A month ago, Mohsen Abdelrahman owned a small but profitable jewelry store in Khartoum. Now, he has nothing to his name but a broken lock and a hollowed-out shopfront. Ten days after battles broke out between two rival Sudanese generals, he received a call from the shopkeeper next door to his business saying it had been looted.

Despite the danger, Abdelrahman braved the relentless gunfire and air strikes ravaging the capital to get to his store on the other side of town, only to have his worst fears confirmed. “Everything I owned was gone,” he told AFP, adding that now he just wants “this war to end, so I can start over.” There is no end in sight to the conflict pitting the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan against those of his deputy-turned-foe Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

But even before the fighting broke out, Sudan was one of the world’s poorest countries, brought to its knees by decades of international sanctions under former dictator Omar Al-Bashir, as well as rampant corruption and the 2011 independence of South Sudan which held almost all the country’s oil.

After a brief respite following Bashir’s ouster, a 2021 coup led by Burhan and Daglo saw the international community cut $2 billion of annual aid to the country, slashing 40 percent of its budget. The economy has been in free fall since, with the government never announcing a 2023 budget but instead boasting that dizzying inflation had recently fallen under 100 percent.

Broken locks

Prior to the ongoing conflict, Khartoum saw signs of economic renewal, with international restaurants and supermarkets stocked with organic food and American goods — although much of it was smuggled through the Sahel. But nowadays Khartoum, which is home to five million people, is a city whose shattered windows, gutted shopfronts, pockmarked cars and empty shelves bear witness to the rampant violence and looting.