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Inside the Mountain Stronghold of an Elusive Rebel Movement
As the conflict in Sudan rages on, an army has built its own state within a state — a vision of what the nation could become.
By the time I reached the hilltop over Kadugli in June, the war in Sudan had been raging for 1 year, 2 months and 7 days — more time than the war in Gaza, less than the one in Ukraine. Yet despite having killed many thousands of people and displacing millions more, this brutal civil war has remained nearly unknown to most of the world. Many NGOs no longer operate in the country. The United States Embassy fled to Ethiopia shortly after the fighting erupted. I arrived in Sudan with the help of a rebel group that controlled parts of the south. Armed men ushered me in over a muddy border road two weeks before without even a stamp in my passport.
We had now climbed the hilltop to a position the rebels had seized, a stony outcrop where a city of more than 100,000 people spread out across a lush African plain. Through a pair of binoculars, I could make out Kadugli’s residents beginning their day in what was still territory held by the government. Kadugli once served as a staging ground for a slow ethnic slaughter as the Sudanese regime tried to wipe out the rebels in the surrounding mountains. Villagers paid the price instead, as entire settlements were destroyed by barrel bombs. Many families hid in caves. But the dictatorship fell in 2019, and last year, the two generals who seized power in its wake turned against each other. A new civil war began.
Now, in this valley, the tables had turned: As the generals fought each other elsewhere, the rebels were on the offensive.
Kadugli’s food stores had dwindled since the rebels took the main supply route to the city, a wide paved road I could make out through the binoculars. You might have expected the people of this place to have fled by now. But nowhere in Sudan is safe. Khartoum, the capital, has fallen along with other major cities as the generals continue their war. The de facto government has relocated to a port on the Red Sea. Instead, Kadugli seems to be awaiting the arrival of those who sent the fighters on the hilltop: The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, known here by its main initials, S.P.L.M., which has been fighting Sudan’s government on and off since 1983.
As rebel movements go, the S.P.L.M. is an unusual one. Armed insurgencies have long been fueled by radical ideology, be it Marxism, in the case of the Central American guerrillas of the 1980s, or Islamism for Hamas and the Islamic State more recently. The S.P.L.M. is among the few rebel groups to claim it is fighting for a Western-style democracy: It has a Constitution and calls for a secular state in Sudan, though it does so while pointing a rifle. The S.P.L.M.’s stronghold is in the Nuba Mountains, a region in southern Sudan roughly the size of Ireland that remains one of the world’s most isolated places. Across the Nuba landscape, piles of pink granite boulders rise up, many for hundreds of feet, making ideal lookout points for assaults against government-held lands. The S.P.L.M. has been capturing territory at a steady pace during the current civil war — “liberating” it, in the rebels’ parlance. Kadugli is their next major target.
The rebel army eyed the city below as one fighter fiddled with the wooden handle of a rocket launcher. They believed the government had stockpiled tanks, armored personnel carriers and potentially large stores of ammunition that, if captured, could fuel their movement for many years. In short, taking Kadugli could be the first step in realizing their vision for the nation that they hope will emerge from these many years of war. “We are patient, and Kadugli is surrounded on three sides,” a commander told me that afternoon. “It is only a matter of time till you and I will meet for lunch there.”
Sudan’s war has left nearly 11 million people displaced from their homes — more than the entire population of New York City, and currently the single largest population of internal refugees anywhere in the world. One U.S. State Department official estimated in May that as many as 150,000 people might be dead in the fighting, though the chaos has made an accurate body count impossible. Hospitals have ceased operating. Khartoum’s international airport is a ghost town, overrun by militiamen. Western Darfur, on the country’s frontier with Chad, stands besieged by paramilitary groups who have rekindled the ethnic cleansing that made Darfur a household name in the 2000s.
