The Missing Daughters of the South Caucasus

The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.

#1. INTRODUCTION. “My parents named my sister ‘Enough’”. 

GEGHARKUNIK REGION, Armenia – The trembling hands of Lena Khachatryan, an 84-years-old woman who has worked her entire life on the farm and the house, turned the pages of an old red velvet family photo album and stopped on one: “When my mother got pregnant with the third girl, they named my sister ‘Bavakan’ (‘enough’ in Armenian),” she said.

In Armenia, families used to call their daughters “Enough” when they did not want to have more girls. In 2023 there were over 1,500 women named “Enough” in Armenia (1,563, according to the voter census). Lena’s sister already passed away.

In China, another country with a strong preference for sons, some women are changing their sexist names, such as “Yanan” (meaning “second only to men”) or “Zhaodi” (“beckon to younger brother”). 

“My sister, however, was not enough, and I was born,” Lena added, smiling, resting her hands on her thick brown wool sweater in the living room of her house in Tsovazard, a village at the shores of Lake Sevan. She was the fourth daughter; the long-awaited son was born after her. 

When Lena married at the age of 20, she immediately went to live at her in-laws’ house, like many Armenian women do. “I had a difficult life”, she said. “There were no blankets, and we all slept in the same room: my husband and I and his parents. The cows were in the other room”. She had a miscarriage during her first pregnancy due to the hard work she did on the farm. Her mother-in-law, a very tough woman, told her that if she didn’t bring a child, she would kick her out. Finally, she had three daughters and two sons.

Son preference is an ancient form of gender discrimination. Traditionally, it manifested itself in what is known as “son-biased fertility-stopping” behaviour, that is, families had children until the number of boys they desired was born. 

However, since the 1980’s, when modern access to reproductive technologies to determine the foetus’s sex was developed, an alteration of the normal ratio between male and female births began to be observed. 

A pattern indicating that some families were having selective abortions of unwanted girls appeared. This practice is known as gender-biased sex selection (GBSS) – the voluntary termination of pregnancy based on the sex of the fetus; most often when it is female. It is estimated that the number of sex-selective abortions per year increased from nearly zero in the late 1970s to 1.6 million per year in 2005-2010 globally.

Sex-selective abortions have become especially visible in some parts of East Asia, South Asia and the South Caucasus, including China, India, South Korea and Vietnam, as well as three ex-soviet countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. 

The tiny Principality of Liechtenstein, which is one of the most restrictive European countries on the right to abortion, has also shown a high imbalance in the sex ratio at birth. 

Asia, a continent of men

The natural sex ratio at birth is around 105 boys per 100 girls. In some countries, however, many more boys are born. 

Why do some parts of the world have many more boys than girls than the natural birth rate?

Erasing 140 million women from the world

The term “missing women” was coined by Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who observed that many more males than females were born in India. Some academics warned that the consequences of this imbalance in China or India could result in an upcoming “marriage squeeze” with heterosexual men who will not be able to find potential partners.  

Since the 90s, some regions have seen up to 25 per cent more male births than female births, according to the UN Population Fund (UNPF). It is estimated that some 140 million women are missing in the world. 

In Armenia, an estimated 1,400 girls are not born every year due to a rooted preference for male children.

Mariam could have been one of them.

#2. CONTEXT. Mariam could have been one of them

Mariam’s parents had two daughters, aged 11 and 12, when in 1991, in the midst of the energy crisis after the dissolution of the USSR, her mother became pregnant again. They were the so-called ‘dark years’ in Armenia, where a combination of war, lack of natural resources and a blockade by Azerbaijan had plunged the country into cold and hunger. 

In the heart of the Gegharkunik region, a province of farmers and cattle breeders, people began to use firewood for cooking, candles for light and coats to keep warm at home. Marian’s parents then decided that if it was a boy, the mother would give birth; if it was another girl, she would have an abortion.

“You see, if it was a son, it would have been possible to continue with the pregnancy, but if it was a girl, we did not have enough bread or butter,” said Liana Asoyan, 45, the elder sister, at the nursery school that she runs next to the family home in Gavar town. Immersed in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994), she explained, families preferred to have male children with the idea that they would protect the country. 

Thirty years have passed, and one of the women present in the conversation is the baby of that story – it was a girl. Her name is Mariam. Her mother, while pregnant with her, went to the hospital several times to confirm the fetal gender and even visited a fortune-teller, “but she still had hope that it would be a boy because people told her that the belly looked different than in previous pregnancies”, Liana said. 

In the fifth month, as there was no doubt, they decided to terminate the pregnancy, but one of the sisters convinced the parents: “Would you have done the same to me because I am a girl?” And Mariam was born.

“The most important thing is that I’m here now”, laughed Mariam Asoyan, 30, dressed in black, as she breastfed her baby daughter. Her mother watered the tulips in the garden. Marian had never talked to her parents about it, “only my sisters teased me when I was a child,” she said. “We told her she is here thanks to us,” joked Liana.

The case of the Southern Caucasus

Armenia has experienced an alteration from the natural sex ratio at birth since the early 90’s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While the biologically normal ratio at birth ranges from 102 to 106 boys per 100 girls, in Armenia, ratios as high as 120 boys per 100 girls were recorded in the early 2000s, according to the National Statistical Service (NSS); they even reached 124 male per 100 females in Gegharkunik region, one of the places where more boys are born in the world.

The root causes of this phenomenon in China are a consequence of the one-child policy combined with son preference. In India, it is related to patriarchal perceptions that consider women less valuable than men,  who maintain the family legacy by carrying the family name and performing funeral rites for their parents; but why in the South Caucasus?

