The grammar of survival: Women on the frontlines of Al -Fasher
"No woman stood here out of love for the army or the joint forces, but out of love for the homeland, because it was a matter of survival."
Insaf Baraka, Al-Fasher
In neighborhoods surrounded by violence, some women neither wait for help nor simply remain passive. They organize, warn, protect, and sometimes fight. Yet, when stories about the war are told, these women’s actions are left out. Women are reduced to familiar images: victims in need of rescue, or peaceful voices calling for peace. The binary that emerges between these two images leave little room for understanding women as warriors. If they are mentioned at all, it is as criminals for supporting the war. The narratives surrounding us are either unable or unwilling to recognize forms of resistance that do not align with moral and political assumptions of the civil forces including prominent groups of women movements and this silence leaves these women doubly exposed : erased by the movements that should defend them, and killable in the eyes of the rapid support forces militia.
In this context, the story of the young woman Hanadi stands out as an example that breaks these patterns. In early 2025, at the Zamzam camp for displaced people in North Darfur, Hanadi was a volunteer medic providing first aid in war conditions. But she also transcended the boundaries of humanitarian work. In a widely circulated video, Hanadi appears in direct confrontation with the Rapid Support Forces, holding a knife and issuing a clear threat to the militia.
Some described her act as a reflection of a broader position: that ordinary civilians, including women, were taking a stand against systemic violence and what they viewed as a repressive campaign in Sudan, in a conflict that involves both local and external actors.
In April the same year, with the fall of the Zamzam camp, she was targeted and killed. You would maybe think that Hanadi became a universal symbol of courage. Yet her actions were not embraced by all. Some activists and civilian actors chose to ignore her story, precisely because it called into question the boundaries of acceptable civilian behavior. Once she was seen as a fighter, she no longer fit within narratives that depend on civilian neutrality. Her resistance, instead of being recognized, became difficult to accommodate. Leaving the question do women and civilians have a right to resist and defend themselves in such a context of city under siege, indiscriminate shelling and constant threat of invasion?
Hanadi’s story raises a broader question about how powerful and clear individual experiences are incorporated into wider narratives about war. Why do stories like hers tend to be treated as isolated outbursts of emotion rather than as an opportunity to examine women’s acts of resistance?
The crisis of civil discourse and women's resistance in Al-Fasher
The deliberate exclusion of Al-Fasher's resistances from civil discourse stems from their contradiction with elite visions that reduce that frame to simply a war between two generals, ignoring the external powers and proxy dimensions that make resistance not just inevitable, but necessary. This is a narrative of 'moral clarity, drawing a sharp line between the victimized civilian and the 'unacceptable' combatant. However, this boundary collapsed in Darfur and Gezira, where citizens, in the absence of a state and army, were forced into direct confrontation with militias. And the women of Al-Fasher, in particular, shatter these binaries. They ceased to be 'neutral civilians' the moment they chose to defend themselves, their families and their community. The failure to describe these women’s acts of resistance in terms of anything other than moral and political classifications penned by the elite is a civil discourse crisis: The civil discourse does not have room for such forms of resistance.
Women between idealism and the reality of survival
The emergence of women resisting in Al Fasher, along with the widespread circulation of videos showing them confronting RSF militias, reveals significant fault line within Sudanese civil forces, women groups and initiatives. Many have responded with either silence or criticism. This reaction reflects a longer tension within sudanese feminist discourses that has often been criticized as Khartoum-centric, shaped by urban and educated voices, and historically less attentive to Darfur’s repeated cycles of violence and survival.
In this context, an activist and gender expert in peace issues I interviewed for this piece describes the different aspects of this sense of exclusion:
"These perspectives can only be grasped by acknowledging that certain civil actors interpret them through frameworks shaped largely outside Darfur, and disconnected from its history of recurring genocide. The prevailing narrative works to sustain an image of women as peaceful figures confined to caregiving roles, and women like Hanadi unsettle that image precisely because they refuse the binary of victim or peacemaker.
But this judgment cannot be made without understanding what Al-Fasher actually was. The city had been under siege for months, encircled by RSF berms, cut off from food and medicine, with checkpoints where women were raped, looted, or killed trying to leave. There was no neutral ground. Resistance was not romanticism; it was the only option that carried dignity.
Hanadi remains contentious because she fused protest with armed resistance. Rather than examining the circumstances that produced her choice, some critics invoke "revolutionary romanticism' to pass moral judgment as though the besieged city had offered her any other."
