Taxi Service in a War Zone

In the first days of Sudan’s war, the two university students felt helpless. They locked themselves in their apartment in the capital, Khartoum, glued to Twitter (now X) as the battle unfolded. As the walls shuddered from blasts and gunfire, they took shelter in the corridor. They wondered where Sudan was going.

On the fifth day, 19 April 2023, the phone rang: Someone needed a taxi.

A senior United Nations official, a woman in her 40s named Patience, was trapped inside her home in an upscale neighbourhood. Pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on them stood outside her building, firing at warplanes overhead. Black smoke was streaming into her apartment following an air strike nearby. She had run out of water. Her cellphone battery was down to five per cent. Could they rescue her?

The mechanical-engineering students, Hassan Tibwa, 25, and Sami al-Gada, 23, had a side gig driving a taxi. But this call wasn’t a paying job—it was a mercy run.

Tibwa phoned Patience. “She was screaming,” he recalled. “We had only a few minutes before her phone died. She was on her own.” Tibwa and al-Gada jumped into al-Gada’s car, a dinged seven-year-old Toyota sedan, and set off into the city, horrified at its transformation. Bullet holes pocked buildings. Charred vehicles littered the streets. Fighters were everywhere.

Crunching over bullet casings, they passed through check posts manned by jittery fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), some wearing bandages or limping. They scanned the students’ phones and peppered them with questions. It took an hour to travel six kilometres.“We went through hell,” Tibwa said.

They found Patience alone at her apartment, a scatter of bullet holes in her living-room wall. She had been hiding in her bathroom for days, slowly depleting three cellphones, she said. The students consoled her, wrapped her in an all-covering abaya robe and devised a cover story: Their passenger was pregnant and needed to get to a hospital. Before leaving, they paused to pray. “We knew that the moment we stepped out, there was no going back,” Tibwa said.

Forty-five minutes and 10 check posts later, their Toyota pulled up outside the Al Salam, one of Khartoum’s most expensive hotels, now a five-star refugee camp. Patience wept with relief. After checking in, she asked the students an urgent question: Could they go back and rescue her friends?

Over six days, as fighting surged between the Sudanese army and the RSF, Tibwa and al-Gada helped at least 60 people: South African teachers, Rwandan diplomats, Russian aid workers and UN workers from many countries, including Kenya, Zimbabwe, the United States and Sweden. Ten passengers said the students had swooped to their aid at terrifying, life-threatening moments.

Along the way they were robbed, handcuffed and threatened with execution. Fighters accused them of being spies. Shells and stray bullets fell around their car. “The bravery of these guys is just amazing,” said Fares Hadi, an Algerian factory manager who had a hair-raising ride with them through Khartoum.

The people they rescued said the students did not ask for payment. “The only word for them is heroes,” one UN official said. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing an organization that, by many accounts, failed to rescue its own employees, even those facing immediate danger. “Despite all the chaos, the fear, the bombing,” he said, “Sami and Hassan were the ones who turned up.”

Even as Tibwa drove strangers to safety, his own family didn’t know he was in Sudan. He arrived in 2017 from Tanzania, where his family runs a modest hardware store in a small town on Lake Victoria. An Islamic charity provided a scholarship to study engineering at the International University of Africa in Khartoum. Knowing their concerns about Sudan’s history of violent unrest, Tibwa told his parents that he was going to study in Algeria—a lie he maintained for six years.

Sami al-Gada is Sudanese but was raised in a sleepy town in Saudi Arabia, where his father was a car mechanic. Classmates in university, the two young men soon became friends. They shared a bright, open disposition and a gritty entrepreneurial streak, working odd jobs at night to make rent. Tibwa drove a taxi that mostly catered to African UN officials.

Sudan’s turbulent politics disrupted their ambition. Classes were cancelled for much of 2019, when protesters, including al-Gada, helped topple Sudanese dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Then in October 2021, Sudan’s two most powerful military leaders—Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the army and Lt Gen. Mohamed Hamdan of the RSF—joined forces to overthrow the civilian prime minister. Protests flared. The economy tanked.

The two students thought little, at first, of the shots that rang out across Khartoum early on 15 April 2023: Anti-military demonstrators had been clashing with riot police for over a year. But when al-Gada went to campus to submit a paper, the guards sent him home. This time it was not a protest, they said. It was war. 

Months of tension between Sudan’s ruling generals exploded into gunfights between rival units that quickly spread to the city centre, concentrated around the military headquarters and the international airport. That zone abutted two upmarket districts, Khartoum 2 and al-Amarat, filled with embassies, UN offices and the homes of foreigners and well-heeled Sudanese. The area also contained several RSF bases. Fighters took up positions on rooftops, broke into homes and, in some cases, robbed their occupants.

The European Union ambassador was assaulted inside his house. A shell landed outside the British ambassador’s front door but failed to explode. An American convoy came under fire. The UN, like most organizations, ordered its more than 700 employees and dependents in Khartoum to “shelter in place.” But although its security division rescued a handful of people in the first days of fighting, rescue efforts were soon put on hold.

Tibwa and al-Gada were not the only rescuers. Local resistance committees, formed years earlier to push Sudan toward democracy, pivoted to helping Sudanese and foreigners flee. But for some stricken residents, the two students were the only option.

“They called us,” Tibwa said. “They didn’t have food. They had no power. Their phones were going down. We tried to imagine ourselves in that same situation. So we went out.”

Hours after delivering Patience, the two students got a text from another UN official. The RSF had given residents at her building three hours to get out.

“I’m resigned to my fate,” she texted. Tibwa responded with a promise that they would come for her. But al-Gada was less sure. It was nearly dark, and a fragile ceasefire was about to end. A tense argument ended with a decision to go, reluctantly. “We were not so happy with each other,” Tibwa said.At the apartment, they found more than they bargained for: about 15 people, including a Korean couple with two children. The group left in a three-vehicle convoy, windows down to show they were transporting women and children. Meanwhile, fighting resumed in the city, with air strikes and shooting.

