Declan Walsh

It had a growing middle class.

And now much of the city had been laid to waste.

Entire neighborhoods of homes that had been looted, buildings destroyed, and in particular the city center around the presidential palace.

The presidential palace had become one of its biggest battlegrounds.

At one point we climbed into a sniper's nest beside the Nile River and overlooking that palace and it was amazing to see how it had been absolutely reduced to rubble by the fighting.

And it wasn't just that, the entire city centre, many tall buildings were also pocked with bullet marks and had been turned into fighting positions.

It was really incredible to see how an entire city could be reduced to rubble by this two years of war.

Largely, it must be said, without being seen by the outside world.

As the Sudanese military pushed into new areas, we followed them.

and often came across residents who were emerging from their homes, kind of stunned.

We talked to this one man who'd seen his neighbor get gunned down by RSF fighters.

At one point, we found ourselves at a well that contained maybe a dozen bodies.

And we were told that these were people who had been killed by fighters at a nearby checkpoint and dumped there.

Well, as we went through the city, we found ourselves in the abandoned villas of some of the RSF leaders.

In one of them in particular, there were fighters lounging outside this empty swimming pool.

The house had an internal elevator, you know, sort of markings of wealth that were such a contrast with the scenes we were seeing outside.

And so as we walked through this house, I also found this sheaf of papers that evidently had been abandoned by the Orsath leaders as they left.

And when we examined them more closely, they turned out to be corporate documents related to gold mines run by the same armed group in the south of the country.

And this was a really important clue into what was funding a lot of the fighting.

We already knew that Sudan had a huge gold industry going back many years, but it was very difficult to get a sense of just how important it had become to these groups that were fighting for control and how much it was fueling the fight itself.