“Your papers. Everybody out,” ordered a soldier blocking the road. In front of a forlorn pillbox, over which a tattered Sudanese flag fluttered, the checkpoint consisted of a few tires and red cones placed on the black asphalt, in the middle of the ocher immensity of the Nubian desert in northeastern Sudan. The military roadblock guarded the entrance to Karima, a small, quiet town 400 kilometers north of Khartoum and adjacent to the city of Meroë, which houses the headquarters of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for this northern region of the country.

The passengers in the stopped vehicle, all of them young men, had dark skin and dusty clothes. They looked exhausted. They came from Darfur and Kordofan, two regions located hundreds of kilometers to the south that had largely fallen under the control of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The RSF had been battling the SAF of Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan in these areas, at the cost of bloody fighting and thousands of deaths.

Judging by their gear, the men were a group of gold prospectors who had set out to try their luck for a few nuggets in the mines of the region, where fighting did not rage. Because they had crossed front lines using smuggling routes, those carrying out the checks might have suspected them of being spies, or even infiltrating fighters.

Spared by the fighting that has torn the country apart for more than two years, El-Shemaliya, or Northern State, remained on high alert. Marked by a vague border drawn right through the middle of the desert, it now found itself in direct contact with the RSF-controlled provinces to the west.

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