When colleagues head to cover news in dangerous places -- such as South African townships where in its waning days the apartheid government was fomenting violence, or Iraq during the Second Gulf War – I tell them that getting back alive to tell the story was the main assignment.
I don't know whether I ever said that to Sudan-based Mohamed Osman Adam when he was among the journalists with whom I worked in the late 1990s, when I was the Cairo-based Middle East news editor for The Associated Press. In a memoir Mohamed recently published, I read his much more succinct version: "A dead journalist is a bad journalist."
Mohamed went to plenty of dangerous places in Sudan during his nearly 30 years reporting for the AP and other outlets. For example, during a war that broke out in 1983 over attempts to apply Islamic law in a country that was home to adherents of Christianity and indigenous religions as well as Islam, Mohamed covered violence in the country's south, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile region. He returned from reporting trips to the relative safety of Khartoum, the capital, to file reports that helped the world understand his homeland, which has been in turmoil throughout his life.
Mohamed was born in 1959, three years after Sudan gained independence from joint British-Egyptian rule and a year after a first north-south Sudanese war erupted. That civil war would last until 1972, then resume as the conflict Mohamed covered in the 1980s that culminated with the Republic of South Sudan declaring independence in 2011.
In his memoir, titled “A Full Year Behind Militia Lines: A witness Account,” Mohamed recalls confronting something new in 2023.
“Never was I aware of a period in my life without my country being at war with itself, with its people. Still, practically … war was physically far away.
“But, lo! On 14 April 2023, war moved to my neighborhood, war has come home.”
Amid the chaos of planes dropping bombs and gunfights in the streets, communication with the outside world was cut off. Mohamed kept observing and analyzing for nearly a year, writing in his diary instead of filing dispatches to editors in Cairo. The diary is the basis of his account of “what I felt, what I smelt and what I feared, and suffered.”
In spare and unsparing prose, Mohamed describes what became an increasingly desperate search for food, and encounters with roving gunmen threatening his life, seemingly acting out of little more than a desire to relieve boredom or flaunt the power their willingness to use violence gave them.
He also recounts a determination to assert his humanity by carrying out the rituals of normal life – greeting neighbors, going to his mosque, writing.
“With no internet, electricity, or running water, radio or newspaper, I was in constant search for anything positive, anything to raise my morale,” he recounts.
Journalists such as Mohamed, who refuses to be anyone's propagandist, have been targeted by all sides in Sudan's war. The Sudanese journalists union said in a statement marking World Press Freedom Day in 2025 that "journalists who attempt to cover events objectively face constant threats of death, arrest or harm to themselves and their families, forcing many to stop working or practice harsh self-censorship.’’
After war came to Khartoum, Mohamad, fearing his home would be searched, burned his press ID and deleted stories and notes from his hard drive. He used newspaper clippings to start fires to prepare tea.
"After all cooking gas was nowhere to be found and trees, even those grown in front of houses, were cut, and even the roots were dug and used as fuel," he writes.
He initially thought the violence would not last long. But as the chaos dragged on, he sent his wife and their two children out of the capital to a safer part of Sudan. He stayed behind to try to protect their home until he was overwhelmed by fear the wrong person would discover he was a journalist.
Friends gave him cash and smuggled him aboard one of the minivans that provide long-distance passenger service across Africa. As it made its way out of Khartoum, the van was stopped at numerous checkpoints by gunmen demanding bribes in exchange for not beating or killing passengers. Mohamad now is among the 13 million displaced by fighting that has since 2023 killed at least 59,000 people and pushed much of the country into famine.
Like many journalists, Mohamed is skeptical of focusing on himself. He ends his memoir with the story of a countrywoman who did not survive the fighting in Khartoum, Asia Abdul Majid
She was killed on May 3, 2023 when shells landed on her home in a Khartoum suburb. She was 80 years old.
Mohamed writes of Abdul Majid’s impact on Sudan as the first woman in the country to act on stage, and later as a champion of education.
It was too dangerous to hold the traditional rites for Abdul Majid at a cemetery. So she was buried in the courtyard of a school she had founded.
“Because of the fighting, very few people could cross into the area to present condolences to her family,” Mohamed writes, a simple sentence that confronts extremism as the enemy of culture.
Mohamed, who said he did not want to portray himself as a swaggering war correspondent, has written a memoir about the courage it takes to survive, and to tell a story honestly.
In May of 2025, six months after he reached safety, I got an email from Mohamed. He told me then that he was working on the memoir.
I got another email from him this summer. He had finished the book and it was being read in Khartoum, to which he has not yet returned.