And then there is the threat of starvation, the specter that haunts nearly all conflicts in Africa and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. More than 15 million Sudanese faced crisis-level food insecurity even before the war began. Since then, the fighting has destroyed not just schools and roads but also farms and agricultural infrastructure, as the warring parties pillage the countryside to sustain themselves. The possibility of a great famine, like the one that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s, has become real again. Yet in a world already ravaged by entrenched wars and the threat of more, the tragedy of Sudan has hardly registered in many corners. Protesters do not march on capitals demanding a cease-fire. The United States has kept its distance. “For a Full Year, the Bodies Have Piled Up in Sudan — and Still the World Looks Away” was the headline of a piece this April by Nesrine Malik, a columnist at the British newspaper The Guardian who writes about the country and was born there.
Perhaps the war’s greatest tragedy is that it started with a moment of hope. In December 2018, Sudanese protesters amassed on the streets to end the 30-year rule of Omar al-Bashir, a brutal military dictator who oversaw the genocide in Darfur and left the country crippled economically. After five months of demonstrations, the military forced al-Bashir out of power, and eventually agreed to a joint government of civilians and generals that would pave the way for elections. Among those negotiating the shape of the new democratic Sudan were professionals in the capital, exiles who had returned from abroad and the secularist rebels of the S.P.L.M., who had long been fighting for an end to al-Bashir’s regime. But the elections never happened. In 2021, the army joined with the paramilitary forces to stage a coup, banishing civilians from the government and leaving two generals in charge.
The first was Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, now the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, known as the S.A.F. Now in his mid-60s, al-Burhan was an establishment figure in the last regime who had spent his life in the main branch of Sudan’s military. The other general was Mohamed Hamdan, a younger and wilier figure known throughout Sudan as Hemeti, or Little Mohammed. Hamdan rose to power not with the armed forces but through a paramilitary militia called the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F. The militia, known during its early days as the Janjaweed, grew infamous in the early 2000s when it was deployed to Darfur as part of the ethnic-cleansing effort.
Like the transitional government before it, the partnership between the two generals didn’t last long. In April 2023, the R.S.F. launched attacks against al-Burhan and took control of most of the capital. The militia received assistance from the United Arab Emirates, according to The Times, even as the Emiratis officially pushed for peace. (The U.A.E. has denied providing support for either side.) Egypt has backed the military, which also has been using Iranian drones. Russia’s role remains murky: It appears to be playing both sides.
In the south, the rebels of the S.P.L.M. formed another front of the war, sweeping into towns and villages as the two generals fought each other for the control of the north. For decades, Khartoum had attacked the rebels using Hamdan’s militias. Now the militias had brought down Khartoum, creating an opportunity the rebels had not seen in years. They could secure not just their home but a much broader territory, with the prospects of even more to come.
Late this spring, the photographer Moises Saman and I asked the S.P.L.M. for permission to visit their enclave to see their side of the war engulfing Sudan. Word came within days: The rebel chairman, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, welcomed the visit. But with the R.S.F. in command of Khartoum, there would be no entering through the capital. Instead, we took a longer route through Juba, the capital of neighboring South Sudan, and flew to a refugee camp close to the border. There, we were met by an intermediary who led us to a point along the border the rebels controlled, and then into their territory in the Nuba Mountains.
Our circuitous route through South Sudan — which was cleaved off from Sudan in 2011 — was a circumstance of the region’s complex divisions. For generations, Sudan has been torn by a bitter divide between its north, which identifies as Arab and Muslim, and its south, which is ethnically Black and religiously mixed, with a large Christian population. Khartoum was founded as a slaving town, the center from which Sudan’s Arab population preyed for years on its Black one. Many Africans fled the slavers and came to the Nuba Mountains, one of countless waves of migrants who have sought refuge in the rugged terrain. The mountains would also create a fertile ground for rebels. Khartoum’s persecution of the Christian south continued, and in the 1980s an Islamist government introduced new punishments inspired by Shariah, a form of religious law based on the Quran, for all of Sudan. It was a bridge too far for some in the south’s population. In 1983, a group of Black leaders formed the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the armed faction of the S.P.L.M. A civil war — Sudan’s second — began that year and lasted for the next two decades.
