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In the tight-knit neighborhood of Shambat al-Aradi in Khartoum North, two childhood friends, Khalid al-Sadiq, a 43-year-old family doctor, and a 40-year-old musician, were inseparable before the war. However, when the civil war broke out in April 2023, they 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 mirrored one another.
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, and at one point, fired at the ground near him, sending shrapnel flying into his abdomen and causing heavy bleeding.
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. The RSF had been told that his family were distantly related to former President Omar al-Bashir, and they accused him of being a “remnant of the regime.” “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.
The musician was subjected to physical abuse, including being tied up and beaten with a “sout al-anag” whip, a Sudanese leather whip traditionally made of hippo skin. He was forced to perform manual labor, including digging graves for prisoners who died from torture, illness, or starvation. “I dug over 30 graves myself,” he said. The graves were around the detention camp, and it seemed that many people were buried in those pits.
Al-Sadiq was also subjected to inhumane conditions during his detention. He was blindfolded, bound, and bundled into a van and taken to an RSF detention facility in the al-Riyadh neighborhood. The compound had five zones, including a mosque repurposed into a prison 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.
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.” Conditions were inhumane in the cell, with limited water and food, and insects, rats, and lice living with the prisoners. Al-Sadiq lost 35kg during his detention.
Both al-Sadiq and the musician told Newsmen they remain haunted by what they endured. The torment 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 Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) announced it had recaptured Khartoum, and the two men have returned to their neighborhood, where they feel a greater sense of safety.