our regular gatherings or just pop by to say hello. They are all mourning our home along with their own.
The staircase to our bedrooms was blocked by my dad’s cupboard. A chestnut wardrobe abandoned in a hurry by its would-be thieves but still emptied of the suits he spent years collecting.
Elbagir at her ransacked childhood home. Below, calling her mother to show her the damage
Our Sky News high-risk adviser Nick climbed over it and did a sweep for any unexploded munitions before coming down to give his report on the state of the first floor. He stopped halfway down the stairs to apologise — it was worse than empty, it was trashed. I clambered over the banister I had climbed as a bored kid. On the left wall was a gaping steel case where the electricity panel that powered all of our rooms had been ripped out. I stood paralysed at the top of the stairs for a moment, then willed myself to walk forward and slowly make my way to my bedroom.
• Watch Yousra Elbagir’s report for Sky News
The room was a disaster zone. Cherished photos, books and knick-knacks lay indiscriminately dumped on the floor and in the gaps of the stripped frame of my bed. The low couch my parents would sit on to chat with me was overturned, its cushions flung to the side, and its base torn open in what we can only presume was a hunt for hidden gold. An antique jewellery box more valuable than the jewellery in it was broken and tossed on the bed frame.
The sight was impossible to process at first. I started big: looking for the painting that was adorned by lights and hung above my bed. It was a gift from my family for my 24th birthday — commissioned from my favourite Sudanese artist and calligrapher at the time by my sister-in-law Yara. I saw the brown back of the frame on the floor in the corner. Sophie, our producer, yelled “There! There!” and Garwen pivoted his camera with excitement. The team had heard all about the one item I had hoped to retrieve, and this might be it. I turned it over and shards of glass fell away from the edges of the frame. The painting was torn in parts but still mostly intact. The wash of deep colour and dark black ink of the Quranic verse I am named after hit me like a rain shower.
Sudanese army soldiers celebrate after retaking the presidential palace in Khartoum in March
SUDANESE ARMED FORCES / AP
“Verily, with hardship comes ease,” it says (the name “Yousra” — the ease — came to my mother in a dream before I was born). I turned the frame over and found the notes handwritten by my family. I read the one from my mother. “To my little girl who is no longer little but great in aspirations and initiative,” she had written. “Keep doing what you are doing — whatever you do, you will do it greatly. Mum.”
The painting of her late mother in my dad’s office was not so fortunate. The vandals had torn through my grandmother’s carefully drawn forehead and wiped faeces on the surrounding walls. On other walls, we found the written names of the RSF troops that had seized and desecrated my home.
But sifting through the rubble, we found the ease that comes with hardship. Again and again, I uncovered small reminders of the memories that made our house a home beyond bricks and mortar. Photographs, drawings, notes and mementos that were left behind like rubbish but feel like hopeful clues that point us towards what really matters.
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As the war has dragged on, people here have banded together. Sudan is largely ignored by the rest of the world, and foreign aid is drying up, yet still a spirit of unwavering mutual support and goodwill has made survival and even hope possible. Community kitchens and emergency response rooms are sustaining millions across the country.
Just as those expressions of solidarity and care signify an abiding sense of community, the reminders of the loved ones that came together in our home before the fighting started are much more than just memories. They are proof of the Sudanese warmth and generosity that my parents’ open door and bustling living rooms represented: the beating heart that keeps our country alive, and that war cannot destroy.
Yousra Elbagir is Africa Correspondent for Sky News