In the second car, Danielle Boyles, 27, a preschool teacher from South Africa, cowered under an abaya. At one checkpoint, a fighter threatened to shoot the Malawian UN official beside her. She started to tremble and pray.

“The RSF guy cocked his gun,” she said. “When I heard that sound, I thought he was dead.” But no shot came. Reaching the Al Salam Hotel, they piled out, exhausted.

The Al Salam was known as the capital’s political salon, where the rich, powerful and heavily armed wrangled over the future of Sudan. Luxury four-wheel drives with dark windows pulled up before its revolving doors. Militia leaders rubbed shoulders with Western diplomats over its US$50 [`4,200] buffet. Negotiators from the African Union sipped coffee in the lounge. Mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner private military company exercised in the gym.

The war transformed the hotel. By the fifth day, all 236 rooms and suites were occupied, the manager said, some sleeping six people to a room.Stray bullets punctured the lobby window and guest rooms. Guests filmed gunfights from the upper floors. Food had to be rationed. When a pitched battle erupted outside the main gate, guests crowded into the basement and the gym locker rooms.

Tibwa and al-Gada became fixtures in the lobby, flopping onto sofas after rescue runs. It was still Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, and they didn’t eat or drink until sunset. Guests marvelled that they kept making more rescues. “I think they were just going on adrenalin,” said the wife of a senior UN official.

Some guests were local residents who had run to the Al Salam when the war erupted. They asked the two students to collect passports, laptops or pets from their houses. The students entered the deserted home of the head of the UN refugee agency in Sudan, guided by a video call with a family member. They held their noses as they passed a fridge filled with rotting food.

Hadi, the Algerian factory manager, had been using the hotel pool on his day off when the fighting started. The students drove him home to get his passport. But when a soldier at a checkpoint found something he thought was suspicious in al-Gada’s phone, chaos erupted. Suddenly al-Gada found himself face down on the street, a cocked Kalashnikov at his head.

Hadi, watching from the back seat, braced for the worst. But al-Gada kept talking and, after a long 15 minutes, the fighter backed down. As the car rolled away, al-Gada was “sweating like hell,” Hadi recalled. “He was terrified.”

The student rescuers learnt that the RSF fighters could be friendly or frightening. Formed in 2013 from the feared Janjaweed militias that once terrorized Sudan’s western Darfur region, the RSF has in recent years sought to rehabilitate its image. But few Sudanese can forget the group’s participation in a massacre of over 120 pro-democracy protesters in 2019.

As Tibwa and al-Gada drove back to their apartment on the sixth night of fighting, they said, RSF troops stole a cellphone and $1,100 [Rs 92,000] from their car—cash pressed on them by grateful passengers. When al-Gada reported the theft at the next checkpoint, an RSF officer insisted on investigating it, even as fighting raged around them.

With RSF soldiers at the wheel of their car, Tibwa and al-Gada were driven back to the post where they had been robbed, then to a makeshift RSF base at the city airport. Scared, Tibwa sent his location to a UN official he had saved. She urged them to get out, texting, “Please Hassan, I’m begging you!!!!”

It was too late. Moments later, a new officer appeared, a scowling man who interrogated the students and placed them in handcuffs. The episode ended hours later when the fighters handed back $500 [`42,000] and escorted the students home. On the way, the convoy stopped at a checkpoint where soldiers were eating a meal: a giant platter of camel meat and rice. They insisted the students join them.

The RSF commander gave them a bag of leftovers to take home and, days later, sent Tibwa a photo of their shared meal at 3 a.m. on the deserted streets of a shell-shocked city.

The students’ final mission, at the request of Rwandan diplomats, was a trip across the Nile to rescue a woman in the city of Omdurman. As their Toyota approached the house, the woman, who gave her name as Fifi, texted them. “Alhamdulilah,” she wrote—Arabic for “praise be to God.” She was eight months pregnant and had been stranded with her young son for 10 days. By then, an exodus of foreigners from Khartoum was underway. Commandos led a dramatic helicopter evacuation of the American embassy. British and French military aircraft landed at an airstrip north of Khartoum, leaving with diplomats and private citizens.

Most of the people the students had deposited at the Al Salam finally left on 23 April, the ninth day of fighting, on a United Nations convoy of buses, cars and four-wheel drives that made a gruelling 35-hour journey to Port Sudan, 845 kilometres away. From there, many took ships across the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia. As the foreigners left, most of Khartoum’s five million residents remained, sheltering in their homes and praying for a ceasefire. The students stayed behind, too, at first.

But within a few days, they were gone. A friendly RSF commander had warned them to get out because “something big was coming” in the city centre, Tibwa said. They packed up the Toyota and drove 23 kilometres to the edge of the capital, where al-Gada’s family has a house.

For a few days they considered their options, working out, drinking coffee and reading novels. Fighter jets scudded over the horizon, and a stray bomb landed nearby, killing members of a family in their home, they said.

Tibwa wanted to stay in Sudan, a country he had grown to love—and where he was a single semester away from completing his degree. But his time had run out. On 3 May, al-Gada dropped his friend on a street where he hoped to catch a bus to Ethiopia, and from there back to Tanzania. A personal reckoning loomed for Tibwa: His parents would learn that he had been studying in Sudan, not Algeria.

As they separated, Tibwa pulled out his cellphone and began filming. “Saying goodbye to my boy Sami,” he said as the Toyota rolled down the street, his partner waving through the window. “See you, man. See you.”  

The New York Times (5 May 2023), copyright © 2023 by The New York Times Company