 There are similarities between the South Caucasus and some countries in Asia, Nora Dudwick, Senior Social Scientist at World Bank, explained in the report “Missing Women” in the South Caucasus (2015). “Skewed sex ratios are associated with patriarchal social structures and expectations that sons will support parents in their old age, while daughters will leave their parents at marriage to invest their labour in their husband’s family,” she said.

Gegharkunik, one of the regions where the most boys are born in the world

The news caught them by surprise in Martuni, a town of some 12,000 people, from which men spend long periods far from home working as seasonal labourers in construction in Russia and women stay at home with their parents in-laws. 

“There was a research, and it turned out that in terms of sex-selective abortions, our region, Gegharkunik, was in the first place, above China,” said Anahit Gevorgyan, head of Martuni Women’s Community Council, an NGO addressing socio-economic problems through the direct involvement of their residents. With 124 boys born per 100 girls born, they had a problem.

Gevorgyan is a tall woman who has been advising the citizens of Martuni for decades. In the past, she held a high position in the administration and people used to ask her for help. That’s why in 2000, she launched this community council, “I couldn’t do everything by myself.” They started working with women, she explained, and now they work on community development. 

At the council, a group of women were discussing transportation problems, cases of domestic abuse and what they call “the demographic issue”, referring to the fact that more boys are born than girls in the town. Anna Hokhikyan, a first-grade teacher with big eyes and short brunette hair, said that her students are 20 boys and five girls, and there are similar ratios in other classrooms.

“Parents of girls are happy and love them. The problem starts when society asks them: why don’t you have a boy? Who will keep the house?” Gevorgyam said.

 In addition, “the decision makers are the people who have the money, and many women don’t work in this region”, said Manan Mkhitaryanm, Project Coordinator. “The corruption level is also high”, she added. “So if there is an informal payment in the hospital, it is difficult for women to make their own decisions, firstly because it is not their money, and secondly because there are some shameful things that women should not do, like refusing to pay to the relative who works in the hospital”, she said.

Between 2015 and 2017, Martuni Women’s Community Council, in partnership with the International Center for Human Development, Armavir Development Centre and Save the Children, implemented a two-year programme on combating gender-biased sex selection in Armenia, funded by the European Union. It included working with community leaders and local authorities, as well as researching, training and awareness-raising campaigns. 

Among the activities, they produced several commercials for television and materials for hospitals and schools. “Let our sisters be born,” said a boy with a balloon in one of them. The aim was to get at least a 15% positive change in attitude and a 10% reduction in the number of sex-selective abortions. Gevorgyan admitted there was a positive change, but the challenge is still great.

#3. CAUSES. “In our family tree, girls are just leaves.”

When a study confirmed a trend of sex-selective abortion in Armenia, the first step was to understand why and who and when decided it. 

In the leaving room of a two-story house where a family raises chickens, sheep, and cows, there was a black and white wedding portrait on a tablecloth with drawings of pomegranates that remembered the day that Gohar Grigoryan, 53, went to live at her in-laws’ home and kept silent.

Gohar, 53, was not allowed to speak directly to her father-in-law. Today she lives with two sons and their wives and her three grandchildren.

Gohar covered her mouth with one hand, in which a golden ring shined, and her eyes watered, “I lived like this for four years, quiet.”  She was not allowed to speak directly to her father-in-law, she explained, so if she wanted to visit her parents, she had to ask her mother-in-law for permission, and she would ask her husband, “and sometimes he said ‘no”. 

Gohar is now a mother-in-law and lives with two sons and their wives and her three grandchildren. In the kitchen, the young daughters-in-law were cooking trout and bread with cheese and tarragon. The children ran around. 

Similarly, in other countries with a preference for sons, such as India, “in the absence of strong social security measures and lack of preference for old-age homes (…), the dependency on sons will continue”, explained the report ‘Patrilocality and Child Sex Ratios in India’.

Things have changed since her youth, Gohar admitted, “but families still prefer boys.” She recalled the case of a young woman from her village who had two daughters and became pregnant with a boy. It was a risky pregnancy, and the doctors said if she did not terminate it, the mother could die. “But the family did not agree because it was a boy”, Gohar said. The woman died after giving birth; the boy was born. 

In the report ‘Giving women a voice’ (2014), Jilozian, director of development at the Women’s Support Center, identified three main factors why sex-selective abortions increased in Armenia after its independence in the 90’s: in a society with a strong preference for sons, she explained, more accessible technology has allowed identifying foetal sex in early stage and a drop in the birth rate since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has meant that having fewer children is less chance of having a boy.

The root of the problem, however, “is the fact that they prefer sons”, said Anna Hovhannisyan, Advocacy and Policy Development team manager at the Women’s Resource Center of Armenia. “This is why we use the term ‘son preference’ instead of ‘sex-selective abortion’ to show where the problem is coming from”, she clarified. And “the reason behind son preference is very simple: it’s patriarchy, and more specifically, gender inequality,” she explained. “In postwar and militarised societies like Armenia, there is also a prioritisation for males as future protectors of our land,” she added, “this narrative is also making inferences, but globally, the reason it’s patriarchy.” 

There is a range of activities that Armenian society attributes to men, including the continuation of the family clan, the care of parents, the labour in agricultural regions and the defence of the country.

Armenia is a patrilineal society in which it is considered that only sons ensure the continuation of the family lineage. 

Armenian families are also patrilocal, meaning women usually move to the house of their husband’s parents at the time of marriage. As daughters leave the house, some families prefer to have sons to have someone to take care of them when they are old. Studies suggest that populations in areas devoted to intensive agriculture have stronger patrilocal norms.

