The congregation at Jarafa belonged to Ansar al-Sunna, a pacifist Islamic revivalist movement that emphasized a return to the practices of the earliest Muslim communities. They were not political. They were not armed. They gathered at the mosque for the ritual prayers that marked the day's rhythm - the same prayers Muslims have gathered for in Sudan for over a thousand years. The men present on the evening of 8 December 2000 were husbands, fathers, grandfathers, laborers, shopkeepers, students. Their families waited at home for them to return from isha, the fifth prayer of the day. Many of the families, instead, would receive word before midnight that their men had been shot through the window of the mosque by a gunman whose face some survivors recognized as a former member of their own congregation.

Abbas al-Baqir Abbas was born in 1967 in Al-Dasis, in the northern part of Al Jazirah state. Before the shooting his mother had reportedly left their home over his religious fanaticism. He had beaten his sister, accusing her of infidelity. He had studied economics at Tripoli University in Libya until he was forced to leave for leading Islamist groups. He had served in the Popular Defense Forces fighting rebels in the south. Initially a member of Ansar al-Sunna, he had switched to the militant splinter Takfir wal-Hijra - a movement that believed Sharia should be implemented by force. He had been arrested twice for his stated intentions to attack Ansar al-Sunna. In 1998 he was held four months. A few months before the massacre he was arrested again with twenty other suspected Takfir members. He claimed to have repented. He was released. He had not repented.

The Jarafa attack was not an isolated act. It was part of a bitter and ongoing sectarian conflict between Takfir wal-Hijra and Ansar al-Sunna that had been claiming Sudanese lives for years. On 4 February 1994, three assailants - including a Libyan Islamist named Mohammed Abdullah al-Khilaifi - had attacked an Ansar al-Sunna mosque in the Khartoum neighborhood of Al Thawra with assault rifles, killing nineteen and wounding fifteen. Al-Khilaifi was executed later that year. On 1 January 1996, eight assailants and a police officer died in a confrontation in Kambo Ashara when Takfir members tried to force villagers to convert. An attack on the same Jarafa mosque in 1996 had left twelve dead. On 1 November 1997, two Takfir members attacked worshippers leaving a mosque in Arkawit with knives, killing two and wounding ten. The pattern was long. The pattern was documented. The pattern kept continuing.

The day after the massacre, President Omar al-Bashir visited the mosque in Jarafa, paid his condolences to the relatives of the victims, and promised legislation to control fanatical religious groups. Security laws were subsequently tightened, allowing law enforcement to detain suspects for up to six months. Opposition parties criticized the amendments for curtailing civil liberties and accused Bashir of exploiting the tragedy to expand his own powers. Sixty-five people were arrested in connection with the attack. The women's funeral at the mosque was a mass event that drew thousands of mourners. Witnesses would report for years afterward that Abbas had not acted alone - that there had been three or more attackers, dressed in jellabiyas, who had fled before police arrived. Police maintained Abbas had acted alone. The worshippers he killed are still mourned by their families.

Jarafa sits on the outskirts of Omdurman, across the White Nile from Khartoum proper. Omdurman is the largest of the three cities making up the Sudanese capital triangle - a historic city that was the Mahdist capital in the 1880s before the British defeated Mahdist forces at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman and incorporated the region into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Today Omdurman is a sprawling urban landscape of mosques, markets, residential districts, and outlying villages. From the air, the city extends westward from the Nile into the desert, its edges fraying into villages like Jarafa where settlement gives way to cultivated plots and empty sand. The mosque at Jarafa still stands. So does the memory.