'I imagine how I used to walk in peace'

More than a year since the civil war started, 7 million people have fled their homes and had their lives uprooted

- Faisal Ali

Hajer Sulaiman, a 32-year-old communications specialist, was living in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, when a power struggle that had been simmering for months between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) burst into the open on 15 April last year.

"My mother was telling me she wanted to head to the market that morning," Sulaiman said. "We could hear loud explosions, but we thought it was to do with protesters, not that the entire country had slipped into a civil war. It was just too overwhelming to process." She didn't expect the fighting to last a long time, believing the country's generals would be hauled around the table to thrash out a deal. But the sound of mortars, fighter jets and gunfire did not cease, and a few days later the family decided they had to leave.

Sulaiman, who now lives in Port Sudan, a small city on the Red Sea coast, is among millions of displaced Sudanese people whose lives have been upended by a brutal and seemingly intractable conflict that has killed at least 14,000 civilians, according to a conservative estimate by the nonprofit war monitor ACLED.

"I only took my laptop and phone because I thought we'd be back in a few weeks," Sulaiman said. "That's what hurts the most," she added, "not being able to say goodbye and now it has been over a year." According to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, there are about 10 million internally displaced people in Sudan, making it the country with "the largest internally displaced population ever reported".