Sudan Crisis Monitor

Kamil Idriss was photographed at a Khartoum filling station on Wednesday after ordering additional petroleum supplies released. Three days earlier, RSF drones struck a fuel depot in El Gezira.

Reuters reported on 22 September that Washington is withholding a visa from Sudan’s leader pending his signature on a 90-day truce. Four days later Burhan answered from a Khartoum stadium.

The Sudanese government renewed UN aid access through Adre until 31 December. In eastern Jebel Marra, an advocacy body says at least 30 children have died of malnutrition-linked complications.

Sudan’s foreign minister told the General Assembly the host country blocked the Sovereign Council chairman from New York, then used the podium to argue against extending the Darfur arms embargo to the whole country.

The 28 September floor fight at the General Assembly turned on whether Port Sudan is a government — and on what the UN Fact-Finding Mission actually found five days earlier.

A drone attack on an IDP shelter and civilian sites killed two and wounded 20 on 25 September, the second aerial bombardment of the North Kordofan capital in a week.

Washington withheld an entry visa from Sudan’s Sovereign Council chairman ahead of the General Assembly. Within 48 hours, two irreconcilable accounts of Khartoum’s position on a US ceasefire proposal came out of the same government.

Sudan’s minerals minister announced draft legislation making possession of gold without papers a criminal offence. State figures put national output at about 70 tonnes last year against 14 tonnes in recorded exports.

The Umm Alila depot near Wad Madani burned on Sunday morning; no party has claimed the attack. Saudi Arabia’s UN complaint over an El Obeid aid convoy rests on an attribution supplied by Khartoum.

The Um Aleila complex in Al Jazirah state — a SAF-held rear area, not a front line — burned after pre-dawn explosions on Sunday. Civil Defence says it stopped the fire before it reached the rest of the tank farm.

Saudi Arabia has written to the UN Security Council accusing the RSF of hitting a KSrelief truck near El Obeid on 17 August. The filing is six weeks late, single-sourced, and rests on Port Sudan’s word.

The SAF commander made his first public response to missing the UN General Assembly, while the US adviser who drafted the truce confirmed on the record that blocking him was deliberate policy.

SAF-side authorities and an RSF-aligned alliance each reported a civilian-casualty drone strike in the same state on 25 September, while the army claimed the recapture of Sodari.

Saudi Arabia says an RSF drone struck a King Salman relief convoy on 17 August; the 1591 regime it would fall under is on a one-month rollover expiring 9 October.

Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service, citing unnamed local sources, put the combined dead and wounded at 22. The strike lands inside a wider air campaign a UN inquiry says killed more than 1,000 civilians in five months.

The African Union and the United States co-chaired the first joint session at the General Assembly. Asharq Al-Awsat’s read on why the truce track keeps failing names the blocker: the two sides still disagree on withdrawal terms.

The Quad and the Quintet met jointly for the first time on September 23, producing a call for a humanitarian truce, a promise of a roadmap — and a US demand to widen the UN arms embargo.

The UN counts more than 1,000 civilians killed by drone strikes from both sides in the first half of 2026. Residents describe a renewed RSF air campaign after weeks of relative quiet.

Sudan’s UN ambassador has asked Guterres to intervene after neither Abdel Fattah al-Burhan nor his delegation received US entry visas. Two anonymous sources tie the refusal to a 90-day American ceasefire proposal.

Resolution 2828 extended the 1591 measures only to 9 October, explicitly to buy time on whether to widen an arms embargo that still covers Darfur alone. Civilian groups at the UNGA are pressing for nationwide scope.

The State Department said on 22 September that neither the army nor the Rapid Support Forces constitutes lawful government in Sudan and that it would raise the cost of the war. It did not say how, and the one lever already on the table expires in three weeks.

The World Food Programme said on 22 September it is cutting food assistance across Sudan, Chad and South Sudan, including for nearly a million people uprooted in Tawila. Its Sudan funding has dropped from $645 million in 2025 to about $206 million so far this year.

Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service reported dawn strikes on the 5th Infantry Division command, the airport and a finance ministry site in North Kordofan’s besieged capital. Both the strike account and the army’s counter-claims rest on single, interested sources.

Massad Boulos told Sky News Arabia the United States is working with partners on a humanitarian truce in Sudan. The three-month truce the Quad first proposed on 12 September 2025 has still not begun.

An SAF announcement relayed from El Obeid on 17 September is the freshest battlefield claim available, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have not answered it. The corridor in question is the one that decides whether El Obeid holds.

UNICEF says IPC figures are largely unchanged not because conditions stabilised but because they are too volatile to classify. The admission is the most useful number in the file.

The SAF general command’s account of a push toward the Darfur border is uncorroborated by any third party, and the RSF has said nothing. If it holds, the siege framing that dominated the first half of 2026 is obsolete.

Five multilateral bodies consulted Burhan, his prime minister and allied political blocs on 9 September. No RSF-side interlocutor appears in any published account of the mission.

The Sudanese Armed Forces said on Thursday it had taken 11 areas west of El Obeid. On Friday an RSF spokesman announced a “large victory” at Abu Qa’oud, one of the villages in the same contested belt. Neither account has independent verification.

Kurmuk governorate says the attackers who struck Al-Keili set out from Ethiopian territory, and the army says it destroyed nine combat vehicles. No Ethiopian response, and no non-Sudanese source, has appeared.

Two reports inside 48 hours have the SAF taking ground in North Kordofan and repelling drone strikes on El Obeid. Both rest on Sudanese military sourcing, and neither has independent corroboration.

The Security Council rolled over the 1591 sanctions regime for four weeks instead of a year, at US request, to negotiate extending the embargo beyond Darfur. Three of the objecting states have vetoes or regional cover.

Resolution 2828 buys four weeks of negotiating time over whether to extend the Darfur arms embargo to all of Sudan. The regime now expires on 9 October.

The al-Zara mine at Nuhud sits in territory the Rapid Support Forces administer and that the army has named as its next objective. The only body counting the dead is a volunteer medical network.

Famine conditions are confirmed in Al Fasher and Kadugli while 3.4 million people have moved out of crisis-level hunger in Khartoum, Al Jazirah and Sennar. The variable is who holds the ground.

Massad Boulos said in public what Washington has implied for a year — that Burhan and Hemedti are both excluded from any settlement. The Security Council, meanwhile, bought itself one month to argue about the arms embargo’s map.

Carl Skau came out of an eight-day visit with a number: just under $300 million to hold current operations, against $206 million received all year. The cut is a forecast, not yet an event.

Witnesses described multiple one-way attack drones over the Blue Nile capital on Sunday night. The pattern matches Kordofan, where the RSF has answered ground losses from the air.

Residents of Ed Damazin counted at least 11 detonations on Sunday evening. Two outlets corroborate the attack; they do not agree on who carried it out, and no casualty figure has been published.

The Dar Hamar Emergency Room says a failed season and looting have pushed the state’s northern belt toward catastrophe. No IPC classification exists for those localities — and the rain failure is a national-supply problem, not a Kordofan one.

Resolution 2828 passed 15–0 on Friday, rolling the Darfur arms embargo forward only to 9 October. Washington wants the embargo extended to all of Sudan and says the status quo is ‘over twenty years outdated.'

Resolution 2828 was adopted unanimously on Friday, but the one-month rollover is the compromise, not the decision. The fight is over whether the arms embargo stops being a Darfur measure and becomes a Sudan-wide one.

Sudan Tribune reports from a leaked UN Panel document that RSF commanders directed sexual violence during the El Fasher assault — and that two of the men named are now in Khartoum under an army amnesty.

The Quintet’s mission of 8–10 September was the group’s first to Sudan since the war began. Everything on the agenda was process, except a detainee track the UN’s personal envoy opened separately with Burhan.