“In many Armenian houses, there is a family tree. In our tree, my branch has my name and a leaf at the end, but new branches sprouted from my brother’s branch,” said Arevik, 27, a mother of two-year-old twin daughters. Armenians consider that only sons ensure the continuation of their family lineage.

On a spring afternoon, Arevik, 27, in jeans and sneakers, walked her two-year-old twin daughters, Sofi and Lia, in a stroller across a park on the outskirts of Yerevan. Older people on benches rested in the shade, children rode bikes, and a seamstress sewed in a booth. A man lighted a cigarette and asked, gazing over the stroller:

–Are they boys or girls? 

–Girls –Arevik replied. 

–Don’t worry, the important thing is that they are healthy. 

“Suddenly, everyone decided that I should be worried because both are girls,” lamented Arevik, who said that this kind of situation happens “several times, every single day, with strangers.” 

“I feel a lot of pressure because I know my husband’s family expects me to have a boy. For Armenian society, girls are not enough”, continued Arevik. She explained that the doctors informed her about the sex of the twins in the fifth month of pregnancy, “and a relative suggested that they had told her so late so I wouldn’t have an abortion.”

“When you have a boyfriend, they pressure you until you marry. When you marry, they pressure you until you have children. When you have children, they pressure you until you have a boy”, she added.

“Even before abortions, there are all kinds of rituals and people making money for families to have sons,” said Sevan Petrosyan, who managed ‘Caring for Equality’ (2015-2019), a four-year project on sex-selection at World Vision Armenia. “Magic, charms and fortune-telling were utilised not only to predict the sex of the expected child, but also to ‘order’ boys,” explained researcher Tsaturyan Ruzanna in the report ‘How to have a boy’.

#4. THE DECISION MAKERS. Silent violence.

Tatevik Aghabekyan, president of the Sexual Assault Crisis Center in Yerevan

On a Sunday at noon in a room full of toys in northern Yerevan, Tatevik Aghabekyan, president of the Sexual Assault Crisis Center, played with her three daughters, Marie, 11, Nare, 7 and Sona, 1 and her dog, Mimi.

“To be honest, as we knew I was pregnant, I dreamt of having a daughter because in a patriarchal system, if the boy is the eldest, stereotypes are more present”, she said. 

Then, a second child was born, a girl. And a third one, who was a girl too. 

“You need the fourth one”, her husband’s family started to insinuate. “But just that, because I’m a very strong woman. Maybe in another situation, they would push more,” she added. 

The missing girls after the third child

In Armenia, the imbalance between born boys and girls is especially alarming after the third child.  Although it has decreased in recent years, from 183 boys per 100 girls for the third child in 2005  to 121 boys per 100 girls in 2021, according to UNFPA, it’s still a worrying number.

Who decides? 

“My grandmother pressured my parents to give me to my uncle because I had an elder sister and I was also a girl, and he did not have children”, said Lilit*, 47. The negotiation lasted three months. In the end, the maternal grandmother took her to Georgia with her, “and I spent my first seven years just talking by phone with my parents from the post office. I remember I cried after every call, and my grandma bought me an ice cream.”

Tatevik Aghabekyan explained that in the years she spent working for women’s rights, she saw a lot of cases in which the families pushed wives or daughters-in-law to have an abortion only because the child would be a girl. 

“There was a woman who had one daughter, and the family said she should become pregnant again”, she recalled, but she got pregnant with another girl, and they pushed her to have an abortion. After that, Tatevik said, she had a lot of health issues, but a time later, the family pushed her to get pregnant again, and it was again a girl. “So she got divorced, and the girl was born,” she added. “She was strong enough to leave the family, others don’t realise this is violence.” 

“It is about education and some cultural changes,” said Mane Minasyan, PR and Communication Coordinator of World Vision Armenia and mother of a daughter, who explained that for many women in communities, home is an oppressive space “in which mothers-in-law and husbands are the decision makers”.

Between 2017 and 2019, UNESCO, and the Swiss universities of Bern and Lausanne and Brown University (US), worked on a study on ‘The Structure of Son Bias in Armenia’. They found that Armenians prefer mixed-gender families. However, when they only have daughters, they actively seek to manipulate the probability of having a son; when they only have sons, it is not a big deal. The survey also found that “husbands tend to be much more son-biassed than wives,” said Astghik Martirosyan, Child Rights Monitoring Specialist at UNICEF, “so pressure is coming from men.” 

Martirosyan explained that this was an unexpected finding since there was a tendency to blame only the mothers-in-law “because they are the ones who go to the hospital with their daughter-in-law for abortion and a key player and quite visible,” however “men are the driving force of son preference because they have the authority in the family, even if it comes out of the mother-in-law’s mouth.” This is why “all awareness-raising efforts are ignoring this significant factor: men and children,” she added.  

#5 RESPONSES. Is the actual problem being tackled?

In the examination room of a clinic in Achajur, a town of 4,000 people in the northeast of Armenia near the border with Azerbaijan, a gynaecologist was performing an ultrasound on a patient. Cows and horses grazed on these paths, along which once passed the caravans that traded between Syria and the North Caucasus. Their residents work the fields.

“In this area, women don’t visit doctors frequently,” said doctor Koryun Rubeni, dressed in a white coat, with a stethoscope around his neck. “But there was a trend for improvement,” he added. In the corridor, a couple, two women in their thirties and a girl, coughing, next to her grandmother, waited for their turn. The doctor sees between 35 and 40 patients daily. 

In rural areas, the number of families that prefer a son than a daughter is higher (16.1% vs. 5.2% per cent)  than in cities (11.2% vs. 5.2%). “When they tell me, doctor, let’s do an abortion, I immediately put them to listen to sonography of the baby’s heart rate. And, most of them change their mind,” said the doctor. 

