Dread washes over Bilal Khorsahein every time he gets a call from his beloved homeland where the Blue Nile and White Nile converge.
“Anytime the phone rings, you expect the worst,” Khorsahein, of Naperville, told me of the crippling unrest that has upended Sudan ever since the country’s army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group starting fighting for government control last year.
Khorsahein’s brother and sister have been ping-ponging to safety between their ancestral village and Khartoum, where they are currently residing with their families. Once they returned to the capital to find the roof of one of their properties pockmarked with bullet holes. For now, there is only the din of distant gunfire.
“We are lucky,” Khorsahein, 49, said. The software engineer said some of his friends in the Chicago area can’t even reach their relatives in Sudan where more than 15,000 people have been killed and 10 million others internally displaced.
When World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned last week that mass starvation is a “very real risk,” it wasn’t news to Khorsahein. He heard about the hungry eating cats. The desperate have also been ingesting leaves, grass and soil to keep from starving to death.
That catastrophic despair along with the war that spawned it have either been “forgotten or ignored” by the world, Tedros said, urging the media to continue drawing attention to the African nation’s plight.
Khorsahein and his peers have been raising awareness in their own way by establishing the Greater Chicago Sudanese American Association earlier this year.
The nonprofit’s long-term goal is to provide humanitarian relief, adequate health and nutrition, access to clean water and educational and economic opportunities to underprivileged communities in Sudan and to Sudanese refugees living in the United States. But the immediate focus has been to feed the rapidly growing malnourished population in Sudan where nearly all hospitals have been forced out of service, further limiting access to life-saving aid.
After collecting donations through word of mouth, local mosques and its website, the Greater Chicago Sudanese American Association has been able to arrange several food distribution operations overseas with the assistance of a pair of humanitarian organizations that run community kitchens.
“If you don’t feel your people’s suffering, no one else will,” said Ali Elkateep, an engineer who volunteers as the public relations coordinator for the Greater Chicago Sudanese American Association.
Elkateep’s family, including his parents, three brothers and two younger sisters fled from Khartoum to the city of Shendi in northern Sudan when the latest conflict erupted. His brothers’ businesses — a building supply store, bakery and supermarket — were destroyed. His married sisters were among the two million Sudanese driven abroad by the violence. One sister went to neighboring Egypt with her husband and children; the other joined her spouse in Saudi Arabia where he had been working.
The Rockford-based Elkateep, like Khorsahein, constantly worries about his loved ones, but he recognizes that they are relatively fortunate. “They are depending on me,” said 44-year-old Elkateep, who immigrated to Chicago in 2005.
Sudan’s tumultuous history, subsequent to its independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956, contrasts with the ease the two Nile rivers in Khartoum co-mingle before flowing north into the Mediterranean Sea. The latest civil war, which has rekindled ethnic bloodshed in the western Darfur region, is rooted in the ouster of autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Al-Bashir’s expulsion was welcomed, but hopes for democracy were quickly dashed in 2021 after the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces came together to overthrow the transitional civilian government. When the militaries couldn’t agree on how to move forward or integrate the RSF into the SAF, tension turned to violence.
Some Americans may recall that Sudan sheltered Osama bin Laden for a few years before expelling him in 1996. More than two decades later, the resource rich-country was placed on Donald Trump’s infamous travel ban list that also included several other Muslim-majority countries. Then in 2020, Sudan’s pariah status was officially lifted when Trump’s administration removed it from the state sponsors of terrorism list in what many deemed a quid pro quo for normalizing ties with Israel.
It is Israel’s unabated response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Russia-Ukraine war that have captured the gaze of the international community.
Khorsahein, Elkateep and others members of the Sudanese diaspora appreciate the gravity of the crises. But they also hope more people around the world, including Americans, extend their compassion to the innocent civilians in Sudan, and demand an end to the slaughter there too.
“Most people think people are always dying in Africa anyway,” so they are unmoved by the casualties resulting from the continent’s frequent wars and conflicts, Khorsahein said.
They also could be too consumed with their own challenges, such as food insecurity, to care.
But for those of us who can open our hearts, and wallets, combating an impending famine in Sudan is a war worth fighting.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board.
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