PORT SUDAN: When Mohammed Bakhit left El-Fasher, he was trying to escape a city under siege. The 32-year-old joined eight other young men and local guides heading toward Tawila, about 70 km away, where civilians were fleeing the fighting. They were intercepted before they could reach safety by fighters from the Rapid Support Forces, the powerful paramilitary force battling Sudan’s military, the Sudanese Armed Forces, in the country’s civil war. For four days, Bakhit said, the members of the group were beaten and humiliated. Then their captors told them to call their families. The prisoners were ordered to negotiate their own ransoms, with the threat of execution if their relatives could not pay. Two men said their families had no means of raising the money. The fighters lined them up in front of the others and shot them, according to Bakhit. “Two members of our group couldn’t pay the ransom — they told us to line them up in front of us,” he later recalled. Bakhit was initially told to pay 50 million Sudanese pounds, equal to $83,000. He explained that the war had left him with almost nothing, apart from furniture he had left behind in El-Fasher. The demand was eventually reduced to 5 million pounds. His family spent three more days raising the money before he was released near Tawila. His experience illustrates a system that has emerged alongside Sudan’s civil war: Detention has become a source of revenue, with civilians intercepted while fleeing, held in improvised prisons and turned into financial assets whose value is determined by what their families can pay. Sudan’s war erupted in April 2023 after a long-simmering power struggle between the SAF, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. The two men had previously been allies, first in the upheaval that ended dictator Omar Bashir’s three-decade rule in 2019 and later in the 2021 military coup that derailed Sudan’s transition toward civilian government. Their alliance ultimately fractured over control of the state and plans to integrate the RSF into the regular army. What began with fighting in Khartoum rapidly spread across the country, particularly into Darfur, where the RSF has roots in the Janjaweed militias that fought during the region’s earlier conflict. By late 2023, the RSF had seized much of Darfur, leaving El-Fasher — the capital of North Darfur and home to large numbers of displaced people — as the army’s last major stronghold in the region. The battle for El-Fasher became one of the defining struggles of the war. From May 2024, the RSF subjected the city to an 18-month siege, restricting the movement of food, medicine and other supplies while civilian areas came under repeated attack. In October 2025, the RSF launched its final offensive and captured the city. The fall of El-Fasher consolidated RSF control over much of western Sudan and triggered another mass flight of civilians. But escape itself became perilous. The UN later documented more than 6,000 killings during the first three days of the final offensive — including at least 1,600 people killed along routes out of the city — alongside abductions, arbitrary detention and demands for ransom. These practices have been particularly associated with the RSF in Darfur, although both feuding factions have been accused of arbitrary detention and other abuses. Following the RSF’s capture of El-Fasher in October 2025, thousands of people were reportedly detained at checkpoints and in prisons, schools, hospitals, abandoned buildings and other sites. The scale of the violence was extraordinary even by the standards of Sudan’s war. After interviewing more than 140 victims and witnesses, the UN Human Rights Office documented the killings, as well as abductions for ransom and 10 detention facilities. Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, described the offensive as a “wave of intense violence … shocking in its scale and brutality,” adding that it reflected an organized and sustained pattern of attacks against civilians. The scale of individual detention sites is difficult to establish, but a UN communication concerning Shala Prison in El-Fasher cited allegations that about 9,000 people were being held there amid severe shortages of food, water and medical care. Ibrahim Osman, a Sudanese human rights activist involved in Emergency Response Rooms and human rights documentation, told Arab News that the ransom system had become increasingly systematic as the war progressed. “In the beginning of the war, it was somewhat a random crime,” Osman said. “But after the first year of the war, it turned into a full-blown crisis.” Captors, he said, assess a detainee’s occupation and social status, but also how urgently relatives are searching for them. “The more your family panics and searches for you, the higher the price goes.” The negotiations are conducted through phones, often with captives forced to contact relatives themselves. Families then scramble to find the money, sometimes creating WhatsApp groups to collect contributions from neighbors, friends and relatives. Cars and land may be sold below market value, while diaspora relatives send money from abroad. Payment, however, does not always guarantee release. Osman described cases in which families paid and detainees were nevertheless killed or handed over to security forces, where their fate remained uncertain. The ransom economy is difficult to separate from Sudan’s wider system of wartime extraction, with gold remaining the more significant strategic resource. Sudan is one of Africa’s major gold producers, but much of its output is believed to bypass formal channels. The RSF has controlled important mining areas in Darfur, while the SAF and allied forces control other productive regions. Gold moves through neighboring countries and into international markets, with the Gulf reportedly a major destination. The relationship between the two economies is therefore less a direct pipeline than a shared logic: control territory, extract value. Armed groups can profit from mines and commodities, tax movement at checkpoints, seize livestock and agricultural production, or demand payment from families for the release of detainees. Ransom has the particular advantage of generating cash immediately. “It is a fast cash business,” Osman said, describing money from a ransom being divided among those involved in an abduction and the commanders who allow it to happen. This economic logic is helping make the conflict self-sustaining. As formal institutions have largely collapsed, armed groups acquire more opportunities to profit from controlling territory, while the destruction of livelihoods leaves civilians increasingly dependent on informal networks. Emergency Response Rooms, grassroots organizations that grew out of Sudan’s 2019 revolution, have become a crucial part of the humanitarian response. Volunteers operate communal kitchens, distribute food and medicine, support hospitals and help evacuate civilians from dangerous areas. They are also targets. Osman said at least 141 volunteers had been killed since the war began and dozens detained by different armed actors. In besieged areas, volunteers have attempted to move supplies through checkpoints and informal routes, often at considerable personal risk. “We are literally the last line of defense for human dignity here,” Osman said. “If we stop, who else will be there for our communities?” Sudan is not alone in developing such economies. In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, armed groups have combined mineral extraction with taxation, forced labor and smuggling, and in parts of the Sahel, gold mining intersects with kidnapping and trafficking. In Myanmar, conflict economies have developed around jade, rare earths, drugs and forced labor. The commodities differ, but the underlying mechanism is similar: territorial control creates opportunities to monetize insecurity. For Bakhit, that mechanism was reduced to a negotiation over 5 million Sudanese pounds. His family found the money and he survived. The two men who traveled with him could not. Their families had nothing left to sell, borrow or transfer. They paid the ultimate price for being unable to participate in an economy in which, for those who control the territory, even captivity has become an income stream.