But does restricting abortion solve the problem of son preference? 

Legislation, a risky path

Like in other ex-Soviet republics, in Armenia, abortion has been the main tool for family planning due to its availability and little cost compared with other types of contraceptives, explained the report ‘Giving Women a Voice’.

In 1920, under Soviet rule, induced abortion was legalised in Armenia. Soviet Russia (1917-1922), which would become the Soviet Union in 1922, was the first place in the world to legalise abortion. It banned it in 1936 and reinstated it in 1955 after an increase in mortality of women due to illegal abortions.

In 2022, abortion was still the primary method of family planning in Armenia. Half of the respondents of a study by the Advanced Public Research Group NGO had never used modern contraceptives. They are more expensive, sometimes not available, or even viewed with suspicion. “In the village pharmacy, we saw that they wrote down the names of those who bought condoms and how many,” Tatevik Aghabekyan said.

A three-day waiting period 

Intending to reduce selective abortions, in 2014, the Armenian Government adopted the first decree on the need to adopt some measures. In June 2016, the Armenian Parliament adopted a legislative amendment to the Law on “Reproductive Health and Rights to Reproduction”, allowing abortion until 12 weeks and restricting it after that, except for medical or social reasons. In addition, a three-day waiting period for women seeking an abortion was added.

“When research showed our number of sex-selective abortions, everyone panicked and started to think what to do,” remembered Tatevik Aghabekyan. Then, she said, the government and some international organisations started to speak about improving gender inequality, “but we realised that soon they were not talking about equality but limiting the right of abortions. And this is a dangerous path”, she said

“If I lived in a village, very far from Yerevan, and I didn’t have enough money to go twice during these three days of waiting,” Aghabekyan said, “I would find someone in my village who might be doing something that puts my life at risk” (such as a clandestine abortion). 

 Some women’s rights associations and activists fear that the problem of son preference in Armenia will be used to restrict the right to abortion instead of focusing on improving gender equality, as it was used in campaigns in the United Kingdom or the United States. “You cannot solve a women’s rights issue by sacrificing a bigger women’s rights issue”, said Astghik Martirosyan.

“Actually, this problem is not that much related to abortion,” said Zaruhi Tonoyan, GBSS Programme Coordinator on UNFPA in Armenia. “Abortion is only the means; the root causes are even deeper. We’re talking about the role of women and girls in society,” she added. Tonoyan also highlighted “the importance of men’s engagement in addressing the problem”. 

Tatevik believes that what nobody is adding to the debate is that forcing a woman to have an abortion because of the fetal sex or coercing her into having more children until a boy is born is a form of violence, not reproductive health, and it is necessary to drive it from that point. 

In 2016, World Vision collected data on gender equality and parenting from 2053 married adults and 637 unmarried youth, finding that 94% of participants believe “a man should have the final word about decisions in the home”. The survey also showed relatively high levels of accepted violence: 66% of men and 63% of women reported that “if a woman betrays her husband, he can hit her”. 

Rising awareness. How television and schools can challenge social norms

Astghik Martirosyan believes that “interventions across the life cycle of the problem” are needed in Armenia.

The History book project

“Do you know how many women are represented in History textbooks in Armenia?” asked Martirosyan; “less than five per cent are women,” she said, quoting a study by the World Bank. 

In 2020, UNICEF launched a resource box of History for high school students, aiming to help Armenian teachers adopt gender-sensitive practices. They provided 240 cards to schools free of charge on topics such as ritual weddings or women’s social activities. 

Female and male roles in television

UNICEF and the Public Television Channel of Armenia also took the message to the prime time by co-producing a 16-part TV series that was broadcast in 2021, targeting people of childbearing age and showing women empowerment models, such as a single mother who was a minister or man with several daughters advocating for girls’ rights. “But a TV series alone is not going to solve all the problems”, said Zara Sargsyan, Communication Specialist at UNICEF, “and these kinds of interventions are very expensive”. 

Other local and international organisations’ activities included television campaigns and doctors’ training.All the people interviewed for this article, on the streets and in Armenian towns, had heard about the issue of sex-selective abortions. 

 #6 RESULTS. A better trend and a worrying figure.

Several years have passed since a study warned that more boys than girls were born in Armenia. Families like Mary Sargsyan’s have grown in Gegharkunik, the region infamous for having exceeded China’s male birth ratio. She is now the aunt of three girls, Lilith, 8 and Susanna, 10, who like drawing hearts and dogs, and a 9-month-old baby. “My brother wants to have many children, three girls, and after that, having boys, but if the fourth is a girl again, it is not a problem”, she added. Mary would also like to have five children.

The sex ratio at birth in Armenia dropped from 114 boys per 100 girls in early 2010 to 112 boys per 100 girls in 2016 “as a result of wide-scale work conducted by the Government jointly with development partners, including international and local organisations”, welcomed UNFPA in a 2018 report.

On Northern Avenue, a lively commercial street in Yerevan of vendors of pomegranate juice, pedestrians with shopping bags and stray dogs, we asked passers-by about the

preference for boys and the changes in recent years. 

Lucy, 47, walking with her mother, said: “The male gender is considered an heir, the one who continues the gene.” “But I see around me that the mentality has changed,” she added. 

Mikael, 55, father of three, two girls and a boy, explained that they didn’t think about it until his second daughter was born. “Then, we thought that we should have a boy.” “We Armenians want to have boys so the nation can continue,” he said.

In the first semester of 2022, the ratio at birth in Armenia was 111 boys per 100 girls, showing “a trend that is clearly improving, but it is still not the norm,” said Martirosyan. 

