KHARTOUM, Sudan – For Iman Abdel-Azim, the war’s violence was compounded by a profound violation of ritual. When her brother died as the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) turned Khartoum into a battlefield, a proper burial was impossible. Cemeteries were inaccessible, streets were lethal, and the relentless conflict demanded an immediate, desperate solution. With the help of neighbors, she buried him in the courtyard of her home in Khartoum North—a makeshift grave born of necessity, not tradition.
Abdel-Azim’s story is not unique. Across the capital region’s tri-city area—Khartoum, Khartoum North, and Omdurman—countless families were forced into similar acts. Gardens, public squares, and the corners of mosques became improvised cemeteries, a silent testament to the scale of the tragedy and the complete collapse of civil order during the fiercest fighting.
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Now, a state-led campaign to exhume these remains and rebury them in formal cemeteries has begun. Announced in December, the operation is a necessary step toward restoring public health and dignity to the capital. Yet, for families like Abdel-Azim’s, it is a harrowing reawakening of grief. “It feels like losing him all over again,” she describes, forced to relive the trauma of his death and the indignity of his initial burial as officials arrive to disinter his remains.
Organised campaign
The Mechanics of a Macabre Mission
The exhumation campaign is a complex logistical and humanitarian undertaking. A multi-agency committee, comprising forensic medicine experts, Civil Defence personnel, the Sudanese Red Crescent, and local neighborhood committees, has been formed to oversee the grim task. Ahmed Abdel Rahman, executive director of Khartoum North, frames the mission in dual terms: alleviating the psychological burden on families and addressing the severe health risks posed by informal burials in densely populated areas.
The process, overseen by the ominously named “High Committee for Collecting the Remains of Those Who Died During the Battle of Dignity,” follows a strict protocol:
- Identification & Survey: Local committees canvass neighborhoods to map every makeshift grave site in homes, mosques, and public spaces.
- Family Notification: Families are contacted and given the right to appoint a representative to witness every subsequent step.
- Forensic Supervision: Specialists from the Forensic Medicine Authority supervise the exhumation, ensuring proper documentation and handling of remains before transfer to a cemetery.
Hisham Zain al-Abidin, director of the Forensic Medicine Authority in Khartoum State, has set an ambitious goal: to clear the capital and its seven districts of all makeshift graves by the first quarter of 2026. The work began in earnest after the Sudanese army regained control of the state, allowing safer access for teams.
Confronting Overwhelming Challenges
Despite the structured plan, the campaign is fraught with obstacles that reveal the war’s lingering devastation:
- Resource Shortages: A critical lack of basic supplies, like body bags, threatens to compromise the dignity and safety of the process.
- Systematic Sabotage: Zain al-Abidin reports that RSF forces deliberately destroyed DNA analysis units. This act of sabotage has catastrophic consequences, making scientific identification of many victims impossible and severing the last hope for families seeking closure for the missing.
- The Unidentified Dead: For remains without DNA or visual identification, teams are forced to assign numbers, document features, and conduct collective burials in graves designated for unknown individuals—a modern-day mass grave stemming from bureaucratic necessity.
- The Unburied: Beyond the graves lies a more immediate horror. The streets of Khartoum still hold decomposing bodies, posing a dire public health crisis and an even more complex identification challenge.
Sabotage
The Human Element: Committees as Connective Tissue
At the neighborhood level, volunteers like Shireen Al-Tayeb Nour Al-Daem, vice president of a committee in Shambat, serve as the crucial link between the state apparatus and grieving citizens. Her work involves the delicate tasks of surveying, data collection, and—most sensitively—communicating with families. The committee’s mandate stresses that no exhumation proceeds without a family member or representative present, a rule meant to provide transparency and a measure of control to the bereaved.
“We are paving the way for a safe environment for the return of citizens,” Nour Al-Daem told Al Jazeera, framing the macabre task as part of broader reconstruction. Yet, she acknowledges the profound difficulty: facilitating a “second farewell” for a population already shattered by loss.
A Deeper Significance: Reclaiming the Social Order
This exhumation campaign is more than a public health cleanup; it is a profound attempt to reclaim social and moral order from the chaos of war. In Sudanese culture, as in many others, burial rituals are sacred, providing structure for grief and affirming the dignity of the deceased and the community. The makeshift graves were a symbol of that order’s collapse. Their systematic removal is, therefore, a foundational act of rebuilding—an effort to heal the physical landscape and the social contract simultaneously.
However, the process risks inflicting a secondary trauma. For families, the official disinterment can feel like a bureaucratic intrusion into a private, painful space, formalizing a loss they were forced to manage in the most informal of ways. The campaign’s success hinges not just on logistical efficiency but on its capacity to handle this profound grief with utmost sensitivity, recognizing that for Khartoum’s residents, healing requires both the removal of the graves from the ground and the careful tending of the wounds they left behind.