In 2005, the two sides reached a peace agreement that led to the country’s being split in two: A largely Arab state would keep Sudan’s name and capital, and the mostly Black country of South Sudan would be created with a government in Juba. But the Nuba Mountains, which sat on the dividing line between the two Sudans, were given to the north. Its rebels there were marooned. After South Sudan became independent in 2011, al-Bashir tried to root out the S.P.L.M. — now renamed the S.P.L.M.-North — with airstrikes. The fighting continues to this day in the current civil war, the country’s third.
After nine hours driving on unpaved roads, we at last reached the rebel capital. Kauda, a farming town, sits in a wide valley between two sets of mountains. Stone terraces line the hills along the road where circular mud-brick homes sit under traditional thatched roofs.
Generations of guerrillas have fought from rugged lands like this one, but few have claimed the prize that the S.P.L.M. has — a state within a state where they are the law now. In Kauda, the rebels run their own court system with volunteer judges, deciding everything from dowry disputes to murder cases. A rebel-run school system teaches classes in English — a rebuff to Khartoum’s education system, which teaches in Arabic — and issues driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The rebels wouldn’t say how many soldiers are in the ranks of the S.P.L.M.’s military arm, though one person close to the S.P.L.M. told me about 20,000 fighters were scattered through the mountains. They call the territory they defend New Sudan.
On the first day in Kauda, we were taken to the rebel media office. On the wall, a handwritten sign promised a “strong revolutionary media system” that would “liberate the people of the Nuba Mountains from Stereotypic ideology which reduces their values and that makes them feel inferior.” Rania Wanza, 36, who serves as the S.P.L.M. information secretary, invited us in from a waiting area in a dirt lot under a tree. I asked her to tell me about the war. Rania — the Nuba traditionally go by their first names — said war was not new for her people; after all, they had been fighting successive Arab dictators since the 1980s. What was different this time was that Khartoum had fallen. Throughout her life, she said, Sudan’s leaders sent armed militias to terrorize ethnic groups on the country’s fringes, be it in Darfur in the 2000s or the Nuba Mountains in the 2010s. “The policy of the government was to use the militias to stay in power,” she told me. “This time the militias have brought down the government itself.”
Rania seemed unworried by the weakened government — it was losing territory both to the militias and her own rebel group, which was expanding its grip on the mountains. Her concerns had to do with the displaced people pouring in from many parts of Sudan, more than 700,000 people, according to the estimate she gave me, in a region of around 2.8 million people. The S.P.L.M. had never received an influx of so many internal refugees, and they had come on the tail end of a devastating drought in the Nuba Mountains that destroyed the local crops. “Now we are in June, and there is no sorghum in the market,” Rania said, adding there were now reports of people dying of starvation in several counties. “This is a first for us.”
That afternoon, when I visited Daud Eshaiya Elful, the region’s acting governor, he was also concerned about food security and the new arrivals. “There is enough room for everyone, but the problem is the water, the problem is the food. We depend on farming. There will be deaths.” Still, Daud took the influx of displaced people, some arriving from Khartoum, the very capital that had declared war on the rebels, as a vote of confidence for their cause. “The Nuba Mountains have become the safest region of Sudan,” he declared. I asked about two foxholes I saw outside the governor’s office when I walked in: When were they dug? Earlier in the year, I was told, a government airstrike nearby prompted to them to redig an old foxhole from the last war and add a new one. “Sudan’s safest place” was a relative term.
On another morning in Kauda I visited an S.P.L.M.-run elementary school. Dozens of students sat under a large tree doing final exams before the summer break as a teacher — a volunteer, like all civil servants — scored the tests inside. But there were limits to what these rebels could provide the Nuba. There are no S.P.L.M. hospitals, only small clinics. The rebels leave the heavy lifting of the health care system to foreign NGOs, several of which told me that potential donors were nervous about dealing with a rebel regime.
