Life Returns to Sudan’s Tuti Island After Nearly Two Years of Paramilitary Siege
For nearly two years, Al-Shubbak watched through ancient grey eyes as Tuti — the crescent-shaped island at the confluence of the White Nile and Blue Nile in the heart of Khartoum — emptied of its inhabitants under a punishing paramilitary siege. She refused to leave.
“I didn’t even move for the English when they colonised us,” the elderly woman told AFP through a toothless smile, months after Sudan’s army finally broke the RSF siege in March 2025.
An Island Under Siege
Tuti Island — historically known for its orchards and vegetable fields that supplied much of Khartoum’s fresh produce — was cut off from the world from June 2023 until March 2025. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled the only bridge onto the island, and nothing could enter or leave without their permission.
Islanders who wanted food, medicine, or even fuel for water pumps had to pay off RSF fighters. Those who wanted to leave paid again — 350,000 Sudanese pounds (around $90), more than double a doctor’s monthly salary, for safe passage out.
Of an estimated 30,000 residents, only Al-Shubbak’s family remained by the end — caring for the bedridden matriarch who had lived through British colonization, and who would not abandon the island her family had guarded for generations.
Guarding Their Soil
“We’re like fish in the water, we can’t survive outside Tuti,” said Sheikh Mohamed Eid, a local elder who raised the alarm about the island’s plight on social media and was subsequently detained by RSF forces for nine months.
The paramilitaries forced residents out “at gunpoint” and charged them for the privilege of leaving their own homes, Eid said. Former president Omar al-Bashir’s government had repeatedly tried to relocate Tuti’s residents to make way for luxury development projects — the island’s strategic location at the meeting of two Nile branches makes it extraordinarily valuable real estate.
Return and Recovery
In recent months, the tide has turned. The Sudanese army recaptured Khartoum in March 2025, and residents are gradually returning. Shops have reopened. Farmers are back on their land. On Friday afternoons, worshippers fill the old red-brick mosque — established in 1480 according to a rusted sign above its door.
But the island bears deep scars. The waterfront, once a popular gathering spot where families sipped tea with their feet in the Nile, is now a designated minefield. Every family on Tuti has lost someone. Two of Nosayba Sa’o’s uncles are missing and presumed dead.
Still, she says, “being together with our people again, coming home is such a blessing.”
The ruins of Khartoum’s bombed-out skyline loom to the south, a constant reminder of the terror that passed. But to the west, where the setting sun makes the Nile glow orange, the island looks almost as it once was — fishermen packing up their rods, families picnicking by the water, couples on evening strolls.
Tuti is healing, slowly, one home at a time.