However, the latest UNFPA also showed a worrying figure – the ratio at birth is three points higher than the previous year (108 in 2021), which some experts see as a consequence of the 44-day war in 2020. At least 3,809 Armenians were killed. “Some health workers told us that families chose a boy, because they lost their soldiers,” Tonoyan said. 

In addition, “if you look at the numbers for the third, fourth, fifth child and more, the sex selection is happening later,” said Astghik Martirosyan, “so there are families who instead of aborting are having more children to have a boy” “But if we look at the problem, which is not the sex selection, but the son preference, that problem wasn’t solved,” she concluded.

Arevik, the young mother of twin girls, showed us her family tree on her phone. The name of her daughters did not appear because they are female. Instead, in her branch, there was a leaf. 

Drawings by Lia, Sofi, Lilith and Susana

“All That We Had Is Gone”: My Lament for War-Torn Khartoum

We thought it would last a day, two at most. When the sound of gunfire began to ring around parts of Khartoum early one Saturday in April, calls from family and friends in the city sounded relatively little alarm. People were hearing that there had been skirmishes near the airport, and reported seeing pickup trucks ferrying troops at speed across the city. Those nearer central Khartoum said that they heard the sound of artillery, but others said there was in fact no gunfire, only loud explosions, and speculated that perhaps they were the result of military training exercises. A minority suspected it was the start of a clash between two military factions that had been jostling for power for months, but no one could foresee the scale of what was about to happen. Whatever it was, I was convinced there was no cause for alarm. I had been in Khartoum only a few weeks earlier, and even though the city felt tense, life was perfectly normal. “It’ll die down,” an old friend told me. “It always does.”

It didn’t. In the 48 hours after the first reports of trouble, life in Khartoum shattered. I was in London, and the news came to me in a horror reel of videos posted on social media and sent on WhatsApp. People trying to leave from Khartoum airport crouched in terror, sheltering from loud explosions. Planes preparing for takeoff were bombed on the runway. Military aircraft screeched across the skies of the capital, clumsily bombing militia targets positioned in civilian areas and levelling residential neighbourhoods. Tanks rolled through the city, crushing cars under their tracks. It was the last days of Ramadan, and the streets, which had only hours before been full of people preparing for Eid festivities, were now strewn with dead bodies.

By the Monday, central Khartoum was a battleground. So sudden and precipitous was the descent into armed conflict that even diplomats and foreign NGO staff, usually protected by early intelligence and evacuation, were caught along with the rest of the city’s residents, sheltering inside their homes. People clustered indoors, as far from the windows as possible. Even as it became clear that things were deteriorating quickly, I still held on to the irrational belief that it would all “die down”. That belief was shaken as videos of dead bodies decomposing in cars were posted on social media, and family members sent photos of their walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Since a revolution in 2019 had toppled the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for 30 years, Khartoum had become accustomed to episodes of civil unrest followed by security crackdowns. This was different.

News reports said that gunfire and mortars were being exchanged between a powerful militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and the army. After Bashir’s removal, the army and the RSF had taken over in a tense partnership that had quickly fractured. Anyone trying to escape the city was caught between airstrikes from the army and ground attacks by the RSF, who drove through the streets, parked their tanks and trucks outside people’s homes and squatted alongside main thoroughfares. “They’re right outside our home,” a friend told me. “They [the RSF fighters] were even greeting people as they opened their doors to check what was happening.”

By the middle of the first week, social media posts brought the news that RSF troops had taken over Khartoum’s airport. That was the moment I knew there was no going back. Every report after that moment felt more terrifying, as it evoked a population now cut off from the rest of the world, held hostage by the RSF. The militia quickly spread into all of the city’s central neighbourhoods, erected checkpoints, and began to harass residents, enter houses and demand money and food.

It seemed, in the blur of those early days, that the RSF was chaotic and lacking in discipline. A family friend on her way to pick up her elderly sister and bring her to safety was stopped by young RSF troops. After a tense standoff she apparently cowed them with her matronly scolding and was allowed to pass.

“They were bewildered kids,” a relative said, when she too was stopped at a checkpoint and interrogated. “Their eyes were popping out of their heads.” She was surprised to find them as agitated and anxious as she was – a jittery, trigger-happy crew who, it seemed, suddenly had more power than they expected.

Soon it would become clear that these incursions into residential areas were not a failure of the RSF’s internal discipline. The RSF was there not just to fight the army for control of the capital, but to ravage its inhabitants as well. Its members were drawn from fighting forces in a lawless region in the west of the country, abandoned by central government, devastated by droughts and famine, where competition between tribes for land and trading routes was fierce. To the militia, war was a living, and Khartoum’s spoils a longed-for reward.

Within the first few days of hostilities, banks, ATMs, mobile money transfer apps and remittance agencies all stopped working. Whatever cash, fuel and food residents had in their possession were all they were left with. No one had any contingency plans. Most had no stockpiles, and within days, food and cash began to run out. Devices died, mobile phone credit ran out, and as the fighting intensified and more infrastructure was hit, phone and internet networks began to flicker. Family and friends who had stayed in touch in the first hours of the fighting began to go dark. My sleep became a feverish half-slumber, stalked by nightmare visions of killings and desperate escapes from homes under fire. Each time I jolted awake, my clammy hand reflexively reached for the phone, which more often than not displayed no alerts and brought no relief.

