CAIRO: On a mountain near Sudan’s border, journalists climb rugged slopes, phones held high, hoping to catch a faint signal from neighboring Chad to send stories amid the war’s two-year communications blackout.
Journalists say efforts like these are their only way to tell the world about the horrors unfolding in Darfur, where accounts of sexual violence, ethnic massacres and mass displacement continue to emerge.
Since fighting erupted between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, at least 28 reporters have been killed, according to Sudan’s journalist union.
Dozens more have been detained and tortured, while many have been displaced and cut off from electricity, water and Internet.
Noon, a 35-year-old freelance journalist who requested a pseudonym for her safety, said she was forced to flee the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina after reporting on ethnically motivated mass killings committed by the RSF and its allied militias in 2023.
Her stories on the massacres, where UN experts say up to 15,000 mostly Massalit people were killed — leading to genocide accusations against the RSF — made her a target.
“They raided my family’s house. They took all my equipment, my cameras, everything,” she said.
By the third raid, she knew she had to go, and fled with her family to the eastern state of Gedaref, nearly 1,800 kilometers (1120 miles) away.
But even there, she was not safe.


While reporting in a displacement shelter, she said she was arrested by the army, accused of collaborating with the RSF and forced to sign a pledge to obtain government approval on every story.
According to Reporters Without Borders, since the start of the war more than 400 journalists have fled the country, which last year was second only to Gaza in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ tally of reporters killed.
Yet some remain on the ground, working in secret with nothing to their name.
In the North Darfur town of Tawila, where the UN says 180,000 survivors of nearby RSF attacks are sheltering, 30-year-old photojournalist Ibrahim works undercover to report on those trapped between famine and brutal violence.
“No one can know what I do,” Ibrahim, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his identity, told AFP.
“If they find out, they’ll arrest me or take my phone,” he said.
Last July, RSF fighters detained him in El-Fasher and accused him of being an army spy. He said they tortured him for five days and confiscated his equipment, documents and money.
Since then, he has sent his family out of Darfur and relocated to Tawila, leaving his cameras behind. His mobile phone is all he has left.



Even before the war, Sudan was a hostile environment for journalists, consistently ranking near the bottom of the Reporters Without Borders’s Press Freedom Index.
Since the fighting began, conditions have only worsened. Many journalists have been forced to flee, while others remain trapped across the country, struggling to survive.
In the central state of Al-Jazira, the country’s breadbasket prior to the war, veteran reporter Youssef, 62, now raises goats and grows sorghum to support himself.
“The last salary I received was at the beginning of 2024,” he told AFP by phone from state capital Wad Madani.
“My newspaper moved operations to Cairo, but I still send them reports — when I can get a signal.”
Youssef, whose name has also been changed, lost all contact with his editors and the outside world for months while the RSF controlled the city.
In February 2024, fighters stormed his home.
“They tied my hands, blindfolded me, shackled my feet,” he recalled. “No food. No toilets. I was detained for three days.”
He said when he told those interrogating him he was a journalist, a fighter said: “That is the biggest crime.”
He was freed only after a local community leader signed a guarantee pledging that Youssef would remain under house arrest. He did not leave until the army recaptured Wad Madani in January.
Both Youssef and Ibrahim say they have received no protection from local or international media organizations.
Still, Ibrahim continues, turning a coffee shop in Tawila — powered by a single public solar panel — into a makeshift newsroom.
“Who else will tell the world what’s happening in Darfur if we leave?” he told AFP, crouching to reach his phone, plugged into an overloaded extension cord.
“No one else will tell these stories. No one can imagine the atrocities happening here.”

NEW YORK: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to halt efforts to shut down Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, whose news broadcasts are funded by the government to export US values to the world.
US District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing six lawsuits from employees and contractors affected by the shutdown of US Agency for Global Media, ordered the administration to “take all necessary steps” to restore employees and contractors to their positions and resume radio, television and online news broadcasts.
USAGM placed over 1,000 employees on leave and told 600 contractors they would be terminated after the agency abruptly shut down the broadcasts in March.
The ruling was a “significant victory for press freedom,” said Andrew Celli, an attorney representing VOA employees in the lawsuits.
USAGM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
VOA was founded to combat Nazi propaganda at the height of World War Two, and has become a major international media broadcaster.
Congress has funded and authorized the broadcasts to provide an “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” source of news in other nations and export the “cardinal American values of free speech, freedom of the press, and open debate,” Lamberth wrote. Congress made the broadcasts mandatory and did not allow the executive branch to unilaterally terminate or defund them, he ruled.
Trump adviser Kari Lake announced the shutdown on March 15, placing nearly all USAGM employees on leave, saying the agency was “irretrievably broken” and biased against US President Donald Trump.
Lamberth rejected USAGM’s arguments in court that it had not made a “final decision” on the future of the broadcasts and that the lawsuits should be handled has a series of “employment disputes” with terminated workers.
“It strains credulity to conclude the USAGM is ‘still standing’ when its 80-year-old flagship news service, VOA, has gone completely dark with no signs of returning,” Lamberth wrote.
Lamberth heard arguments from lawyers for VOA employees and the Trump administration on Thursday. He asked several questions probing Trump’s statements indicating that VOA’s news coverage was too critical of America and personally of him.
“I thought that one of the strengths of Voice of America was that it had the nerve to tell the truth about America,” Lamberth said.
Lamberth also pointed out that Trump had signed stopgap government funding measure last month that appropriated funds for USAGM. Trump had not vetoed the spending bill or asked Congress to rescind that funding, Lamberth said.
As a group, USAGM had about 3,500 employers and an $886 million budget in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.