Khartoum, Sudan: A Travel Guide and Current Status

Before any itinerary, a direct statement of the current situation is necessary: as of mid-2026, Khartoum is not safe to visit and no legitimate travel itinerary can be written for it in good conscience.

What Happened to Khartoum

Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023 when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. Khartoum became one of the primary battlegrounds. The RSF seized large parts of the capital and held them through most of 2023 and 2024. In early 2025, the SAF fought its way back, recapturing Omdurman, Bahri and eventually Khartoum itself by March 2025. The Sudanese military-led government returned to Khartoum in January 2026 after nearly three years of operating from Port Sudan.

What the fighting left behind is extensive: hospitals, government ministries, banks and large sections of the residential city were damaged or destroyed. Years of airstrikes, shelling, drone attacks and street combat devastated infrastructure. Basic services including electricity, running water and medical care remain severely disrupted as of early 2026. Khartoum International Airport has been closed to commercial traffic since the war began and had not reopened at time of writing.

Travel Advisories

The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland and virtually every other Western government maintain Level 4 (Do Not Travel) advisories for Sudan. The US Embassy in Khartoum suspended operations in April 2023 and cannot provide consular services to American citizens in the country. Most other Western embassies are similarly non-operational. Travelling to Khartoum means doing so without consular assistance if anything goes wrong.

Landmines and unexploded ordnance are present across Khartoum state following two years of urban combat. Checkpoints and roadblocks operated by various armed factions remain in place. The humanitarian situation is among the most severe in the world, with millions displaced.

Khartoum Before the War

For readers who are curious about what the city was before the conflict, or who are researching it for future travel if and when conditions change, the following summary covers what made Khartoum worth visiting.

Khartoum occupies one of the most geographically distinctive positions of any capital city: it sits at the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile, the two river systems that meet here and flow north as a single river toward Egypt. The point of confluence, visible from the bridges between Khartoum and Omdurman, is one of the landmark natural sights of Africa.

The National Museum of Sudan on Al-Nil Avenue was among the finest archaeological museums in Africa, holding Nubian and ancient Kushite artefacts including stone reliefs and statuary from the ancient kingdoms of Meroe and Kerma that predated and rivalled ancient Egypt. The collection reflected the largely untouristed fact that Sudan contains more ancient pyramids than Egypt, concentrated in sites like Meroe, Nuri and Jebel Barkal north of Khartoum.

Omdurman, the twin city across the White Nile, was the spiritual and popular centre of Sudan: a dense, ancient city of souks and mud-brick architecture that functioned as the seat of the Mahdist state in the late 19th century. The Friday Sufi ceremonies at the mausoleum of the Mahdi, where dervishes performed the dhikr (rhythmic religious chanting and spinning) in open courtyards, were one of the most unusual and authentic cultural experiences available in Africa. The ceremony has been a Khartoum fixture for more than a century.

The food culture was built around Sudanese staples: ful medames (spiced fava beans) for breakfast, molokheya stew and grilled meats for dinner, and the sweet Sudanese tea culture that made stopping at any outdoor tea vendor a daily social ritual. The restaurants of Bahri and the banks of the Nile near the confluence were known for grilled fish eaten at outdoor tables above the river.

When to Visit

There is no reliable timeframe for when Khartoum might be safely visitable again. The SAF has returned to the capital but the wider civil war continues in Darfur and other regions of Sudan. Reconstruction of the city has barely begun. For anyone with a genuine interest in Sudan, the most useful thing is to monitor developments through UNHCR updates and government travel advisory pages, and to support humanitarian organisations currently working to address the catastrophic displacement and food crisis the war has caused.

If conditions do eventually improve to the point where travel is possible, the Meroe pyramids north of Khartoum and the archaeological sites along the Nile valley remain among the most extraordinary and undervisited ancient sites in the world. They are the strongest reason to return to Sudan when the time is right.