They Returned to Rebuild Khartoum. Blackouts, Rubble and Shortages Are Driving Them Out Again.

KHARTOUM — They came back to a war-ruined capital determined to rebuild their lives. Instead, many residents of Khartoum are discovering that chronic shortages of electricity, water, jobs and medicine have made the city nearly impossible to live in — and some are already planning to leave again.

About four million people fled Khartoum after war broke out between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in 2023, fighting that reduced large parts of the city to rubble.

But the estimated 2.7 million who have returned since the army recaptured the capital last year are caught between the relief of being home and the harsh realities of staying there.

Businessman Emad Khaled said he was sending his family back to Egypt while he remains in Khartoum for work.

"Bringing my family back was a mistake," the 43-year-old told AFP near the city center, where blackened, bombed-out buildings line the streets.

Multiple government officials ordered back to Khartoum told AFP they were also leaving their families outside the country.

Fighting between the armed forces and the RSF is still raging elsewhere in Sudan, including in the Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile regions.

The army, which has strongly encouraged Khartoum's residents to return, rebuilt the airport and reopened it for domestic flights, and patched up some infrastructure.

Yet electricity and water still go out for days at a time. And while markets across the capital have reopened, many people are unemployed and have little money to spend.

'Price goes up every day'

By June, only one percent of Khartoum had been declared safe by the United Nations, with dozens of children killed and injured by booby-traps and unexploded shells lurking in walls and on street corners.

Nearly half a million people have returned from neighboring Egypt, where 1.5 million Sudanese had sought shelter but faced soaring living costs, racial persecution, arrests and deportations.

Khartoum's working-class neighborhoods have seen the highest numbers of returnees, while most of those who can afford to stay away have done so.

As a result, upscale districts such as Khartoum 2 lie abandoned. Along tree-lined avenues, broken glass crackles underfoot and only birdsong fills the air between empty villas, entire corners of them blown out by missiles.

Thuraya Babiker, 86, thought she had returned for good. But three months later, "my husband, my youngest daughter and I are leaving for the United Arab Emirates," she told AFP.

"We don't want to leave," she said, explaining that the lack of medical care makes it impossible to stay.

As people started returning last year, Sudanese charities rushed to rebuild hospitals, some of which are now "better than before," health workers say.

But despite their best efforts, physician Haifa Omar says "some things just aren't available."

"We have to ask patients to buy some medicines on their own dime. I have a lump in my throat as I say it, we know how difficult people's situations are."

College professor Imam Babiker has to visit 10 pharmacies to find his father's blood pressure medication, "and every day it's a different price," he said.

The 34-year-old bought a refrigerator to store his diabetic mother's insulin, "but the electricity goes out for 12 hours a day, so it gets ruined," he told AFP.

Others, like Souad Mohamed, 49, had her fridge stolen by looters and could not afford a replacement.

"So now I have to buy vegetables and meat every day, and the price goes up every day," she said.

'Things really aren't fine'

Khartoum, once a major African capital home to more than eight million people, is a shell of its former self.

In the city center, a veteran UN official told AFP that the level of destruction dwarfs every other crisis they had seen, including Ukraine.

Although occasional RSF drone strikes continue, Khartoum's university students have been told they must return after authorities ended remote learning in July.

Khartoum University medical professors have threatened to resign en masse in protest, while students complain they are being forced back.

"The university's refusing to let me defend my thesis online, even though my supervisor is also in a different country and doesn't want to return," one master's student told AFP, requesting anonymity.

An undergraduate management student, who should be starting her senior year, said she missed in-person exams this summer and is now scrambling for scholarships in Egypt to restart college from scratch.

"They wouldn't listen to us, all they cared about was for people to return," she told AFP.

"To me it's political. They want people back to show that things are fine, when things really aren't fine."

The result is a capital that is partly open and partly abandoned, where recovery is measured less by grand reopenings than by whether a pharmacy has blood pressure pills or a refrigerator can keep insulin cold. For families who returned with hopes of rebuilding, the daily struggle has become a test of endurance — and for some, a reason to leave again.