Feature
When detainees appeared on television, Om Omar’s children watched for their father. He had been missing for more than two years. They did not know whether a release would bring him home—or whether he was being detained at all.
“My children haven’t forgotten their father,” the mother of four told the International Committee of the Red Cross in an account published on 13 April 2026. Her family searched social-media lists of missing people and detainees. What she wanted was someone who could say where he was. ICRC
A list, a hospital visit or a televised release gives a family somewhere to look. It does not necessarily supply an answer. Sudan’s war has separated relatives while disrupting communications, restricting access to detainees and damaging forensic services. The search moves between these systems because families do not know which one holds the information they need.
Sometimes a change in military control opens another possibility without settling anything. In a separate account published by Sudanow on 20 April, Sihaam Abdulrahman Al-Hassan described her family’s renewed hopes after prisons opened in Khartoum. Her sister went back to review detainee records for their missing brother. She found neither his name nor a clue. That is an account of a search, not confirmation that he had been imprisoned. Sudanow
Even knowing which institution someone belonged to may not resolve the uncertainty. Azaher Abdallah’s husband, Fahmy al-Fateh, had joined Sudan’s army after the war began. According to an Associated Press report published on 22 May, he was last seen leaving a military base in Khartoum more than a year earlier. Abdallah searched hospital morgues and approached his unit. It said it would try to find him; if she heard nothing, she should consider him missing. AP, republished by The Washington Times
“I would feel more at peace if I knew something,” she told AP. “It’s better than not knowing what happened to him, whether he’s alive or dead.” A member of the military media accompanied AP’s visit, including its interviews; the agency said it retained editorial control.
The families’ public enquiries sit alongside a quieter search. In a September interview with Radio Dabanga, ICRC spokesperson Farid Al Humaid described severely restricted access to detention facilities and disrupted communications. The organisation pursues confidential discussions with the relevant authorities to establish people’s fate and whereabouts. Confidentiality, he said, helps it seek access without putting that access at risk. Radio Dabanga, 3 September
That work can produce answers. Al Humaid said the ICRC had clarified the fate and whereabouts of 613 registered missing people in the first half of 2026. The figure does not say that all were found alive. Nor does it resolve the cases of the families described here. But it matters: the obstacles do not make every search futile.
For those searching among the dead, an answer also depends on what survives burial. AP reported damaged DNA-testing laboratories and a shortage of forensic specialists. Khartoum state’s forensic-medicine director, Hisham Zienalabdien, said samples were being saved from unidentified bodies in the hope of matching them with relatives later. Preserving that possibility is not the same as completing an identification. AP
For another family in AP’s April reporting, progress meant something different. Abubakar Alswai had waited more than a year to move his brother Mohamed’s remains from outside a house to a public cemetery. A proper burial, he said, would give the family some peace. His was not an unresolved disappearance: he knew whom he was burying.
That distinction separates a place to mourn from a name still being searched for. For Om Omar’s children, the television offered the possibility of recognition. Their mother’s request, in the April account, was simpler than a promise of reunion: someone who could tell them where he was.