Kassala

Kassala is the capital of Kassala State in eastern Sudan, on the banks of the Gash River. The Egyptian army founded it as a garrison town in 1834 after Sudan's conquest in 1821, and it endured a Mahdist siege in the 1880s before surrendering in 1886, with Italy occupying it from 1894 to 1896 and again briefly during the Second World War. Its population was about 411,574 in 2025. Kassala is a market city known for its fruit gardens and for the Khatmiyya Mosque, built in 1840, and hosts an ethnically diverse population of Beja, Beni-Amer and Rashaida people alongside refugees from the Ethiopian-Eritrean war.