The initial 'anti-war' stance, despite its moral appeal, has become difficult to maintain in light of the asymmetric violence targeting female civilians. When the frameworks defining who counts as a civilian were built for different kinds of wars, they don't just fail, they become weapons. In Al-Fasher, the moment Hanadi picked up a knife, she became harder to mourn. Another activist and peacebuilding expert from Al-Fasher addressed this directly:
"Resistance is any method used to achieve security, whether direct or indirect, violent or non-violent. In the context of Darfur, people do not choose war; war chooses them. Therefore, civilian neutrality there is a 'theoretical luxury' that does not exist on the ground. Hanadi found herself under brutal assault; she first played the role of a healer, which is an inherent role of resistance, and then took up arms to continue her work and protect herself and the women around her. Our validation of this stance is not a glorification of militarism; it is an acknowledgment of a human being who chose resistance in a context devoid of alternatives."
This position is not without its critics within women's movements. One view, encountered repeatedly in women's group discussions, draws a firm boundary:
“Women supports grassroots resistance that protects people’s independence, as long as it isn’t controlled by the army or supporting armed groups. We understand that centralized, male-dominated powers can push people into difficult choices, but those choices will have disastrous results.”
This concern points to a real tension, not about whether resistance is legitimate, but about who controls it and whose interests it ultimately serves. The risk of co-optation is genuine, but it is an argument for protecting women's autonomous resistance, not for dismissing it.
And yet the current conflict calls for a response that goes beyond neutrality. Women in Algeria, Eritrea, Gaza and Lebanon who took up resistance were condemned by their contemporaries, called criminals, collaborators, or pawns, and only recognized by history long after the fact. The question is whether Sudanese feminist discourse will wait for that same belated recognition, or reckon with Hanadi's truth now.
Voices from the Al-Fasher frontlines in the face of Janjaweed
When women in Al-Fasher took up arms, it was not in response to a call from the army or any political faction. It was a decision that came from within, collectively and without instruction.
"The women put on their clothes and rose up. No one asked them to do this. No woman stood here out of love for the army or the joint forces, but out of love for the homeland. It was a question of survival, to be or not to be”, says Insaf Baraka.
Baraka, a resistance fighter from Al-Fasher, had been in the camps since the beginning of the war in Darfur in 2003:
"From the first days of the war, I was certain this militia had outside backing because no militia could possess this kind of power on its own.”
What made this particularly painful was watching the same international community that armed the militia arrive with workshops on neutrality. For Insaf Baraka, this was not irony. It was policy:
“Many organizations arrive with workshops on neutrality, framing it as the only path to peace. At the same time I witnessed fueling the janjaweed militia with weapons under the cover of humanitarian aid."
This is the context in which women in Al-Fasher made their choice: not between war and peace, but between different kinds of danger.
Sara Kalash, a fighter with the Sudan Liberation Army since 2003, moved from Nyala to Al-Fasher after Nyala fell. She describes what pushed women outside the bounds of neutrality in a single sentence:
"When the Janjaweed come, they do not distinguish between woman, man, child, or elder.”
Women from all backgrounds joined: civilians with no military history, women unaffiliated with any faction. What Sara describes is not a military mobilization but a total community response: carrying weapons, treating the wounded, preparing food, securing water. She fought across multiple frontlines and led combat operations in the city's defense. She does not separate these roles, for her they were all part of the same thing:
"The Janjaweed targeted civilians in their persons, their property, their honor, and their land."
She names the fallen: Hanadi, Badria, Nazifa, Mona, and Afaf. The missing: Hawaa and Faiza. A group of girls slaughtered in Al-Fasher. She left on October 27th, 2025, forced out not by surrender but by siege, starvation, and relentless militia pressure.
These women did not fight because they were recruited. They fought because the city they lived in had been turned into a kill box, and because no one else was coming. As Insaf Baraka put it:
“Women stood in food preparation, in hospitals, and on the frontlines. They fought in large numbers — and the media did not show it”.
This blog post is written by Aya Khatir Haroun Nahar. She is a Sudanese dentist, researcher, and social activist based in Cairo. Her work focuses on the impact of war and displacement on higher education, particularly for female students, alongside active involvement in public health and community initiatives.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the SNAC project or CMI.
References
Unsettling-the-coloniality-of-being-power-truth-freedom.pdf
Interview sources:
Insaf Baraka, resistance fighter, Al-Fasher. Interview conducted for this piece, 2026.
Sara Kalash, Sudan Liberation Army fighter, Al-Fasher. Interview conducted for this piece, 2026.
Anonymous activists (2 interviews). Conducted for this piece, 2026.