In a hospital run by the German NGO Cap Anamur — only one of two in the Nuba Mountains — I came across a young woman caring for twins. Lagomi Issa, a nurse anesthetist who was working in the maternity ward, told me they were born prematurely but their mother, a teenager, went into convulsions after a cesarean section and died on the operating table. The woman with the twins was 29-year-old Sumaya Hassan, their grandmother. I introduced myself to Sumaya and offered my condolences. She told me she was now worried about the twins. The grandmother was breastfeeding her own infant now, but the premature twins were refusing to take her milk. They would need baby formula, but she could not afford any. Sumaya, resigned, said the twins might die soon, too.
I thought again about Rania’s warning — that the S.P.L.M. couldn’t keep up with the food supply. At its heart, the S.P.L.M. was a rebel organization, built to battle the government with propaganda and weapons. It was far less adept at defending its people against the hunger that was spreading across Sudan.
The rebels were eager to show us some of the territory they had conquered from the government. But Sudan’s rainy season had begun, and the S.P.L.M. controls few paved roads. Most of the Nuba, if they traveled at all during the muddy summer months, did so on foot or by tractor. Two relief agencies offered to lend us several A.T.V.s that would get us to the front line faster.
My vehicle was driven by Yassin Hassan Kundaly, a 39-year-old journalist who accompanied us as a minder for the rebels. (Yassin’s presence, including during interviews, was the only condition the S.P.L.M. put on our visit; we traveled freely, determined our own itinerary and asked what questions we chose without interference.) As we chatted over the roar of the A.T.V., Yassin told me he was the son of a “radical Muslim” father — but, he added, his mother was a Christian. This wasn’t unusual, he said. Since its inception, the S.P.L.M. encouraged those in its territory not to identify by religion or even by tribe, but rather as simply “Nuba,” to downplay the divisions that have long plagued Sudan. The rebels also had the practice of identifying talented Nuba students at an early age and sending them abroad for higher education, bypassing schools in the Sudanese capital, where Islamist education was common. As a teenager, Yassin lived for 10 years in Nairobi, where an S.P.L.M. scholarship paid for him to learn documentary filmmaking in college. But he wanted to return home to be part of the rebel movement. Now he was guiding me on the A.T.V. into the mountains where he was raised.
We passed through a changing landscape: parklike savannas covered in pink lilies, and stony fields where lone baobab trees stood watch. Every so often we would pass a rebel checkpoint, where a man in fatigues would examine our papers and wave us on. The only constant was the unforgiving road of mud and rocks. About six hours in, however, an enormous paved highway appeared before us like a sudden mirage. The S.P.L.M. captured the road this summer after the war began, Yassin told me over his shoulder. It ended in Kadugli, which the rebels wanted to take next. For years, the Sudanese Army used its control of the highway to cut off the rebel capital in Kauda from a large enclave it controlled in the west; now the two were finally connected. Saman and I were the first foreigners to make the journey in at least 15 years, Yassin said. He gave the A.T.V. some gas, and we started to accelerate down the tarmac highway.
We arrived in Mehtan just as a turbaned imam began his services for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. The S.P.L.M. refers to Mehtan as a “newly liberated” village; the Sudanese Army lost it after what someone in Kauda told me was a protracted battle with the rebels last summer. As we entered Mehtan, a hundred Nuba gathered under a tree to listen to the imam read from the Quran, with the men and boys seated near his feet and the women arranged in a long row behind them.
“You are experiencing war, you are experiencing hunger,” he said, looking up, after he finished reading. “But you will not die of either one unless God has written for it to happen on this day.”
“Amen,” the congregants intoned.
