![]() A British woman struggled to walk after her foot was struck by a stray bullet. ![]() A French soldier lay in an embassy hall, a tin foil blanket covering his wounds. While I made it safely into the fortified embassy building, others were not so lucky. With no water and food supplies dwindling, remaining there grew more perilous. After fighting erupted on April 15, I was trapped in an apartment where I’d been staying in Amarat, a neighborhood just south of Khartoum 2. There was no sign of foreign embassies or aid agencies packing up. While Sudanese citizens warned of potential clashes, analysts, journalists and diplomats alike leaned to the logic that each side had too much to lose from open conflict. Then, convoys of RSF fighters and army troops moved into downtown Khartoum. Long-smoldering resentments between the two forces heated up. The army and the RSF were at loggerheads over merging the paramilitary force into the army, a key clause of the deal. The start of the transition was delayed repeatedly. At night, the streets, which normally would have been bustling during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, were still. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, joined forces to overthrow a Western-backed, power-sharing government.īut on the ground, unease was rife. On paper, the new era promised closure to a 2021 coup in which Sudan’s two top generals, Abdel Fattah Burhan, and RSF commander Gen. They worried about the books, clothes and electronics they’d left behind and asked their mother if they could return to the house to retrieve them. Their children, a daughter of around 15 and her younger brother, were stoic, rarely complaining. The father was an anthropology researcher at Khartoum University. The Sudanese family had fled their home with almost nothing. She and her group had left for fear the building would be targeted the structure next door had been hit and caught fire. “They used our roof to shoot from,” said a British woman. Early on in the fighting, Sudanese military planes flattened several RSF bases in the capital of Khartoum, driving paramilitary fighters into the streets. The guests exchanged stories of what they’d endured, seeing death outside their doors, armed men robbing people, looting shops and commandeering buildings. ![]() ![]() Whenever the explosions got closer, some guests - myself included - moved to the stairwells for safety. We spent long hours together in the hotel lobby, the sound of gunfire almost constant in the mornings. In this place of temporary safety, we all began to search for a way to escape the city. I got to the hotel on the seventh day of the fighting. The city had never seen anything like it, as the army and the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces blasted each other in the streets with automatic rifles, artillery and airstrikes.Įach day, millions of Sudanese caught between them faced terrifying choices of how to survive: Stay hiding at home, where a bullet or a missile could blast through a wall, or make a run for it, risking the mayhem outside.Īfter days trapped in their homes, many chose to flee to the Liasamin Hotel - most of them on foot from the nearby neighborhood known as Khartoum 2, when the destruction became too great. Now, it was simply a five-story place of refuge.įighting between Sudan’s two most powerful generals had reduced the capital to an urban battlefield. In better times, the Lisamin Safari Hotel catered to small tour groups that came to see Sudan’s little-known attractions - the ancient pyramids of Merowe and the coral reefs of the Red Sea. If your files get corrupted at any point, it can be extremely difficult for you to retrieve your encrypted work.KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - We were a diverse group of more than a dozen people, hunkered down in a small hotel in central Khartoum - a Sudanese family and the Sudanese hotel staff, a few British and French citizens, a Syrian family and a Lebanese man. If you go this route, write down your journal entries in a paper diary.To keep your diary secure, delete the original folder, which removes the unencrypted copy. Then, select either option under encryption, and insert the password you want to use. Then choose the name of the disk, and where to save it to. In the menu bar, click Files>New Image>New Image from Folder. For a Mac, put your diary file in a folder, then go to Finder>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.Select the box that says “Encrypt contents to secure data”, then click OK. On the General tab, click the advanced button. To encrypt files on Windows, right-click on the file or folder and hit “Properties”.Doing this will prevent you from accessing your diary quickly, but encryption will keep your writing secure. Encrypting your diary means that you'll need a password or some decryption key to gain access to your work. Encrypt your journal for ultimate privacy.
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