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In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia’s commanders would turn their artillery on residential neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from the Sudanese capital.

From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side. Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother killed, a house destroyed.

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Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate, bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later, probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away. This wasn’t merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities closed, futures curtailed.

In the mornings, we drove down streets on the outskirts of Khartoum that had recently been battlegrounds, swerving to avoid remnants of furniture, chunks of concrete, potholes, bits of metal. As they retreated from Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces—the paramilitary organization whose power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces has, since 2023, blossomed into a full-fledged civil war—had systematically looted apartments, offices, and shops. Sometimes we came across clusters of washing machines and furniture that the thieves had not had time to take with them. One day we followed a car carrying men from the Sudanese Red Crescent, dressed in white hazmat suits. We got out to watch, handkerchiefs covering our faces to block the smell, as the team pulled corpses from a well. Neighbors clustered alongside us, murmuring that they had suspected bodies might be down there. They had heard screams at night, during the two years of occupation by the RSF, and guessed what was happening.

Another day we went to a crossing point, where people escaping RSF-occupied areas were arriving in Sudanese-army-controlled areas. Riding on donkey carts piled high with furniture, clothes, and kitchen pans, they described a journey through a lawless inferno. Many had been deprived of food along the way, or robbed, or worse. In a house near the front line, one woman told me that she and her teenage daughter had both been stopped by an RSF convoy and raped. We were sitting in an empty room, devoid of decoration. The girl covered her face while her mother was talking, and did not speak at all.

At al-Nau Hospital, the largest still operating in the Khartoum region, we met some of the victims of the shelling, among them a small boy and a baby girl, Bashir and Mihad, a brother and sister dressed in blue and pink. The terror and screaming of the night before had subsided, and they were simply lying together, wrapped in bandages, on a cot in a crowded room. I spoke with their father, Ahmed Ali. The recording of our conversation is hard to understand because several people were gathered around us, because others were talking loudly nearby, and because Mihad had begun to cry. Ali told me that he and his family had been trying to escape an area controlled by the RSF but had been caught in shelling at 2 a.m., the same explosions we had heard from our apartment in Omdurman. The children had been wounded by shrapnel. He had nowhere else to take them except this noisy ward, and no plans except to remain at the hospital and wait to see what would happen next.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic Medical staff at al-Nau Hospital treat children injured in shelling by RSF forces in Omdurman.

Like a tsunami, the war has created wide swaths of physical wreckage. Farther out of town, at the Al-Jaili oil refinery, formerly the largest and most modern in the country—the focus of major Chinese investment—fires had burned so fiercely and for so long that giant pipelines and towering storage tanks, blackened by the inferno, lay mangled and twisted on the ground. At the studios of the Sudanese national broadcaster, the burned skeleton of what had been a television van, its satellite dish still on top, stood in a garage near an accounting office that had been used as a prison. Graffiti was scrawled on the wall of the office, the lyrics to a song; clothes, office supplies, and rubble lay strewn across the floor. We walked through radio studios, dusty and abandoned, the presenters’ chairs covered in debris. In the television studios, recently refurbished with American assistance, old tapes belonging to the Sudanese national video archive had been used to build barricades.

Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.

But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction. I felt this most strongly in the al-Ahamdda displaced-persons camp just outside Khartoum—although the word camp is misleading, giving a false impression of something organized, with a field kitchen and proper tents. None of those things was available at what was in fact a former school. Some 2,000 people were sleeping on the ground beneath makeshift shelters, or inside plain concrete rooms, using whatever blankets they had brought from wherever they used to call home. A young woman in a black headscarf told me she had just sat for her university exams when the civil war began but had already “forgot about education.” An older woman with a baby told me her husband had disappeared three or four months earlier, but she didn’t know where or why. No international charities or agencies were anywhere in evidence. Only a few local volunteers from the Emergency Response Rooms, Sudan’s mutual-aid movement, were there to organize a daily meal for people who seemed to have washed up by accident and found they couldn’t leave.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic In Tiné, a Chadian border town, Sudanese refugees scramble for food provided by a local Emergency Response Room, part of a humanitarian network that has distributed medical aid and food to millions.

As we were speaking with the volunteers, several boys ostentatiously carrying rifles stood guard a short distance away. One younger boy, dressed in a camouflage T-shirt and sandals—he told me he was 14 but seemed closer to 10—hung around watching the older boys. When one of them gave him a rifle to carry, just for a few minutes, he stood up straighter and solemnly posed for a photograph. He had surely seen people with guns, understood that those people had power, and wanted to be one of them.

What was the alternative? There was no school at the camp, and no work. There was nothing to do in the 100-degree heat except wait. The artillery fire, the burned television station, the melted refinery, the rapes and the murders, the children in the hospital—all of that had led to nothing, built nothing, only this vacuum. No international laws, no international organizations, no diplomats, and certainly no Americans are coming to fill it.

The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.

To understand Sudan, as the British Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub once wrote, you need a kind of atlas, one containing transparent cellophane maps that can be placed on top of one another, like the diagrams once used in encyclopedias to show the systems inside the human body. One layer might show languages; the next, ethnic groups; the third, ancient kingdoms and cities: Kush, Napata, Meroe, Funj. When the maps are viewed simultaneously, “it becomes clear,” Mahjoub explained, that “the country is not really a country at all, but many.” Deborah Scroggins, a foreign correspondent who once covered Africa for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—a job that’s hard now to imagine ever existed—wrote in 2002 that a version of Mahjoub’s cellophane atlas could also help explain how Sudan’s wars and rebellions are provoked not just by ethnic and tribal division