Resolution 2828 rolls the 1591 regime forward to 9 October instead of renewing it for a year, while the United States tries to extend the Darfur embargo to all of Sudan. Russia has said it will block any widening.

The African Union, IGAD, the Arab League, the EU and the UN held their first joint mission inside Sudan since the war began. Neither belligerent sat at the table.

Strikes on Umm Ruwaba and El Obeid came days before the IPC’s June–September projection — which put 200,000 people in Phase 5 — expires without a published update.

Resolution 2828 rolled over the 1591 regime unanimously on 11 September — one day before expiry — while the United States, Britain and Sudan’s own envoy set out irreconcilable positions on whether the arms embargo should cover the whole country.

What the Council is arguing about is a map drawn in 2005. The documented displacement and siege warfare of mid-2026 is happening several hundred kilometres east of the territory the measures bind.

Sudanese Armed Forces say they expelled the RSF from a highway town in North Kordofan on 6 September and are massing for Sodari. The second half of that is one outlet’s unnamed military sources.

Sudan Tribune reported on 5 September that a UN experts report it had seen finds RSF commanders ordered rape and encouraged the killing of civilians during the takeover of El Fasher. The document itself has not surfaced publicly.

The African Union, IGAD, Arab League, EU and UN closed their first wartime political visit to Sudan on Thursday. Every engagement they disclosed took place on army-controlled territory.

North Kordofan absorbed a deep strike on a civil-administration building on Tuesday, two days after the army seized a town on the Export Road. Casualty counts diverge across outlets.

Resolution 2791 lapses on 12 September. Whether the Security Council extends the embargo beyond Darfur is the only testable question on the Sudan file this week.

SAF commanders released video from Hamrat al-Wiz on Sunday claiming the RSF had been expelled. The claim rests on one outlet and one field commander, in a theatre the UN says emptied of more than 200,000 people last month.

UN experts renewed the call last week and the United States has floated a nationwide text. Nothing has been adopted, and the states named as suppliers are being named by belligerents rather than by documents.

The Darfur arms embargo and associated measures expire on 12 September; the Panel of Experts that monitors them runs to 12 October. The argument in New York is about duration, and duration is the tell.

The operational news out of Ed Damazin is not the accusation against Ethiopia and the UAE — it is that the SAF has formalised a southeastern command while still claiming ground four hundred kilometres away in Kordofan.

The Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission traced weapons, cargo flights and foreign recruits to entities in four countries. The Security Council must vote by 12 September on whether the regime that would police any of it survives.

The fact-finding mission’s freshest line is that RSF strikes on El Obeid between July and August progressively destroyed the infrastructure of a city of half a million. The IPC’s own projection for that same window put 200,000 Sudanese in catastrophic hunger.

The Fact-Finding Mission’s report on foreign fighters and weapons transfers lands as the Security Council must renew the Sudan sanctions regime by 12 September, or let it expire.

The Sudan Doctors Network reported the deaths on Friday; the IPC window that put 19.5 million Sudanese in acute food insecurity closes this month, with El Obeid still encircled.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan published findings on 3 September documenting up to 2,000 former Colombian contractors with RSF units and transit routes through Chad, Libya and Bosaso. It names jurisdictions, not states.

The IPC’s current analysis projects 825,000 children under five with severe acute malnutrition in 2026 and flags 14 areas at risk of famine — but could no longer disaggregate El Fasher and Kadugli, the two towns it classified in Phase 5.

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan published findings on 3 September that external recruitment and supply networks are sustaining both belligerents. The 1591 sanctions regime lapses on 12 September.

The army chief toured troops in Damazin on 3 September while the RSF and SPLM-N claimed two military bases. A Sudanese official’s allegation of RSF camps inside Ethiopia is denied by Addis Ababa and Abu Dhabi.