There was no fighting around my family home, and my sister and her husband, newly married, who lived there, resolutely refused to leave. Once safe routes had been established to Egypt, I, along with other family members who had left the city, tried to persuade them to flee. Every day I would call them, and every day they would report, with an eerie, jolly tone of reassurance, that things were calm where they were, and so there was no need to leave. I would try gentle persuasion, then frustrated scolding. I would give up, then redouble my efforts, seized with terror that if something happened to them I would forever be haunted with regret that I hadn’t done enough.

Their refusal to leave was in part down to denial that the city could unravel so quickly, and in part to fear of leaving their whole lives behind. But their resolve soon crumbled in the face of reality: two weeks into the fighting they fled, making a treacherous journey to a small village in the east of Sudan. The morning they left, I unclenched for the first time in weeks, but the relief of their departure was quickly replaced by anxiety as I followed their progress, mentally tracing their journey as they moved slowly through battle sites and checkpoints, displaced, hungry, sun-struck, sleeping rough, wrenched from all that they knew, thrust into the unknown. Along with them, millions scattered across Sudan and into the neighbouring countries. Khartoum, a city that had for decades sat peacefully along the River Nile, was now a war zone.

A short iron bridge sits on the spot where two rivers, the Blue and White Niles, meet in Khartoum. Their waters join and flow northwards to Egypt and finally, into the Mediterranean. We crossed that bridge every Friday, when I was a child in the 1980s, on the way to Omdurman, a city that is part of greater Khartoum, to visit my maternal grandparents. The journey was long, so my father sweetened it with treats: on the way there, an oily falafel sandwich and cold bottle of soda from one of the kiosks near the river. On the way back, a cone of ice-cream from a small dingy shop that sold one unidentifiable flavour of soft serve. The rest of the entertainment was provided by the changing scenery. The trip from the far east of Khartoum to the far west of Omdurman covered the span of the city at the time, its old wealth displayed in large houses with elaborately designed gates and fences, its grand colonial-era government buildings and presidential palace, and finally, the small homes of uprooted elders such as my grandparents, who had moved from other parts of Sudan to follow their children to the city. My siblings and I gave nicknames to landmarks and houses, and flamboyantly saluted the two smartly dressed guards who stood outside the presidential palace as we drove past them. Without fail, they would tap the butts of their rifles on the ground in response. It never got old.

The Khartoum I grew up in was a peaceful, scenic place, from which the rest of the country seemed hazy and remote. By early 2023, that drive to Omdurman was along busier streets. The riverside kiosks had been replaced by bustling restaurants. In the 80s and 90s, many of Khartoum’s doctors, engineers and academics had moved to the Gulf, and their remittances funded the growth of an urban middle class that built modern apartments and handsome villas across the city. An oil boom that started in the early 2000s tempted most of them back. Expensive private hospitals opened. By 2010, there were 20 universities in Khartoum, up from three in the 80s. Most of them were private, with medical schools being the most expensive and the most popular. They exported doctors to the UK, Ireland and the Gulf.

But while the city prospered, for many, Khartoum remained a harsh, inhospitable place. Outside the university campuses, new residences and old villas, there were no pavements. Those who could afford to, drove everywhere. Ditches crisscrossed the city to drain rainwater, which lay there until it evaporated under the city’s intense sun, but not before it had bred a plague of mosquitoes. Money that could have paid for public infrastructure mostly made its way into the pockets of politicians. The result was a capital city of 7 million people who suffered from power cuts, poor water supply and a public healthcare system in desperate straits.

And yet, through blackouts, lack of water, sandstorms and short but paralysing rains, Khartoum somehow retained its ability to function and, in magical moments, thrive. Over two decades, bouts of economic pain caused by corruption and a lack of investment were exacerbated by sanctions. But as the city swelled and stretched with the arrival of thousands fleeing civil war and poverty in other parts of the country, a social contract remained in place. When the state failed them, extended families stepped in to support poorer relations, paying for their healthcare, housing and education.

The affluent urban population of the city believed they were immune from the strife tearing through the outer regions of the country. Even though Khartoum was periodically roiled by political turmoil and economic crisis, the city never descended into violence. Political elites imprisoned or exiled each other as governments changed hands, but always ensured that Khartoum was safe for them. They saw the importance of preserving Khartoum as a centre of commerce and culture. We told ourselves that, even in times of political upheaval, we were fundamentally a peaceful people.

But on 15 April this year, as the RSF entered Khartoum with the spoils of the city in their sights, it became clear that this peace had always been secured at the expense of the rest of the country.

April 15 marked Sudan’s fourth war, but it was Khartoum’s first. For 50 years, conflict has raged across different regions of Sudan, but not a single shot has been fired in Khartoum. While rebels battled for equal distribution of resources, fighting never reached the central stronghold.

For decades, political and economic power was monopolised by a handful of tribes settled along the Nile – a mix of the descendants of Arabs from the Arabian peninsula in the 12th century, and Indigenous populations from the Nile region.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the city saw an influx of refugees from the south, labouring in menial jobs and living in precarious encampments and squats on the edges of the city. Otherwise the war in Sudan’s south was a distant noise that only ever registered when there was an announcement heralding a breakthrough by the Sudanese army against the rebels. For a period in the early 90s, after Bashir’s Islamist government came to power in a military coup in 1989, Sudan’s longest war, which ultimately resulted in the secession of South Sudan in 2011, was given a higher profile in Khartoum and rebranded as a holy jihad. A weekly half-hour programme on Sudan state television, The Fields of Sacrifice, broadcast religious and racial propaganda against non-Arab southerners, and portrayed Arab northern soldiers as pious patriots. In one episode etched in my memory, a picture of the leader of the main rebel movement, Dr John Garang, was superimposed over that of a monkey.

