Khartoum, Sudan – Two years after being displaced by the civil war, Rafeeda Abubakr and her husband returned to their home in Khartoum, where they embarked on a challenging journey to rehabilitate their 21-year-old son from a drug addiction that had pushed him into seclusion and caused him to have a bad temper.
Muaz, once a cheerful civil engineering student at the University of Sudan, had become withdrawn, sullen and prone to sudden outbursts due to his addiction to “ice,” a variant of methamphetamine that has spread rapidly throughout Sudan since the war began.
The family, originally from Shuqailab, a town about 90 kilometers (60 miles) south of central Khartoum, had fled to al-Duwaym in White Nile state when war broke out between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15, 2023.
It was there, in July 2024, that Muaz’s addiction became evident. He had joined a youth group during the family’s displacement and his drug use had gotten out of control.
Amid the drastic humanitarian crisis that has developed in the country since then, and the almost complete absence of medical care when hospitals were attacked and health workers had to be displaced, Muaz and other patients suffering from psychiatric problems received no care.
When conditions in Khartoum stabilized enough for her to return, Rafeeda took her son home and began seeking treatment. He was found only at Al-Tijani Al-Mahi Hospital for Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases.
“We heard that the hospital had reopened and we launched an initiative for war patients, people with trauma and addictions,” Rafeeda told Al Jazeera. “Since November we have been coming every two weeks. The treatment is free and I can feel that my son is improving a little. That has brought me some relief.”
The moment you enter Al-Tijani Al-Mahi Hospital, the damage announces itself.
Medical equipment, beds, furniture, electrical cables and air conditioners have been dismantled. Bullet casings and shell fragments are still visible to any visitor walking the perimeter of a site once named after one of Sudan’s most famous psychiatrists.
Rehabilitation is progressing slowly. The economic difficulties that had been exacerbated by the war make it impossible to accelerate the process and the needs are enormous. But the team behind the War Patients Initiative works anyway, taking cases and issuing prescriptions from dilapidated offices in the sun.
Al-Tijani Al-Mahi was founded in 1971 and is among the oldest psychiatric facilities in Central and East Africa. When the war came to Omdurman, “it had been looted, its wards damaged, its equipment stolen and its buildings abandoned in a state of disrepair that the hospital estimates has caused losses now running into millions of dollars,” Dr. Mai Mohamed Youssef, the hospital’s director, told Al Jazeera.
Rebuilding from scratch
In October 2024, Sudan’s Ministry of Health issued an order to demolish what remained of the buildings. Youssef, who had spent his entire career at Al-Tijani Al-Mahi since graduating from the medical school of the Islamic University of Omdurman in 1998, rejected the decision.
“We discussed it for days,” he said. “So we decided to oppose the decision.”
Together with some of his colleagues he managed to revoke the demolition order. On July 13, 2025, Youssef returned to the hospital with only one colleague. The two decided to reopen the facilities.
Youssef remained in Omdurman during the fighting, sheltering in her home in the Rabatab neighborhood with her son and mother as shells flew around them. She described going through her own psychological trauma through the decision to stay. That same determination shaped what came next.
Their first challenge was infrastructure. The hospital had no running water or electricity. Staff installed solar panels to power basic operations and worked to establish a functioning pharmacy.
In the first weeks there were no inpatient beds. All cases requiring hospitalization were transferred to al-Naw Hospital or the Military Medical Corps center in Omdurman.
The outpatient clinic began with psychiatric consultations, prescriptions and referrals. In one month, the volunteer medical team had grown from two to six doctors. There are now nine, including two consultants, all working in what the hospital calls its referral clinic.
“The hospital currently sees between 60 and 70 patients a day, up from about 50 when it first reopened. Cases include children, women and men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and drug addiction.
“Most addiction cases involve ice or crystal methamphetamine, and most patients are young people between 23 and 40 years old,” Youssef told Al Jazeera. “Many of them were displaced to neighboring countries and returned to Sudan after the fighting subsided,” he said. “They came back with addictions.”
One case that stuck out to him was that of a man in his early thirties who attempted suicide after prolonged drug use. “It was a horrible and painful scene,” Youssef added.
According to the WHO Health Emergency Appeal published in January 2026, the war in Sudan has created one of the most serious humanitarian crises in the world since fighting broke out in April 2023, and 33.7 million people now need urgent assistance. More than 9.3 million people are internally displaced and another 4.3 million have fled to neighboring countries.
The WHO notes that prolonged exposure to conflict, violence and instability has led to widespread psychological distress, with large numbers of people suffering from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, large gaps in mental health services leave most of those needs unmet.
An estimated 38 percent of health centers across the country are non-functional and health partners reached less than half of their target population by 2025, underscoring what the agency describes as the urgent need to expand humanitarian access and sustain funding for life-saving assistance.
A stigma that war has begun to break
Youssef noticed a change that would have been difficult to imagine before the war. In Sudanese society, he said, “seeking psychiatric help has long been a stigma, and many families turn to traditional healers or religious figures. That is changing,” he said.
“People have seen that going to sheikhs (Muslim clerics) and healers does not work,” he said. “Now there is no choice but to go to a psychiatrist.”
Dr. Ghada al-Samani, who graduated from Imam al-Hadi University in Omdurman in 2020, joined the initiative after seeing an advertisement on social media. She went directly to the hospital management to apply as a volunteer and has since worked with the team that treats psychiatric patients affected by the war.
Hospital care remains suspended. The hospital has been rehabilitating the remaining wards and service facilities and hopes to be able to admit patients within three months. When that is possible, Youssef said the hospital intends to build to meet international standards, including a dedicated addiction research center and separate units for the treatment of depression and trauma.
For now, the hospital runs on solar power, a small team of volunteers and the determination of a director who was still at her desk when the bombing began and returned when it stopped.
Rafeeda continues to bring Muaz to visit once every two weeks.
This story was published in collaboration with Egab.
