Mohanad Hashim

That was your local community kitchen for the people who cannot afford food?

What was the reaction when the army arrived here?

Mixed?

From day one, and pretty much ever since, one of the main tasks has been to clear the remnants of war from this vast city, removing bodies, rubble, shattered glass, burnt out vehicles.

A lot has been done, but it's a huge task.

We stopped by the remains of the old Meridian Hotel in downtown Khartoum, a burnt, twisted shell of a building, now open to the elements.

We would have come from school after school to come here, and at the back over there would have been the swimming pool.

Inside the wrecked lobby, an unusual sight, there's two burnt-out vehicles.

Those are the remains of rapid support forces, technical.

And technical means basically it's a Toyota 4x4 pickup truck that had a mounted heavy machine gun on top of it.

They drove cars inside buildings to hide them from drones, the army drones, or from artillery shelling.

It's a done technique by fighters in this war to try to hide vehicles

their equipment from the other side.

Among the most dangerous painstaking jobs is to check every building, every part of the city, for mines, booby traps and unexploded ordnance.

Just by the banks of the Nile, near the shattered remains of the old Hilton Hotel, we find a team of deminers at work.

Juma Hamdan is a deminer with JASMAR, a Sudanese NGO funded by the EU and the UK.

His team is clearing one block of land near the river.

He says 80% has been done.

He points out the part that remains.

So in front of me, what I can see is that there is a road with a smashed-up digger to my right-hand side, and down the road I see whiteboards that are blocking the road.