As that war ended in the early 2000s, another exploded in the west of the country. Rebels from African tribes in Darfur, another vast, marginalised region, took up arms against the central government and demanded their share of the country’s resources. The government’s scorched-earth response, according to global human rights organisations, amounted to ethnic cleansing. In 2009, Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the international criminal court, when he was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The war in Darfur was even less of an event in Khartoum than the civil war. I had graduated from university a short while before the start of the fighting in Darfur, and any information I learned about it was from western media. Bashir spun it as a western campaign to isolate his government for holding on to its Islamic principles and not doing the west’s bidding, and Khartoum’s elites were happy to adopt that narrative. The few times the war was mentioned in my immediate circle, the view was that Darfur rebels were over-dramatising claims of ethnic cleansing. A relative breezily once announced that people from Darfur “weren’t Sudanese anyway”, whatever citizenship they held.

In the early 2000s, Sudan began exporting oil, and the wealth that it generated rendered Khartoum a capital of consumerism, leisure and property, even more remote from the areas under attack in the west. People built larger houses, bought bigger cars, and held extravagant weddings. I was always perplexed at how such lavish lifestyles were funded, even by people in the civil service. I later realised they were drawing on heavy subsidies provided by a government that had created an extensive patronage system.

A thousand kilometres to the west, villages in Darfur were being razed to the ground. But not by the army, which was busily partaking in Sudan’s boom years. Never far from power, the military had always operated on a franchise basis. In Darfur, it appointed Arab mercenary gangs on the ground to fight the rebels, or bombed targets from the air. Otherwise, it did not get its hands dirty. Generals who wore elaborate uniforms, never stained with the mark of live combat, luxuriated in benefits such as free housing. The Officers’ Club in the centre of Khartoum was the largest private club in the city, boasting lush manicured gardens, a swimming pool, several banquet halls, a billiards room and a bowling alley. On New Year’s Eve, there was often a large concert in the club’s amphitheatre.

The government handed over the business of quelling the rebellion in Darfur to the Janjaweed, an informal force made up of nomadic Arab tribes that for years had raided land and cattle from settled African populations. Their modus operandi was to kill the men, rape the women, loot and burn their villages. In 2013, Bashir’s government had come to depend so heavily on the Janjaweed that he regularised them into a formal military unit, the Rapid Support Forces.

As the RSF entered Khartoum three months ago, people were shocked at their violence, their disdain for the sanctity of people’s homes, and their destruction of the city’s landmarks and infrastructure. On social media, RSF troops are portrayed as beasts and monsters, barely human, arriving in Khartoum to raid and loot. Many people I spoke to from Khartoum, notably from older generations, expressed bewilderment at “where these people came from”, or concluded they must be foreign mercenaries.

“When we came, we found the people in Khartoum resting in luxury,” said one RSF soldier on a video recorded after the conflict started in April. “Air conditioners cool the air. The fridge has water so cold it cools your heart. The cars are air-conditioned. People here don’t work very hard. They come home two, three times a day. It’s not like in the provinces, where you go and sit in the bush all day only to come home at night.

“This rest that you are enjoying,” he said addressing the people of Khartoum, “we want to rest like you.” The intent was clear – the people of Khartoum did not deserve these lives, so vastly different from theirs, and the time had come for us to hand them over.

Once large parts of Khartoum and Omdurman were secured by the RSF, its soldiers began entering houses. If the inhabitants were lucky, they were ejected and told not to return. If they resisted, they were killed. By mid-May, it was clear that Khartoum, previously protected as key to the country’s stability, was, to the militia, merely a large pot of loot, ripe for the taking.

An elderly uncle living in central Khartoum heard the RSF entering his home before he saw them, as they smashed whatever was in their way and tore pictures and mirrors from the walls. After he pleaded with them, the troops warmed to him. He and his family were spared, but the troops told them they would have to leave the house. “You seem like a good man,” they said to him, “but your house is large, and even if we leave, there are others who have their eyes on it.” My uncle and his family took whatever precious things they could carry while the soldiers kept their guns pointed at them, and left the home they had lived in for more than half a century. “Did you see what happened?” my uncle asked me, with the same good humour with which he had talked the RSF troops out of ransacking his home. “We became homeless at the end of our lives,” he told me, with a laugh.

Reports of RSF troops stealing cars and looting houses started coming in from all over the city, posted on Twitter and sent to me by those on the ground. Incidents of rape were reported on social media – when connections would allow – and came with requests for emergency contraceptive pills. A graphic video was circulated, recorded by a witness who narrated the time and location, showing an RSF solder raping a young girl, as another stood guard.

Three months of fighting between the RSF and the army have wrecked the city’s infrastructure, historical landmarks and cultural institutions. A video sent to my phone showed Khartoum’s largest and most famous market on fire. Another showed Airport Road, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, deserted, strewn with the wreckage of burned cars. Khartoum’s factories, which made everything from wheat products to infant formula, were destroyed. The Sudan National Museum, which contains collections from the country’s pharaonic past, was taken over by the RSF. An archeological lab that housed ancient mummified remains for the purpose of research was broken into by befuddled RSF soldiers, who filmed the contents, including mummies. “These are all just corpses,” one narrates, “boxed up in a way you don’t understand.” Libraries and cultural centres were taken over by RSF troops, who saw these places not as repositories of valuable heritage, but the fripperies of a decadent city. Every time I saw a familiar building, street, market or neighbourhood emptied, destroyed or on fire, I experienced a sort of erasure, as if with Khartoum’s diminishment I myself, somehow, had ceased to exist.

