Sudan War Locks Depositors Out of Savings

On a scorching sidewalk, Ibrahim Said hopes to withdraw his savings from a Sudanese bank, but the wait seems as unending as the war that has brought the country's financial system to a standstill.

Said is one of dozens of depositors who have queued at a branch of the Bank of Khartoum in Madani, a city about 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of the capital, to recover their savings.

"I have been here since seven in the morning hoping to withdraw money from my account," he told AFP.

One of half a million people who fled Khartoum for safer cities, Said escaped with what little cash he happened to have in the house when the capital was rocked on April 15 by air strikes and shelling that have not stopped since.

Now, he is locked out of his savings as the fighting between the army under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy-turned-foe Mohamed Hamdan Daglo's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shows no signs of abating.

Ishraq al-Rih has been coming to the same bank branch for three days, and on each occasion it has been the same.

"At around 3:00 pm, they open the doors, let in a very small number of people, and if you're not one of the lucky ones you have to come back the next day," she said.

Every passing day brings more anxiety, as families ration their cash to make ends meet, terrified of what footage shared online of looted banks and empty safes means for their savings.

Locked out

"We don't know what to do. We have money in the bank but we can't touch it," Ahmed Abdelaziz told AFP, standing outside the closed gate of Omdurman National Bank.

The 45-year-old civil servant thought he was safe in Madani, where tens of thousands of people have settled but cannot escape the impact of the battles that rage in the capital.

"The servers that control every bank's operations are all in Khartoum, and employees can't get to them because of the fighting," said Mohamed Abdelaziz, who works in the banking sector.

Even in states untouched by the violence, "branches have lost contact with the headquarters that used to validate operations," leaving managers unable to replenish reserves and allow withdrawals, he said.

In a move questioned by observers considering the entire sector is at a standstill, army chief Burhan declared a freeze on RSF assets this week and dismissed the central bank governor.

"Bank-to-bank payments have been completely cut; we can't transfer any money between accounts," said an employee of Sudanese French Bank who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sudan was brought to its knees by two decades of international sanctions against former ruler Omar al-Bashir, as well as rampant corruption and the 2011 independence of South Sudan which held almost all the country's oil.

Even after Bashir was toppled in 2019 and the sanctions were lifted, the International Monetary Fund said Sudan remained on an international donors' list of "heavily indebted poor countries" and characterized its banking sector as "fragile, with several banks undercapitalized".

Emptied out safes

Sudan's fledgling banking sector -- which does not accommodate credit card payments or international transfers between individuals -- had $11.2 billion in assets at the end of 2019, according to the IMF.

It is unclear how much of that is left, however, as the country had already experienced years of economic woes, including a free-falling currency, before fighters began smashing their way into banks and emptying safes.

From the first week of the war, the army accused the RSF of breaking into a subsidiary of the central bank in Khartoum and stealing "huge sums of money".

The country's banking federation has repeatedly moved to assure clients that their assets and financial records are intact and has vowed to "restore banking services as soon as conditions permit".

Despite promises of ceasefires and the restoration of services to increasingly desperate civilians, conditions have remained unchanged for over a month.

For the time being, depositors like Said, Rih and Abdelaziz are being forced to use whatever means they have to get staples such as flour, which has doubled in price, or petrol -- now 20 times what it cost before the conflict.

At 80, Syrian Abdel Rahman Athab still holds on to hope of finding his son, missing for 11 years. He searched tirelessly—watching former detainees leave prisons, combing through hospitals, and finally, visiting suspected mass grave sites. Despite losing three other children, Athab clings to the hope of finding his son or at least laying him to rest.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that since 2011, about 136,614 people have been forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained. Of these, over 113,000 remain missing, leaving families in heartbreaking uncertainty.

The pain of Athab’s family began with the start of Syria’s revolutionary unrest. The father, who had six sons and two daughters, recalls with deep sorrow: “Four were engineers, and two were teachers. At the onset of the revolution, they joined protests against the regime, and I stood with them.”

By late 2011, three of his sons were killed, their bodies returned in disfigured remains wrapped in black bags. Athab buried them, held a mourning service, and, though devastated, accepted their deaths, seeing them as martyrs for Syria. “I found comfort knowing they were in a safer place,” he said.

However, just two years after losing his sons, Athab’s fourth child disappeared in Damascus. The remaining members of his family fled the country, leaving the father’s heartache to grow even deeper.

In his ongoing search for his missing son, Athab told Asharq Al-Awsat that he and his family have been tracing newly uncovered mass grave sites across Syria in the past month.

On January 4, local Syrian outlets reported that residents found a mass grave near the Ninth Division in the town of Sanamayn, located in the northern countryside of Daraa in southern Syria.

This discovery followed another mass grave found about two weeks earlier at “Al-Kuwaiti Farm” on the outskirts of central Daraa.

The area had been under the control of a militia linked to the military intelligence branch, and 31 bodies, including those of women and a child, were recovered.

Additionally, a team from Human Rights Watch reported visiting a site in the al-Tadamon neighborhood of southern Damascus on December 11 and 12, 2024.

They found a large number of human remains at the location of a massacre that took place in April 2013, with more scattered around the surrounding area.

Sudan War Locks Depositors Out of Savings