“I don’t know how to start again.” A displaced family returns home in Sudan
Story narrated to Mohammed Gimish
“We took only what we could carry. Everything else we left to fate,” said Osman Bashir Mohammed Ali, standing in what used to be his living room in Barakat, a shattered town in Sudan. All that remains of his home in southern Aj Jazirah State is a roofless shell of scorched concrete and twisted metal.
Like so many others, Osman fled in October 2024, when renewed fighting tore through Aj Jazirah. What once served as a refuge for displaced families from Khartoum had become the front line, triggering another wave of mass displacement. Civilians, already uprooted once, were forced to flee yet again.
Osman and his family found shelter in a nearby village, where the host community shared their food through communal kitchens and offered shelter, despite their limited resources.
In January 2025, following a shift in the control of Aj Jazirah’s capital, Wad Medani, displaced families began to return. Osman was among them.
But returning offered no relief – only devastation.
A homecoming to ruins
“Everything is gone,” said Osman. “They looted what they wanted, then set fire to what was left. Even the windows and doors are gone.”
Neighbours who had stayed behind recounted the horror. No home and shop in Barakat was untouched. In a matter of days, families lost loved ones, livelihoods and an entire lifetime of work.
Osman spoke without anger, but the pain was visible – etched in his face, his voice and his silence. His eyes scanned the debris-strewn ground where his children once played, where family photos once hung.
“I don’t know how to start again,” he said. “This place… it’s unrecognizable.”
His story echoes across Sudan. According to the International Organization for Migration’s latest Displacement Tracking Matrix, approximately 1.3 million internally displaced people returned to their areas of origin between November 2024 and June 2025. Aj Jazirah State accounted for most of those returns.
But “return” belies reality. People are not returning to safety or stability. For Osman and thousands like him, returning means facing a haunting truth: what was lost may never be recovered – but survival demands beginning again.
Breakdown across critical sectors
The destruction extends far beyond homes and livelihoods.
OCHA, the Food and Agriculture Organization and UN-Habitat on a joint visit in April, found communities in Aj Jazirah facing severe shortages of food, clean water, healthcare, shelter and education.
The health system is on the verge of collapse. More than 800 health facilities are damaged or destroyed, and 60 per cent of health workers are no longer present.
Access to safe drinking water is scarce, with around 90 per cent of solar-powered water stations out of service. Waste management systems are broken, heightening the risk of waterborne disease outbreaks.
Hundreds of schools were looted or destroyed, and many children have been out of school for months. The lack of safe learning environments has increased protection and psychosocial risks for young people.
Pooled funds support returning families
The OCHA-managed Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF) is playing a pivotal role in supporting returning families, like Osman’s. Through front-line partners, the SHF is delivering life-saving assistance to more than 600,000 people, focusing on communities receiving large influxes of returnees, such as Aj Jazirah.
Even before access improved in the state, the SHF’s grants to mutual aid groups were supporting early responses to people’s needs.
Once Aj Jazirah became more accessible, the SHF’s rapid response mechanism provided an additional US$4 million to partners, enabling them to immediately restart health services and address gender-based violence among the returnees.
The UN Central Emergency Response Fund allocated nearly $4.5 million to projects in Aj Jazirah to complement the ongoing efforts. These funds are helping to rehabilitate health facilities, restart nutrition services, support gender-based violence prevention, clear mines and boost agricultural recovery.
But more funds are urgently needed to support vulnerable families in Sudan. More than 30 million people – nearly two thirds of the population – need vital aid and protection this year.