When the services were over, the 65-year-old imam, Abbas Hassan Kuku, sat with me next to the mosque as some passers-by listened in. I started to ask him about the fighting in the village last year, but he said that seemed like a distant memory; he wanted to talk about the hunger his parishioners faced. Khartoum had fallen to the R.S.F., which meant no more supplies from the capital. Locust swarms last year consumed the sorghum harvest, leaving few seeds to plant. “Our lot is basically the same as it is for those who fled from the north — no one has anything to eat,” Abbas told me. While the rebels had freed the town from the government, he said, the liberation had brought no food.
Ramadan Alnour Shalu, 59, the village chief, had joined us, and I asked him to tell me what the fighting was like last year. He pointed into the branches of the tree under which we sat; I could see the fins of a rocket-propelled grenade peeking out from the canopy. Ramadan said that it was launched by government fighters. The battle began after rebel fighters captured a neighboring village early last summer, Ramadan told me. One morning, the distant figures of the guerrillas could be seen on the top of the hill above the mosque; shortly afterward, their rockets were pouring down into Mehtan. The fighting lasted a month. When the army retreated, Ramadan, himself an S.P.L.M. supporter, entered the village with the local commander, gathered the villagers and declared the area “liberated” by the rebels.
But it had come at a steep cost, the chief told me: At least 100 people died in the fighting, and the school and part of the market were both destroyed by rockets.
The death toll of the rebel offensive was becoming clearer to us as we traveled. We arrived one night at Al Hadra, a town where the rebels told us the government launched a retaliatory attack in March, dropping a barrel bomb on a school that they said killed 11 students and two teachers. When our A.T.V.s entered the village, it was already dark, and because the town had no electricity, only the silhouettes of the residents could be seen. Abdulbagi Alnuw Said, the village chief, joined us for dinner and invited us to spend the night at his home. He told us his 16-year-old daughter died in the bombing, and his son, Yusef, had just returned from the hospital after taking shrapnel in his stomach and eye. He wanted to introduce us to Yusef in the morning, he said.
After sunrise, we headed out to the school. Yusef did not seem to want to come with us. But his father pushed him; the boy needed to confront his fear, he said.
Abdulbagi recounted the day of the bombing. He was on his way to Mehtan to handle some business there when he heard the sound of an Antonov bomber, the Soviet-made planes used by the Sudanese Armed Forces. By the time his motorbike had turned around, the plane had dropped the first of four bombs. The second hit the school just after the students had left the courtyard for an assembly.
We reached the school, a brick shell of its former state with a crater in the courtyard. Bloodstains were visible on a wall. A chalkboard had been shorn in half. “My name is Coco Bashir,” someone had written in English. Abdulbagi took me to the spot where he found his daughter’s body, along with those of two of her classmates.
Yusef didn’t follow us. The 13-year-old sat alone near a broken wall. “He hasn’t been the same since he came home,” his father said. “He just stares into space.”
As the days passed, I heard about a massacre that took place in Tukma, a village outside rebel territory, where the forces of the two generals were vying for control. Saman and I started looking for survivors, a search that led us to Tanto, an encampment of 23 families that included people who fled from Tukma after the militia attack. They now lived in a community of makeshift huts made of sticks and grass, where one resident pulled me into his home to escape a downpour that began just as I arrived.
He said his name was Mohammed Maki. As water began to collect on his floor, Mohammed told me about his former home in Tukma, noting it was made of brick and had an aluminum roof that didn’t let the rain in. Tukma was a quiet village with seven wells and four mosques that, deep within government-held land, was home to a mixed Nuba and Arab community where Mohammed lived with his wife and children. But the peace ended when Arab militias aligned with the R.S.F. began to attack the barracks nearby. Mohammed knew it was only a matter of time until they reached Tukma, so he and his neighbors began organizing nightly patrols to spot them.
