Sudanese professor flees war-torn country, finds new life in Ottawa in AI research role

Artificial-intelligence researcher Abeer Ibrahim vividly recalls the day she read the e-mail that changed her life.

The Sudanese academic was a refugee in Somalia when she received a message from Carleton University professor Thomas Kunz asking her to join a team researching cybersecurity and machine learning.

The e-mail set her and her family on a path to a new life in Canada, after a perilous flight from Sudan during a civil war that has displaced millions.

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In her new university office in Ottawa, Ms. Ibrahim, now a visiting professor in Carleton’s computer engineering department, says that back in 2023, she would never have expected to find a safe haven in Canada.

But a global organization helping scholars flee war zones, a charity helping skilled refugees find jobs in Canada and a group of determined Carleton University managers spent years helping the academic.

The civil war in Sudan began in April, 2023, a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

It has since uprooted millions of people in what the World Health Organization has dubbed the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. An estimated 13 million people have been displaced by the fighting, with around nine million forced to leave their homes and a further four million seeking refuge in neighbouring countries.

The conflict made continuing at the Academy of Engineering and Medical Sciences in Khartoum, where Ms. Ibrahim taught and carried out research, all but impossible. Classes shut down, internet and phone coverage was unreliable and food shortages and violence in the city drove people to flee their homes.

The situation became more perilous for Ms. Ibrahim, head of the private university’s department of communication and computer engineering, after intellectuals and doctors began to disappear. Among them was Ms. Ibrahim’s cousin, a doctor who was kidnapped and forced to give medical help to RSF forces, and let go after a year.

In March, 2024, she embarked with her three children on a harrowing bus ride across the country from Khartoum to Port Sudan. The family only had three bags between them, containing clothes, food, her academic diplomas and a single photograph of her late mother. (Her husband Saber was working as a postdoctoral researcher at a university in Malaysia at the time, and joined the family in Somalia later.)

The trip usually takes about 11 hours, but closed roads and multiple checkpoints meant the driver had to take small roads and a longer route than the usual 800-kilometre journey. It ended up taking five days.

Along with other passengers, Ms. Ibrahim and her children were pulled off the bus repeatedly at checkpoints set up by the RSF and Sudanese army in areas they each controlled.

The family, rationed to one meal a day, slept in their seats and in bus stations. Ms. Ibrahim says her children were scared of the armed men who had guns slung over their shoulders at checkpoints. At some, the men sat in pickup trucks with large machine guns mounted on the back.

Ms. Ibrahim had decided to travel light and bring little cash, as she says it risked being stolen during searches. She did not want to alert those at checkpoints that her family were in the process of fleeing the country, so hid the families’ passports in the bottom of one of her children’s bags, along with her academic certificates.

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Ms. Ibrahim grew up in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, whose population has been targeted by the RSF paramilitaries. She says those moving between territories controlled by the rival factions fell under suspicion of being spies. Some passengers were pulled off buses or taken away and others were abused and beaten, she says.

“We are passing 19 checkpoints in just three kilometres,” she says. “They are searching a lot: Before you got on the bus, during the bus – you had to get on and off.”

After they finally arrived at Port Sudan, the country’s main port on the Red Sea, the family found a flight to Eritrea, then on to Ethiopia and from there to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. There, they waited for two years while Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada processed their applications for permanent residence so she could embark on her research in Ottawa.

Dana Wagner, co-founder of TalentLift Canada, a non-profit recruitment company that matches displaced people with employers, was working assiduously to help Ms. Ibrahim and her husband navigate immigration hurdles, which include biometric tests, to gain permanent residence. Ms. Ibrahim was among the refugees who was able to apply through the now-paused federal Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot program that matched qualified refugees with job vacancies.

In March, 2024, a global organization that funds and supports displaced scholars had awarded Ms. Ibrahim a fellowship to continue her studies abroad. The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund contacted Carleton University to see if it could find a temporary post for her so she could continue her research.

IIE president and chief executive Jason Czyz described Ms. Ibrahim as “an accomplished academic in the field of wireless communication and network engineering.”

“She, like so many of her Sudanese colleagues, has demonstrated remarkable courage and perseverance in the face of war and displacement,” he said in a statement.

Ms. Ibrahim says she had applied to several universities, including in Britain, in the hopes of continuing her academic career somewhere safe. As she waited for news, the e-mail she received from Prof. Kunz accepting her application to join his research team at Carleton changed the course of her life, she says.

Prof. Kunz says Ms. Ibrahim’s academic background just happened to fit in well with the research project he had embarked on, looking into ways to train software agents to defend a network.

“There’s a number of different approaches to doing this. And in the interactions that I had with Abeer, her idea was to use game theory, which is sort of a new approach I hadn’t thought about.”

Prof. Kunz says although her two-year visiting professorship is not “a long-term solution” to secure an academic career in Canada, it will help her establish herself here and build on her teaching experience.

Ms. Ibrahim says she and her husband, who has also started as an instructor in Carleton’s department of electronic engineering, have been overwhelmed by the kindness and hospitality of Canadians.

At one dinner hosted by a university manager, her children tasted salmon for the first time. They are now eagerly anticipating playing hockey on an outdoor rink.

However, her youngest do not yet realize that sub-zero temperatures are a seasonal feature in Ottawa.

“They are waiting for the ice. They are waiting every day,” she says. “My youngest one asks, ‘When will the winter come?’ They are saying, ‘Why are we not seeing the ice yet?’ ”