Human Rights Defender Sulaima Ishaq Elkhalifa On Her Battle To End The War On Women In Sudan

Whenever the bombs would go off nearby, Sulaima Ishaq Elkhalifa would gather her four children, sister, husband and mother into one room of her house to recite the Koran and try to stave off her nightmare visions of their casualties. The day they almost became a reality, the whole house shook against her family’s screams. “We smelled the dust,” she describes over a shaky phone line from Kosti, Sudan. “There was so much dust.”

Sudan has experienced three multi-decade domestic wars since it achieved independence in 1956, all of which have taken place in its marginalised regions. Elkhalifa never expected another to break out in its capital, Khartoum. But when, in April this year, it did, the simmering tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) having reached a boiling point, she thought it would last a few hours, then a few days. When it intensified – the sounds of war echoing in her Omdurman home – and people around her prepared passports for Egypt, she thought they were overreacting. Even as she fled to Kosti, a city south of Khartoum, the day after the bomb fell next to her home, she didn’t take everything: “I thought, I’m going back in a few weeks. Maybe things will change.”

Elkhalifa can’t help but hope for the best, but as a human rights defender who has lived in Darfur conflict zones, she knows a return to normality will not be simple. And as general director of Sudan’s Unit for Combating Violence Against Women, so too does she know just how horrifically this conflict will affect women. It already has.

As she fled, Elkhalifa called the minister for social development: “It’s going to be an emergency for women,” was her message. At shelters and associations around Kosti, Elkhalifa set about training 57 volunteers on psychological first aid (a World Health Organization-endorsed disaster intervention that involves compassionate listening and providing coping strategies) while privately praying that “the worst” would not happen. But a few days later, she got a call: in Khartoum some Ethiopian girls had been raped.

“Every day, things got much worse,” Elkhalifa recalls. Echoing the atrocities of the 2003 Darfur genocide, “Most of [the sexual violence victims] are very young girls in Darfur and Bahri.” A colleague reported 25 cases of rape in Darfur by the RSF, before she had to flee to South Sudan when her own home was looted. Meanwhile, in Khartoum, women are disappearing. They leave to get groceries and do not return. Men released from local detention centres run by the RSF report seeing women inside, but the RSF deny these claims, despite evidence to the contrary.