Killing Without Bullets: A War Waged Against Life in Sudan

Abdelnasser Salim Hamed

This text is written at a moment when words no longer precede death, but merely try to catch up with it.

It does not recount Sudan’s tragedy as a series of isolated humanitarian incidents, nor does it settle for describing suffering or tallying losses. Instead, it seeks to dismantle the logic that has turned daily life itself into a battlefield. The issue is no longer the number of victims or the scale of destruction, but a fundamental transformation in the nature of the conflict: from targeting military opponents to targeting the very conditions of survival, and from a conventional confrontation to a war waged against society itself.

In Sudan, death is no longer a sudden event or the result of direct combat. It has become a slow, managed process—like a silent erosion of a collective body. In Darfur, Khartoum, Al-Jazira, and Kordofan, the brutality of war is measured not only by the explosions that are heard, but by what remains unseen: roads closed without announcement, markets halted without decree, supplies looted, and patients unable to reach treatment because access itself has become a risk. These are not collateral damages; they are a pattern of indirect violence that targets the foundations of life.

Killing without bullets is not a metaphor—it is a system.
A system that produces death as the natural outcome of disabling life itself. In this war, people are not killed because they are in the line of fire, but because they are gradually pushed to the edge of endurance.

To understand this slow depletion, one need only observe a single day in the life of an ordinary citizen. He wakes before dawn not because he has work, but because sleep is no longer a safe refuge. He surveys his surroundings with a calculating gaze: Is the wall still standing? Is the door intact? Will the phone charge, if electricity comes at all? Silence is not reassurance—it is a heavy void.

Life begins with a short list: water, bread, medicine. These are not wishes, but conditions for survival. He steps into the street with acquired caution, reading faces the way maps are read, choosing the least costly route. Streets are no longer mere pathways; they are probabilities. Every corner carries the memory of an incident, every silent building conceals an untold story.

Waiting has become a profession: waiting for the market to open, for bread to be available, for power to return, for news that does not carry the name of someone he knows. Time here does not move forward; it circles itself. Days blur into one another until dates lose meaning and the line between yesterday and tomorrow fades. The only measure left is this: did the day pass without a new loss?

Inside the home, small details become the center of life: a cup of water shared, a candle saved for a longer night, a child asked to whisper instead of laugh. Fear is no longer incidental; it is the overarching frame of existence. There is no planning for the future, no major decisions. Life is postponed, and survival is practiced as a daily skill.

This scene is not individual—it is a condensed expression of the logic of war itself. When life is drained in this manner, violence ceases to be an exception and becomes part of the daily organization of existence. Here, killing without bullets appears in its clearest form: exhaustion through deprivation, erosion through waiting, and the gradual stripping away of the capacity to imagine a life after war.

Since the outbreak of the war on April 15, 2023, this pattern has expanded into one of the world’s most complex humanitarian crises. According to recent United Nations estimates issued by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 25 million Sudanese are now in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, while the number of internally and externally displaced people has exceeded 10 million. Yet some losses cannot be quantified: trust, a sense of safety, and the ability to imagine a future.

Some conflicts are not managed solely through control of territory, but through control of people—the rhythm of their lives, their movement, and their access to food and medical care. When the functions of the state are sidelined by war, need turns into a parallel market, scarcity into power, and fear into an unwritten system of governance.

Most dangerous of all, this war produces a new human time—a suspended time without horizon. There is no long-term planning, no decisive choices, because stability itself has become a fragile possibility. This is temporal violence: when killing does not occur in a single moment, but stretches across days and years through the exhaustion of body and soul.

In Khartoum, the city returned to state control after months of fighting, but it did not return as it once was. The recovery has been primarily administrative and security-based, not psychological or social. Regaining control did not mean fully restoring life. Every street bears the imprint of confrontation: damaged buildings, disrupted rhythms, and walls that have become silent records of what transpired.

The government is working to revive the city by restoring services, securing neighborhoods, and reopening public facilities. These are necessary steps on the path to recovery, yet they collide with a deeper question: who can erase the terror of war from a city’s memory? Physical destruction can be repaired, but accumulated fear and heavy silence do not fade easily.

If Khartoum is struggling to heal, the picture in Darfur is far harsher. There, cities fell one after another after fierce battles and prolonged resistance by residents and by those who continued to fight to the last breath from the army and joint forces. Yet what followed the fall was, in many cases, worse than the battles themselves.

Cities were transformed into closed spaces, resembling vast camps where life is governed by fear rather than law. Violence ceased to be an episodic event and became a public spectacle and an instrument of rule. The openly broadcast killings of civilians were not momentary acts of terror, but deliberate messages aimed at collective memory, shattering any remaining sense of protection.

In this sense, Darfur was not defeated militarily alone—it was forcibly reengineered. The harm does not end with those who were killed or disappeared; it extends to those who survived, carrying restless memories and living daily under the weight of fear.

Yet the most dangerous aspect of this war is not only what is committed, but what is allowed to persist. Prolonged international silence is not neutrality; it becomes part of the structure that makes such violence possible. When these practices turn into a recurring pattern, they move from the realm of failure into the realm of crime.

International humanitarian law does not protect bodies from bullets alone; it protects life from gradual hollowing-out. When a reality is engineered in which deprivation of food, healthcare, and movement becomes expected and sustained, death—even if indirect—becomes systematic.

Here, the question is not who wins militarily,
but how many human beings must be silently exhausted before the world acknowledges that what is happening is not a side effect of war, but a full-scale war against life itself.

In such a time, writing is not an act of solidarity—it is an act of accountability.
And silence is not neutrality, but participation in killing without bullets.