Three Years of Silence: A Sudanese Journalist’s Journey From a Digital Dead Zone

22 March 2026

Mohamed Atim

March 21, 2026 (PORT SUDAN) – After three years of absolute silence, during which the mobile phones of El Fasher were little more than dead pieces of plastic, Dr Mohamed Suleiman Atim stood before a telecommunications office in Port Sudan, staring at his screen in disbelief.

Atim, a veteran journalist and editor-in-chief of the Al-Sharaa Al-Sudani newspaper, felt his heart pound as he inserted a new SIM card into his old device. For 1,000 days, that phone had been a paperweight. When the network name finally flickered into life, he broke down.

“I burst into tears,” Atim said. “Three years of searching for a signal, and now it appears. I was crying as I saw light return to a phone that had remained dead all these years.”

Since April 15, 2023, when the first shots of Sudan’s civil war were fired in Khartoum, the city of El Fasher had been plunged into a sensory void. Communication towers were looted or levelled, leaving the population to hear the voices of their loved ones only in their memories.

The isolation was more than a technical glitch; it was a cloak for a humanitarian catastrophe. In the silence, children died in shelling, and the wounded bled out in homes that could not call for help.

By July 2023, a black market for connectivity had emerged. Starlink satellite kits were smuggled across the desert from Libya and Chad. They offered a lifeline, but at a staggering cost of 3 million Sudanese pounds, a fortune in a war economy.

Even for those who could afford the $160 monthly subscription, the signal was a source of anxiety. Users hid their equipment from armed groups, fearing confiscation or surveillance, and the connection often vanished during the heavy shelling that defined daily life.

The psychological toll of the blackout was as devastating as the physical violence. One journalist recounted watching a nine-year-old boy suffer from shrapnel wounds with no way to call for a doctor, while the crushing weight of isolation drove some residents to the brink of suicide.

“The children here do not just suffer from hunger,” Atim said. “The disconnection from hope makes a child die twice: once from hunger, and once from the silence.”

When El Fasher finally fell on Oct. 26, 2025, the silence gave way to a desperate exodus. Thousands of civilians fled through Tawila and across the Chadian border, navigating a landscape Atim described as “lined with bodies partially covered by the shifting sands.”

Upon reaching the relative safety of Port Sudan, Atim’s first act was to reclaim his digital identity. But the restoration of his service brought a second wave of trauma—the digital deluge of three years of missed grief.

As his phone vibrated with hundreds of accumulated messages, he found himself reading a three-year-old timeline of tragedy. The first message he opened was from a friend: a former university classmate had been dead for two years.

“My colleague who sat next to me at Al-Neelain University was gone, and I never knew,” Atim said. “It felt as if time itself had exploded in my face.”

In the coastal city, Atim has since recovered his official national ID card, a step he said made him feel like a person again rather than a “shadow in a displacement camp.” Yet, even with a full signal and a restored identity, a sense of futility remains.

Standing on the shores of the Red Sea, Atim still sees the disconnect between his working phone and a world that seems to have moved on.

“The internet has returned for me, but the world has not,” he said. “We are screaming, but no one is listening. I still ask myself: how many more will die in silence before the world decides to hear us?”