As Belfast burned, two Sudanese women braved the streets and sheltered those under attack
Submitted by Oscar Rickett on Sat, 06/13/2026 - 08:30
As mobs roamed Belfast's streets targeting anyone who looked foreign, Areej Fareh and Twasul Mohammed organised to help keep immigrant families safe
This picture shows a burned-out vehicle and home in Belfast on 11 June 2026 (Oscar Rickett/MEE) Off When the homes of two Sudanese families in Tiger Bay, north Belfast, were broken into by gangs of masked men earlier this week, the police took an hour to arrive.
A single mother and her two children hid as the downstairs of their home burned.
It seemed preferable to going out into the street. The gangs knew who they were. The gangs were targeting anyone who looked foreign.
In the other house, a father protecting his two children thought about how he was going to explain to his wife what had happened when she got home from a trip overseas.
Both of them are translators for the UK's National Health Service and both have cars for their work. Those cars, sitting on a street lined with loyalist murals, were burned.
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At Anaka, a women's collective based in the Northern Irish capital, Areej Fareh and Twasul Mohammed had been working on how to keep their community safe even before the stabbing committed by a fellow Sudanese on Monday.
On Tuesday, when the first night of violent attacks broke out, the Anaka community - made up mostly of women from a wide range of backgrounds - ventured out into the streets, braving the petrol bombs and the improvised checkpoints set up to root out anyone who looked foreign.
'There are more good people here than bad'
- Twasul Mohammed
With the state almost totally absent, they evacuated 12 families themselves - families whose homes and cars had been burned.
The night after, a list of targeted addresses began to circulate online and in WhatsApp groups. These homes were not attacked but their residents, terrified about what would happen, needed to be moved.
The police and the Department for Communities and Housing were nowhere to be seen.
And so the local organisers - using their own WhatsApp groups, a database of people who needed homes and one of those who had rooms to spare - got to work, moving a total of 200 families and individuals, many of whom have not yet been able to return to their homes.
'I never worried about racists'
Fareh and Mohammed are friends from university and were politically active back in Sudan, organising against the government of Omar al-Bashir, who ruled the country from 1989 to 2019.
Mohammed came to Belfast in 2016. Fareh stayed and was part of the revolution that toppled Bashir in 2019.
That year saw a wave of protests across the country that were ferociously cracked down on by the army and security services, including the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now at war with the army and widely accused of genocide.
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One night at a demonstration in Khartoum, Fareh disappeared. "I was arrested by the security forces, harassed and abused," she tells Middle East Eye.
She remembered another wave of protests, in 2013, when the newly created RSF - made up of the Janjaweed militias that were accused of atrocities in Darfur - appeared on the streets. Someone she knew, a young chemist, had been shot dead.
By 2019, Fareh's son, Morhaf Sid Ahmed, was 15. He wanted to be out on the street. Worried about what might happen to him, Fareh knew it was time to leave.
When she came to Belfast, she liked it. "The first few years, until the attacks in 2024, I never worried that people on the street were racist," Fareh says.
"I was confident. Even if it was late, and I was on my own, I felt safe. Now I feel it all the time. If I see two men I feel worried."
Twasul Mohammed (L) and Areej Fareh (R) say the city's Sudanese community won't allow themselves to believe the narrative of collective punishment (Oscar Rickett/MEE)
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The Sudanese women are speaking at a church in central Belfast that has been turned into a place of refuge for those affected by the riots.
There's a kitchen in which volunteers are cooking food for everyone: chicken and rice, baked pasta, apple cake and custard.
The space acts as a striking response - both actual and symbolic - to the violent racism of the riots. The World Cup is starting and a local woman asks everyone if they'd like to take a bet on when the first goal will be.
'There are more good people here than bad'
Brenda, who for 15 years ran set production for films and TV in Belfast, has whipped the organisation into shape. Everyone knows what they are doing.
Conol Matthews, a community organiser who works on housing, tells MEE that when he encounters racism from those he's trying to help, he always asks them who they think is benefitting from a housing crisis in which asylum seekers and refugees are dumped into the middle of working class communities, with landlords charging the government more rent than they ever would a private tenant.
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"It's those boys in suits," he tells them by way of an answer.
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"They benefit. You have to live it. Maybe look not at the people living a life like yours."
Matthews had his phone number leaked onto loyalist WhatsApp groups, and he shows MEE his call log, which shows one anonymous number after another.
Having lived through political repression in Sudan, Mohammed and Fareh are not going to leave Belfast, however afraid they are right now.
"There are more good people here than bad," Mohammed says.
"It's becoming like this all over the West, but at least here the Irish understand, they have the history of being colonised."
Both women say that some Sudanese people in Belfast have felt ashamed because Monday's attacker was also Sudanese. But they know they can't allow themselves to believe the narrative of collective punishment.
"We are not leaving it for them," Fareh says, meaning the racists. "If you think you should leave then you have to think: no way."
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