Killed Without Bullets: A War Waged Against Life in Sudan

Abdelnasser Salim Hamed

This text is written at a moment when words no longer outrun death; they 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. Rather, it seeks to dismantle the logic that has turned everyday life itself into a battlefield.

The issue is no longer the number of victims or the scale of destruction, but a profound shift in the nature of the conflict: from targeting military adversaries to targeting the very conditions of survival; from open 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 cruelty of war is not measured only by the explosions one hears, but by what goes unseen: roads closed without announcement, markets halted without decree, stockpiles looted, and patients unable to reach treatment because access itself has become a risk. These are not collateral damages; they are a form of indirect violence that targets the conditions 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 stand in the line of fire, but because they are gradually pushed to the edge of their capacity to endure.

To grasp this slow depletion, it is enough to look at 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 practiced, calculating eye: Is the wall still standing? Is the door intact? Will the phone charge if there is electricity? Silence is not reassurance—it is a heavy void.

Life begins with a short list: water, bread, medicine. Not wishes, but conditions of survival. He steps into the street with learned caution, reads faces as one reads maps, and chooses the least costly route. Streets are no longer just pathways; they are probabilities. Every corner carries the memory of an incident, every silent building conceals an untold story.

Waiting has become an occupation: 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 no longer moves forward; it circles itself. Days are so alike that dates have lost meaning, and the line between yesterday and tomorrow has blurred. The only measure left is whether the day passed without a new loss.

At 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 general framework 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. When life is drained in this way, 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, attrition through waiting, and the gradual stripping away of the ability to imagine a postwar future.

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

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

Most dangerous of all, this war produces a new human time: a suspended time with no horizon. 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 mind.

In Khartoum, the city has returned to state control after months of fighting, but it is no longer the same. The return has been administrative and security-focused rather than psychological or social. Regaining control did not mean fully restoring life. Every street bears the marks of confrontation: damaged buildings, roads stripped of their rhythm, and walls turned into silent records of what transpired.

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

If Khartoum is attempting to recover, 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 fought to the last breath from the army and joint forces. But what followed the fall was, in many cases, worse than the battle itself.

Cities turned into closed spaces, resembling vast camps where life is governed by fear rather than law. Violence ceased to be episodic and became public spectacle and an instrument of rule. The openly circulated scenes of civilians being killed were not momentary intimidation, but deliberate messages aimed at the collective memory, shattering any sense of a minimum level of protection.

In this sense, Darfur was not only defeated militarily; it was forcibly re-engineered. The harm does not end with those who were killed or disappeared—it extends to those who remain alive, carrying an unquiet memory and living daily under the weight of terror.

Yet the most dangerous aspect of this war is not only what is committed within it, but what is allowed to persist. Prolonged international silence is not neutrality; it becomes part of the structure that makes this violence possible. When such 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 created in which deprivation of food, healthcare, and movement becomes an expected and sustained outcome, death—even if indirect—becomes systematic.

Here, the question is not: who wins militarily?
But rather: how many human beings must be silently depleted 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, but an act of accountability.
And silence is not neutrality—it is participation in killing without bullets.