Sounding the Alarm

As the Sudanese war threatens to spill beyond its borders, can activist Niemat Ahmadi help force an international reckoning?

- Alexis Okeowo.

The videos keep coming: armed fighters taunting men with their hands tied behind their backs, bodies piled in an open grave. The videos are from Sudan, where two generals began a struggle for power last spring that has killed more than 12,000 people, displaced 6.6 million, and turned the nation into a battlefield, one that has flooded social media with images and videos that give the impression of a country burning alive. The Washington, DC–based Sudanese women’s rights activist Niemat Ahmadi can’t stop watching the footage. Nor can her friend and fellow activist Sadya Eisa Dahab. “Shooting and burning, people running for their life,” said Ahmadi when I visited her at home on a recent winter day. “It’s shocking.” Trees shook in the wind outside, but Ahmadi’s two-story house in the Northeast district of Washington was warm and smelled of incense; candles were lit on almost every surface on the first floor, which felt like a smoky tea room in Khartoum.

For Ahmadi, 53, who has thick, dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, and a restless but patient energy, the videos bring back memories of the 2003 genocide she eventually fled in Darfur. It was when she arrived safely in the US that she formed the Darfur Women Action Group (DWAG), her nonprofit that works to raise awareness of violence in Sudan. Over the past 15 years, the group has lobbied Congress and held conferences on genocide with high-profile attendees from the US State Department and the UN, as well as foreign diplomats and the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC). “In many instances people view women as victims, but they fail to see their leadership and courage and what they do to contribute,” she told me.