The market runs twice a week, along the wadi and next to the little botanical garden that predates most of the town's current troubles. Traders bring goods from El-Fashir, livestock from the pastoralist camps surrounding the town, and grain from the farms worked by the Fur. Around it cluster the mechanics' shops, the bakeries, the small groceries, and the public telephone outlets that do the work that banks do not, because as of 2006 there were no formal banking services in Kutum at all. The mosque at the market has a minaret that locals notice; the town holds several other mosques besides. Electricity runs a few hours each day from a community generator. Most people still draw water from wells.

Kutum's population, about 45,000 before the most recent wars, has always been mostly non-Arab: Fur, the people who gave Darfur its name, along with smaller Tunjur and Berti communities. The Fur have farmed the slopes around the Marrah Mountains and the wadis of North Darfur for many centuries, long enough that every dialect of Fur carries its own small map of who came from where. The Tunjur, who once ruled a kingdom in this region before the Fur rose to power in the sixteenth century, still remember that history. The Berti, smaller in number, have largely adopted Arabic but preserved distinct cultural practices. Around Kutum, the villages are often Arab, because this town sits on one of the traditional north-south migration routes used by Arab pastoralists moving their herds with the seasons. For centuries this meant trade, intermarriage, and occasional friction. In the last two decades, it has meant much worse.

During the War in Darfur, which began in 2003, Kutum's non-Arab residents found themselves associated, by government rhetoric, with the rebel groups then fighting the Bashir regime. In August 2003, Sudan Liberation Army fighters briefly took the town. Janjaweed militias and Sudanese Armed Forces retook it and turned it, in the following years, into a stronghold of anti-Bashir sentiment. Battles moved through in waves. The Sudan Liberation Movement held the area northeast of town. Janjaweed held the south and west. Civilians in the middle paid the price. Two camps for internally displaced persons, Fatta Borno and Kassab, formed just outside Kutum, and most of those who fled the surrounding villages stayed in them, unable to return to homes that had been burned or occupied.

Kassab sits just north of Kutum. For years it was the refuge of families from Fur villages that had been destroyed, and though attacks dropped in the late 2010s and thousands returned home in 2018, gunmen kept coming back. The war in Darfur was officially declared over in 2020, but attacks on civilians in and around Kutum continued. In August 2012, Kassab was itself attacked, a setback documented by the New York Times and others as proof that the 2020 peace had not been peace. Children were born in Kassab who had never seen the villages their parents came from. Grandmothers who remembered when a trip to the Kutum market meant fresh produce and gossip lived out their final years in tents.

In June 2023, two months into Sudan's new civil war, the Battle of Kutum ended with the Rapid Support Forces capturing the town. Hemedti, the RSF commander, had already threatened in March 2023 to dismantle the IDP camps across Sudan, Kassab among them. That is now happening. Kutum's Fur, Tunjur, and Berti residents face a familiar choice, one their grandparents faced under the Mahdi, their parents faced under Bashir, and now they face under the RSF: stay and risk everything, or flee and hope to return to a town that still exists. The market along the wadi will reopen one day. The bakers and mechanics will come back. They always have. But the count of those who do not return grows longer with each war, and Kutum carries the weight of everyone it has lost.