The Security Council must renew Sudan’s targeted sanctions and arms embargo within nine days, while a US proposal to extend the Darfur-only embargo across the whole country runs into a leak fight and open defiance from the army.

Security Council Report describes a significant build-up around North Kordofan’s capital and repeated strikes on power and fuel that have closed medical and water facilities. The city sits on the road from RSF-held Darfur to the army’s east.

Yasir al-Atta told reserve troops in Omdurman that neither the Security Council nor the Emirates could stop a coming offensive, eleven days before the Darfur sanctions regime lapses on 12 September.

State media said 200 RSF fighters crossed over with their weapons; the army said reinforcements reached Ed Damazin. Neither has been independently verified, and both landed in the days before a promised offensive.

The claim, carried Monday by three outlets that appear to share a single origin, arrives at the end of a four-week run of defection reporting — and with fighting now at the edge of El Obeid.

The IPC projection running through September expires this month, making the October 2026–January 2027 figure the live one. UNICEF has already confirmed famine conditions in Al Fasher and Kadugli.

The Sudan Doctors Network’s accusation, carried by one outlet on Sunday, describes raiding inside ground the Sudanese army retook five weeks ago on the western approaches to El Obeid.

Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service reported on 29 August that Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab had disclosed equipment massing at an Ethiopian base on the Sudanese border in support of the RSF. This desk has not read the underlying report.

Three weeks of fighting on a single arc south-west of El Obeid, a struck water station and an OHCHR count of more than 500 civilians killed by drones in ten weeks describe a war whose worst violence has migrated out of Darfur.

The IPC’s February–May analysis puts 19.5 million Sudanese in crisis or worse and 135,000 in Catastrophe, down from 375,000 last September. The drop is the most misreadable number in the file.

The United States tabled a resolution on 24 August extending the two-decade-old Darfur embargo to all of Sudan and naming drones explicitly. Sudan, Russia and China opposed it; the existing regime expires in a fortnight.

Reuters filed on 28 August on sustained outages attributed to strikes on generation and transmission, theft of copper and fuel, and late seasonal rains. An anonymous RSF source called the accusation army propaganda.

The Central Bank of Sudan let commercial lenders set their own exchange rates; within days the parallel market had repriced the currency downward again, and one state-linked bank published two irreconcilable prices in 24 hours.

The Darfur arms embargo lapses on 12 September unless the Council acts. The US draft would extend it nationwide and cover drones — but Russia holds a veto and Burhan has already answered.

A field report from the North Kordofan capital finds displaced families moving toward a city under sustained drone attack, because the countryside is worse. The population estimates on offer differ by a factor of fifteen.

Sudan Tribune reports strikes on RSF positions in South Darfur at dawn on 24 August, following an unexplained night flight. The same day, a proposal to extend Sudan’s arms embargo country-wide reportedly reached the Security Council.

A US adviser addressed the Council on 24 August with a proposal to extend the 2004 Darfur-only embargo to the whole country. As of Wednesday the proposal exists in aggregated reporting, not in a circulated text.

The siege of North Kordofan’s capital is not stalled. It is being tightened by drone strikes on the city and ground probes at 25 to 40 kilometres, with the villages in between depopulating.

Rosemary DiCarlo briefed a divided Council on Monday, and the session’s most striking figure was an estimate no one can verify. The fight over a nationwide arms embargo remains unresolved.

Sudan Tribune reports dawn strikes on Monday in the South Darfur capital following the arrival of a large cargo flight. Neither the aircraft’s origin nor the attacking force has been established.

A two-day consultative meeting opened Saturday to formulate a common position on the army chief’s call for an internal dialogue. The Quintet’s own track has stalled, and Khartoum is filling the space.

Sudan’s armed forces say they have completed the first phase of “regularising the status” of defecting RSF units. No headcount has been published, and one defecting brigadier stands accused of involvement in the El Fasher atrocities.

