A high school building housing Kenyan teachers and 15 families began to shake as air raids and artillery pounded Sudan’s capital Khartoum.
The stranded group had begun to run out of food and water as fighting between Sudan’s army and its rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensified, but no help could reach them – so a network of Sudanese civilians, organising mainly through Twitter, sprang into action.
“We couldn’t reach out to them and the Red Cross couldn’t reach out to them,” Jia El Hassan, who spearheads the network and uses an alias due to safety concerns, told Al Jazeera.
Finally, the network sent a group of men to check the perimeter of the building and help the trapped people flee on foot.
“They escaped on foot because we could not send any car – any car that went into that area was bombed,” El Hassan said.
The network – a reincarnation of an earlier one – started up on the first day of the conflict, April 15, with the setting up of vital updates on Twitter Spaces, the social media platform’s feature for live, audio conversations.
Some of the people on Twitter Spaces were not new to grassroots organising, but had led activist groups during the 2019 uprising that toppled former President Omar al-Bashir.
Many activists, El Hassan said, were killed during that uprising or forced to leave. Today, there are about 120 people left on the ground in Khartoum, a fraction of the 4,000 who helped organise rescue teams in the past, she said.
Despite the many people who have left, in the last week, the network helped hundreds of people leave the capital or get vital supplies – from medicine to food, to petrol – and they’re using Twitter to seek out more people in need.
“A lot of the cases we get, it goes like this: I’m stuck in this situation. I have no food, I have no water, and my phone is about to die,” explained El Hassan.
That’s when her team combs Twitter to find someone near the trapped person who can provide information on everything from how safe the area is to whether any supermarkets are open.
If fighting is rife, or a person who needs emergency supplies is unable to leave their residence for whatever reason, the network will arrange a driver to drop off the supplies, also arranging for petrol for the driver if needed too, she said.
People have also reached out to the network through Twitter to offer extra medical or food supplies to…