In early July, RSF troops broke into my family home. Witnesses told us that militia men first entered on foot, then left, returning with a truck that they loaded with my family’s possessions. Most of what was in the house held sentimental rather than material value – family pictures, books, old furniture collected and restored by my mother, musical instruments and memorabilia belonging to my late father, including an ancient shortwave radio that was his constant companion, and the only printed copy of my pre-digital age university graduation thesis. These items will fetch little in a war economy, but they were treasured memories and heirlooms. Their loss symbolises the demise of a city that had itself, despite its contradictions and limitations, been a vibrant place of dynamic student politics, academic excellence, and musical and literary heritage. What the militiamen took or vandalised are the hallmarks of a life and a culture that was rich and deep-rooted, and, yes, built on the privilege of class and tribe. As our own home was taken over, that sense of erasure extended to my entire life in Khartoum as I had experienced it.

My family are now sheltering in a small village to the east of Khartoum. Those of us outside the country plot on WhatsApp groups and phone calls, on a daily basis, to try to get them out of Sudan, but our attempts keep failing due to unsafe routes and visa restrictions. An evacuation to Egypt by land was scuppered when Egypt cancelled visa-free travel. Another attempt via Saudi Arabia was abandoned when we realised that the country only allows entry to those with citizenship or residence of certain countries. We managed to send them a small amount of money, which went towards purchasing clean water, antibiotics and food. Other relatives have become refugees, having made a perilous journey by bus to Egypt and Eritrea, a journey that on one leg claimed the lives of three in-laws as their rickety bus overturned on a bumpy dirt road. One elderly diabetic uncle remains in Khartoum, refusing to leave, even though he has run out of insulin.

Six weeks before the fighting started, we were all under one roof in Khartoum, celebrating a family wedding. Now we gather on WhatsApp groups, checking in on people in the north and east of Sudan, in the Arabian gulf and in Cairo, as they veer between deep depression, relief that they have at least escaped the conflict, and anxiety about how to start again with no source of income. The older members are listless and quiet, glued to their phones, watching videos of bombings and house invasions, only springing to life to recount, over and over, the trials they went through or to bring news of another calamity. We, their children, nieces and nephews, plead with them to stop traumatising themselves. But they are stuck, trying to process it all, unable to accept their new reality.

In this new bewildered state, the question – badly timed, but pressing nonetheless – is, are Khartoum’s middle classes finally paying for decades of privilege and protection? If you asked any of the people who have been driven out of their homes, their answer would be that Bashir’s government, and the RSF, victimised the whole country. The 30 years under Bashir visited misery upon millions, including Khartoum’s middle classes. Throughout the 90s Bashir’s regime dissolved labour unions, purged the civil service and replaced those fired with loyalists. Those who resisted, including two uncles of mine, were thrown into secret prisons, infamously called “ghost houses”, and tortured. A cousin of my father’s who participated in a counter-coup early in Bashir’s rule was forced to dig his own grave and then executed, along with 27 others. Officers present at the time said that not all were dead when the firing squad began to fill the graves, and the soil choked the voices of the not yet perished who pleaded for instant death and not slow suffocation. “Just end us,” they pleaded.

Throughout the 90s the population suffered under a repressive sharia regime and harsh security state. Strict public order laws were enforced by the police, who meted out lashings and head shavings for inappropriate dress or partying. Bashir put down any protest movement with disproportionate force. The University of Khartoum was closed twice in 10 years, as students were lashed, imprisoned and tortured for any political activity that was critical of the government. I barely escaped a beating by hiding in a toilet on campus in the mid-90s. Early in Bashir’s government, three young men were executed for black-market currency trading. Along with those who left to build better lives, an entire generation of Khartoum’s middle classes left Sudan in that decade, as political refugees.

When Khartoum did finally reject Bashir in 2019, it demanded that the army return to barracks and the RSF be disbanded. Protesters chanted “We are all Darfur”. It was a moment during which, however briefly, one could see a path, a new model where power was not seized by a violent minority over and over again. For two months, the main protest site became a celebration of art, music, poetry and collectivism, a hopeful visualisation of what Khartoum, and all of Sudan, had the potential to become. I try to remind myself that the descent into war was not inevitable, that there had been an attempt to imagine a different, more equal country. But the hope was smothered when the protests were brutally suppressed by Bashir’s partners in the army and the RSF who refused to relinquish power. A bloody massacre on 3 June left more than 100 people dead, including many members of the professional classes.

Magdi El Gizouli, a Sudanese academic, says the odds were stacked against the would-be revolutionaries. “They probably could have done better,” El Gizouli said to me. “But their history was already determined.” The revolution was “a brave and daring last-ditch attempt to renegotiate the social contract”, he said, but it was fighting a system that had been finessed “for over 100 years in the Nile valley”. Now, as the city is destroyed, the means of political resolution are disappearing with it. “What existed in Khartoum before 15 April,” El Gizouli said, “its urban life, culture, whatever it was worth – is all you have.”

All that we had is gone. My lament for Khartoum and its people rises with the anguish of what is being lost. And yet it catches in my throat. The loss of our home, the scattering of my family, and their hunger and dispossession cannot be mourned without acknowledging that their fate is not the work of a unique and vengeful evil in the shape of the RSF – themselves young, poor and dying under the bombs of the military before they have lived. The RSF fighters’ decision to take up arms, their resentment and nihilism, were all forged in an economic wasteland where war was the most reliable living. They also represent Khartoum’s legacy, its failure to attend to social justice and equal distribution, and to foresee the consequences of that failure. As we yearn to return, the only hope for the city’s survival, and the safety of those who remain, is the acceptance that it can never be as it was before. As Khartoum burns, that tranquil childhood journey to visit my grandparents plays over and over in my mind, as I try to capture the city in my memory one last time, and bid it farewell.