Rehab, one of Mohammed’s two wives, told me she was still in bed at dawn the day of the attack; she was four months into a pregnancy and feeling exhausted. While she slept, gunmen were sneaking into Tukma on foot, bypassing the patrols. The mother woke up suddenly to the sound of gunfire. She gathered the children up to flee. When the youngest boy asked her what was happening, she said: “These people have come to kill us.”
Mohammed, still on the main road, could hear the gunfire in the town and rushed in the direction of his family. The Arab militiamen were racing into town, too, driving pickup trucks and carrying rifles. They wore civilian clothes with scarves over their faces. Mohammed wondered: Where is my wife? But Rehab was running in the other direction toward the mango groves on the outskirts of town. As the shots rang out, she noticed there was blood on her legs. She hadn’t been hit, however. The blood was coming from her womb.
Rehab found her husband later that day at a displaced persons’ camp and gave him the news: They had all survived except the unborn child, who, a midwife had told her, was lost in a miscarriage on the road. The family slept that night on the floor of a school, fearing the militia would attack there too.
The next morning, Mohammed was told that the government had taken back the village from the militias. He and a group of men ventured back into Tukma, where they found burned homes with the charred remains of their residents inside. They buried the bodies they could recover in shallow graves.
Suddenly there was gunfire again: The government had not retaken the town from the militia. Mohammed and the others fled, but left three men after they were hit by gunfire. After a time, Mohammed insisted they return once more to see if those they had abandoned were alive. Two were dead, but one, a forest warden, could still speak. Before he died, he whispered the name of the man who shot him — a nomadic Arab whom they all knew as their neighbor. They had been armed by the R.S.F., he said.
“We saw him in the market, we shared ceremonies with the Arabs, and then this war broke out and it became Arab versus Nuba,” Mohammed told me.
They had now fled to a village called Julud in S.P.L.M.-controlled territory; they were safe, but they were also hungry. “We’re in the same boat as the locals here,” he said. “No one has food. We are all eating bush leaves.” In the afternoon, Mohammed climbed a tree and began hacking off the branches. His children, gaunt and some with swollen stomachs, collected the leaves into plastic bags, to be boiled down for lunch. A woman walked up. “The ones yesterday were sweeter,” she said.
One night, as I headed to bed at a compound run by an NGO, I found something hard under the head of my mattress. It was a Kalashnikov rifle. The owner quickly came to claim it. Whether he was an S.P.L.M. fighter was unclear to me; he wore no uniform, but neither did many of those I saw on the road carrying similar rifles at rebel checkpoints.
What was clear was that after so many civil wars, the line between civilian and militant had become irrevocably blurred. The next day, I met Kuku Idriss, who had been described to me as a legendary commander of the rebels for two decades, known for his guerrilla-style ambushes. But when we sat down in his outdoor office, he had traded in his fatigues for an orange tunic with a peacock print. He said he was now a deputy governor in the northern corner of the Nuba Mountains where we had come to meet him. When I asked him about the S.P.L.M.’s progress in the current war, he demurred at first, saying he was a civil servant now. But he lit up when I asked him about Kadugli.
So far the S.P.L.M. had stopped short of a total assault on the regional capital, Kuku said. Too many Nuba lived there, and the rebels did not want a blood bath to capture it. They would slowly choke the city off, hoping the government soldiers there, many of them Nuba, would surrender. Kuku paused for a moment. “My brother is also there,” he said, adding that the man was a government military commander and that the two brothers had been fighting on opposite sides for many years. I asked him when the two had last talked. It was about two weeks ago, he said. “We try to keep our conversations strictly to family business.”
We decided to visit Kadugli to see the rebels’ front lines in the civil war. It was a 10-hour journey on our A.T.V.s, one that alternated, usually with little warning, between the blistering African sun and thunderstorms that brought heavy rains. As we approached Kadugli, the landscape turned into a flat no man’s land. We stopped at a former government army encampment that now had been taken by the rebels. A mosque lay in ruins after what fighters there told me was a 12-hour siege. We passed abandoned tanks that were left too wrecked for the rebels to fix. The remains of a charred car lay on the side of the road, sheared into several large pieces, as if it had been snapped by a giant. Yassin, the S.P.L.M. minder, told me it had exploded as it crossed over a land mine while an S.P.L.M. commander was inside. The rebels had no mine-sweeping technology: Instead, they depended on what one commander described to me as the “traditional method” of demining, which involved detonating mines by throwing objects, like lances, at the bombs to set them off.