The agency’s alert, dated around 19 August and circulating since 20 August, folds nine months of displacement into a single figure — and blames a shipping-lane closure outside Sudan for slowing the response.

More than 1,000 people walked into a city already hosting 100,000 displaced, while Sudanese civilian parties gathered in Ethiopia to decide whether to legitimise a process that excludes the RSF by design.

Two Sudanese outlets report at least six civilians killed in RSF raids on Umm Draysa and Al-Shagla, with hundreds of families displaced into a city the UN has already flagged for mass-atrocity risk.

Four credible outlets place the SAF’s seizure of Bara in March, June, July and August. The discrepancy is not a footnote — it is the measure of how little of the Kordofan campaign is independently observed.

A Northern State locality administration announced the defection late Tuesday. Every version of the story traces back to that one statement, and the RSF has not commented.

Radio Dabanga carried a security analyst’s assessment on 18 August that the RSF is intensifying operations in Blue Nile. Meanwhile no hard battlefield reporting has emerged from North Kordofan since 17 August.

An AU Peace and Security Council mission met Burhan and Prime Minister Kamil Idris on 16 August, as the five-body diplomatic mechanism remains stuck on where talks would be held and in what format.

OCHA says the RSF has surrounded North Kordofan’s capital and is threatening a full assault. ACLED’s reading is that the city is more likely to be ground down than taken.

A Sudanese Armed Forces shoot-down claim relayed by Sudan Tribune is the only fresh item on the Kordofan file inside 48 hours. It is a belligerent’s assertion, and this desk cannot yet say more than that.

The most-quoted hunger figure on the Sudan file cannot be tied to a reference period, and the Quad “peace deal” announced in February has never been reported as collapsed. Both gaps flatter the parties.

The AU Peace and Security Council’s two-day mission closes on Monday with no published outcome. It arrives at a moment when both belligerents have reasons to believe the map is still moving in their favour.

The week’s structural fact is not momentum in one direction but two fronts moving in opposite ones, and a drone campaign that reached towns untouched since May.

The Sudanese army’s chief of staff set a deadline of December 2026 for eliminating the Rapid Support Forces. In the twelve days that followed, the RSF announced captures in Blue Nile and 25 km from El Obeid.

The war’s financing runs through a market the Quad’s four members include. Between half and four-fifths of Sudan’s gold output is now reported as smuggled.

A dawn ground assault 25 km southwest of El Obeid produced two incompatible statements on Friday and one casualty figure, from a Sudanese NGO, that no wire verified on the ground.

Nothing moved from the Quad in the 48-hour window. The last substantive announcement was Massad Boulos in February saying a peace document acceptable to both sides existed.

The UN put an IOM-sourced figure on Tuesday’s assault on Geisan in Blue Nile. Two days later the RSF announced it had taken Al Kurmuk, a border town that has changed hands at least three times this year.

Reuters and Sudan Tribune place loitering-munition attacks on five army-held cities across Wednesday and Thursday. The attribution rests on witnesses and army sources; the RSF has claimed nothing.

The IPC’s 14 May analysis dropped the North Darfur famine classification confirmed in 2025 while leaving 135,000 people in Catastrophe. The likeliest explanation is access, not recovery.

Reuters counted eight drones over El Obeid and two dead, photographed a collapsed mosque wall in Khartoum North, and said explicitly it could not verify who launched the strikes or from where.

Witnesses say the RSF resumed its ground attack on El Obeid on Wednesday, weeks after suspending it. Military sources tell Reuters both armies have massed fresh forces in Kordofan.

OCHA’s Monday briefing puts an encirclement of El Obeid, an emptied cluster of villages in Sirba and a 40-per-cent-funded appeal in the same document. The Sudanese army, on the same day, describes the West Darfur fighting as a victory.

Al Jazeera and Asharq both report undisclosed consultations by the army chief on a national dialogue conference. Neither has an on-the-record word from Port Sudan, and the two accounts emphasise different things.

