The medical college on Obaid Khatim Street: what the war did to Sudan University of Science and Technology, and what anyone considering Sudan must check now

The World Directory of Medical Schools lists the College of Medicine of Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST) as a public school, teaching in English since 2017, with its main address on Ebed Khatium Street in Khartoum. That entry is still accurate as a description of the institution. It says nothing about what has happened to the street.

Sudan's war began in April 2023, when fighting broke out in Khartoum between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). According to figures from Sudan's Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research reported by the Christian Science Monitor, around 100 universities and research centres were damaged or vandalised in the first four months alone; in the capital, the RSF turned at least one campus into barracks. SUST was among the worst hit. University officials, as recorded in the university's Wikipedia entry and in later press reports, said all 300 of its laboratories, valued at around US$220 million, were destroyed, and that 5,000 computers and 50 new dental chairs were lost from the medical complex. The same account describes mass graves holding around 1,000 bodies dug on land the university had reserved for a medical-complex hospital near Obaid Khatim Street — the street on which the WDOMS entry places the College of Medicine.

Students were scattered. A cross-sectional study of medical students published in BMC Medical Education in 2024 found that 92% of those from Khartoum State had been displaced, roughly half of them abroad and the rest to other parts of Sudan, with a majority reporting anxiety, depression or an inability to study. The universities that could, moved. University World News reported that the University of Medical Sciences and Technology, a private Khartoum school whose campus had been seized as barracks, flew 160 students to the University of Rwanda's College of Medicine and Health Sciences on 2 August 2023 and sent a further 150 to Muhimbili National Hospital in Tanzania; the Monitor later put the Rwanda cohort at about 300. Radio Dabanga reported that the University of Khartoum, El Gezira, El Gedaref and Nile Valley universities resumed examinations from 12 August 2023 at centres in Atbara, Wad Madani, El Gedaref and the Sudanese Cultural Centre in Cairo. Ahfad University students who moved to Egypt, the Monitor reported, found tuition around fifty times what they had paid at home.

Nobody in this account is accused of fraud. It is on this site because of what such a situation does to the people who are tempted to exploit it, and to the students who cannot see it from abroad. A medical school whose laboratories are gone and whose teaching hospital land holds mass graves cannot deliver the five-year clinical programme its directory entry describes, however genuine the school. Agents do not update their brochures for wars. Fee demands, "admission letters" and promises of a Sudanese MBBS have continued to circulate online for institutions whose campuses are closed, relocated or occupied, and a family paying in advance for a seat in Khartoum today is paying for something the school itself cannot currently provide.

For a student considering Sudan, or any country where a conflict has closed campuses, the checks are specific. Ask the college, in writing and from an official address, where teaching and clinical rotations physically take place this academic year and under which agreement with the host institution. Confirm with your home regulator whether training delivered at a relocated or host campus, or online, will be accepted for the degree; India's NMC, for example, requires the whole course, internship included, at the same foreign institution. Check WDOMS for the operational status, which is updated slowly, and treat any agent who cannot answer the first question as the answer. And keep the people at the centre in view: the Sudanese students who lost their homes, their campuses and their years of study are the same people this site exists to protect, wherever they end up finishing their degrees.