As we approached the front lines, the sense of excitement grew among the rebels. “From here you can see the lights of Kadugli,” said Lt. Gen. Jagod Mukwar Marada, the S.P.L.M.’s top commander on the ground, who invited us to an outdoor lunch at his compound 20 miles from the city. “But they are not turning them on anymore, because we can shell them.” On a dirt road we came across a herd of cattle being driven by a contingent of young fighters who lifted their rifles and cheered as we passed them, bragging that they had just raided them from the city. If the state of the cows was any indication of the situation on the other side of the front line, it was not a good one: They were gaunt skeletons of cattle, and some could barely raise their heads.
At last, we reached a rebel position that faced the northern side of the city. A group of fighters were huddled in thatched huts. Some wore military boots; others had flip-flops and Adidas sneakers. Messages came in over a shortwave radio to a commander, who pointed us in the direction of the government stronghold. But palm trees blocked our view. The commander suggested we should accompany his soldiers on a march to a lookout point on a nearby hill. We set off with a contingent of eight men. As we continued the march, more rebels joined us: Some brought rocket launchers and others more Kalashnikov rifles. The commanders held wooden canes like those used by Nuba chiefs. After most of an hour passed there were at least two dozen of us, and we changed direction and scrambled to the top of a rocky hill.
I reached the top of the hill winded, and a soldier there handed me a cigarette. I looked down at Kadugli through binoculars. I could see water towers and roads. An airport stood below us whose control tower looked empty.
Then I saw a truck speeding toward us. Suddenly there was some commotion among the rebels, and several men readied their rifles. But the fighters calmed down when they saw the truck had a United Nations logo. The soldier who had handed me the cigarette explained that the hilltop position had been shelled by artillery recently.
“They’re hungry down there,” he said. “And they are desperate.”
I asked him what the soldiers on the hill were getting for food.
“Just leaves,” he answered.
I then thought back to the lunch I had eaten that day with Jagod, the rebel commander. There had been goat stew, cooked baobab leaves and kisra, a spongy bread made from sorghum. It was the only meal we had eaten like that in the Nuba Mountains. As we sat, the rebels’ commander recited again the principles of the S.P.L.M. and their long fight against discrimination against Black Africans that went back to the 1980s. “We can open up people’s eyes,” he said, getting more animated. “Do they want freedom? Do they want rights?”
I asked him what would happen if the rebels took Kadugli. “We advance to other states,” he said. “We can advance to Khartoum.”
It was the first time I had heard anyone in the S.P.L.M. suggest taking over the capital. I asked him if he really thought the war would end with his forces marching on Khartoum. “Why not?” he said, looking at me more seriously this time. Yet the bravado sounded to me like the kind that insurgent leaders have used to urge their men into battle for generations. On the ground, I saw a different reality: rebels hunkering down in the mountains to shield the Nuba people from the worst of the war, as the two generals continued to burn what remained of Sudan. The S.P.L.M. felt too ragtag to accomplish more, but perhaps that was enough.
It was time to go, Jagod said. His men had loaded his Land Cruiser. A half-dozen of them jumped inside carrying the usual assortment of rifles and rocket launchers. But when the driver turned the key, the engine didn’t start. Jagod’s men looked at each other for a moment, deciding what to do.
Finally a few fighters came up behind the land cruiser and started to push it forward. The driver got the engine going, and slowly angled the vehicle out of the gate. Jagod climbed into the truck, and it sped in the direction of Kadugli.
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