Port Sudan, Kassala & the East

The Red Sea Hills have been home to the Beja for thousands of years; their ancestors appear in Egyptian and Roman sources as desert raiders and traders, and the medieval port of Aidhab on this coast carried pilgrims and goods between Africa and Arabia. Suakin rose as a trading town and, after the Ottomans took it in the 16th century, became the chief port for pilgrims crossing to Jeddah, built of coral blocks on an island in a lagoon.

In the 1880s the east was a major Mahdist front. The Beja leader Osman Digna led the Hadendoa against British and Egyptian troops around Suakin, and at Tamai in 1884 they briefly broke a British square, which Kipling later celebrated in a poem that gave the Hadendoa their English nickname. Kassala, founded as an Egyptian garrison in the 1830s, was held by Italy for a few years from 1894. The British then built Port Sudan, opened in the early 1900s, with a deep harbour and a railway to the Nile, and Suakin was slowly abandoned.

After independence the east felt neglected by Khartoum, and a Beja Congress, later joined by other groups, took up arms before a peace deal in 2006. Refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia have crossed into Kassala and Gedaref since the 1960s, most recently from Tigray in 2020. Since the war began in 2023 Port Sudan has been the country's main link to the outside world, and it was the seat of the government until the government returned to Khartoum in January 2026; the RSF declared a rival government in 2025. In the far north-east, the Hala'ib Triangle is claimed by both Sudan and Egypt, and Egypt has controlled it since the 1990s.

The Beja are the region's defining people. The Hadendoa, Bishariin and Amarar speak Bedawi, a Cushitic language, and the Beni Amer largely speak Tigre; herding camels, goats and sheep across the hills, they are known for their long hair and fierce independence, and their hospitality centres on coffee.

Kassala is one of Sudan's most mixed towns, home to Beja, Arab tribes, and Eritreans and Ethiopians who have lived there for generations, while the Rashaida, Arab camel herders whose ancestors came from Arabia in the 19th century, are known for the face veils of their women. The town is the spiritual centre of the Khatmiyya Sufi order, whose founding family, the Mirghani, built their seat at the foot of the Taka mountains.

Port Sudan, a working port city, has its own mix of Beja, northern Sudanese and people from across the country, and its seafront corniche was the evening meeting place for families.

Port Sudan, with several hundred thousand people, handles most of the country's trade and from 2023 to January 2026 was also its administrative capital, crowded with ministries, embassies, aid agencies and displaced families. Kassala, on the seasonal Gash river, and Gedaref are the main inland towns, with Suakin, Tokar, Sinkat and New Halfa smaller.

The economies are sharply different. The coast lives from the port, the oil export terminal for South Sudan's crude, fishing and some gold mining in the hills, while the Beja interior remains among the poorest parts of Sudan, with recurrent drought and malnutrition. Kassala is a market town of fruit gardens, and the New Halfa irrigation scheme, fed by the Khashm el Girba dam on the Atbara river, grows sugar cane and cotton. Gedaref is the centre of mechanised rain-fed farming, where huge estates of sorghum and sesame supply grain across the country.

The war has pushed people, money and power east. Rents in Port Sudan have soared, water and electricity are overstretched, and camps and schools across the three states house families from Khartoum and the Gezira. Border trade and smuggling with Eritrea and Ethiopia are a constant part of life.

Coffee is the region's best-known food custom: brewed in a clay jebena and poured into small cups, it is offered to every guest. Camel and goat milk and meat sustain the herding families of the hills.

Port Sudan eats from the sea. Red Sea fish are grilled or fried and sold in the town's markets and seafront restaurants. Kassala is famous for its fruit gardens.

Gedaref's sorghum becomes kisra flatbread and asida porridge eaten with mullah stews, and its sesame is pressed into cooking oil. Ethiopian and Eritrean influence shows in Kassala and Gedaref, where injera, the sour pancake of the highlands, is easy to find. Sweet tea with milk or mint, karkade (hibiscus) and tamarind juice are the everyday drinks.

The Red Sea coast holds some of the world's least-visited coral reefs, with the famous diving close to Port Sudan. Sanganeb atoll, with its steep walls, and Dungonab Bay with Mukkawar Island to the north form a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their reefs, sharks, manta rays, dugongs and seabirds. At Sha'ab Rumi, Jacques Cousteau's team lived underwater in 1963, and the wreck of the Italian cargo ship Umbria, scuttled in 1940, lies near Port Sudan's harbour.

South of Port Sudan, the ruins of Suakin's Ottoman town cover its island: collapsed coral-stone houses and mosques facing the mainland town, with a Turkish restoration planned since 2018. Inland, the Red Sea Hills hold the small town of Erkowit.

Kassala sits beneath the Taka mountains, bare granite domes rising abruptly from the plain, with the brick Khatmiyya mosque at their foot, the village of Toteil, and the fruit gardens along the Gash. South-west, the Gedaref plains stretch in endless fields of sorghum and sesame towards the borders with Eritrea and Ethiopia, green after the rains and golden at harvest. All of it awaits the end of the war.