Sudan’s army chief told Sudanese the war is existential and that the Sudanese Armed Forces fight unaided. The line is a sovereignty claim aimed at the mediators, not an answer to the charge that both sides are supplied from abroad.

The Sudan Liberation Army faction led by Khamis Abdullah Abakar said on Saturday it was surprised by the dismissal of a minister from its ranks. The dispute reaches the army’s manpower in the theatres where the fighting now is.

Every claim of army progress in Kordofan and on the Libyan border this week originates with the army or with anonymous military sources. One of them now rests on satellite thermal data that cannot identify a truck, let alone a flag.

NPR’s report on the siege of North Kordofan’s capital is the strongest single item of the window. The UN quotes inside it date to July, and the underlying agency documentation to 2 July.

NPR reports UN experts fear large-scale atrocities in North Kordofan’s besieged capital. The army’s chief of staff says the war ends this year. Both statements were made in the same week, about the same city.

Sudan Tribune’s Juba reporting describes how raw Darfur and Kordofan gold acquires South Sudanese paperwork. It corroborates the FT’s investigation into 1.5 tonnes of stolen bullion — but possibly from the same well.

Anonymous army sources told The New Arab of strikes on the RSF’s northern supply path and the killing of an RSF major general. An analyst in the same piece points to Pakistani weapons and a Saudi-brokered deal.

Sudan Tribune’s 6 August field report supplies the mechanics the Financial Times investigation left as a border crossing — and rests them on one anonymous trader.

The Al Sadarat highway recapture is the army’s largest claimed gain of the year, and the only reporting of residents contradicting it reaches The Files through an aggregator.

Every published account of the 2 August strike on a customary court in RSF-held Darfur traces back to the Emergency Lawyers collective. The UN’s own statement cites the press rather than its own verification.

Haavisto travels to Türkiye this week for talks with Turkish authorities and Sudanese stakeholders, under a five-body configuration that is not the Quad — after Tasis declined the AU and UN consultations on 1 August.

A Financial Times investigation, so far available to this desk only in Semafor’s digest, says the UAE received more than $100 million in bullion looted from Sudan’s central bank and state refinery. The Emirati response conceded the size of the trade, not its origin.

Sudan’s army says no RSF fighters or foreign mercenaries will remain in the country by the end of 2026. Every claim of territorial control behind that forecast originates with the army itself.

Emergency Lawyers says Sudanese army drones hit a customary court in RSF-held North Darfur on Sunday. Every wire account rests on that one group, and the army has said nothing at all.

The Al Sadarat highway was announced as a second supply line into El Obeid on 26 July. On 1 August an INGO put the city’s drinking-water gap at about 70 percent.

SUNA announced the defection of the RSF’s “Group 26” without a headcount or an equipment list. Al Jazeera Arabic’s headline the same day put the figure at 45 — and placed it in Kordofan, not Omdurman.

A 400-kilometre corridor from Omdurman to El Obeid moved from disputed assertion to background fact without any independent confirmation surfacing in between — and no reporting on whether the city’s siege has lifted.

The RSF-aligned Founding Sudan Coalition declined the invitation to the Addis Ababa consultations, leaving a process now refused by pro-RSF, anti-war and non-aligned armed constituencies at once.

The analytical premise behind every ‘next El Fasher' story about El Obeid was built on three RSF positions. Sudan Tribune says the army took one of them in late July, and Sudanese state media cannot decide which city its surrender footage comes from.

Sudan Tribune reports the heaviest aerial escalation of the war across North and West Kordofan on Thursday. The ground gains that preceded it are multi-sourced; the bombing is not.

A local emergency room says the RSF disabled satellite terminals in three West Kordofan market towns. Connectivity denial is how the record of what follows gets erased in advance.

The army’s 26 July recapture of Bara reopened the road to El Obeid. Sudan Tribune reports the withdrawing RSF then attacked civilians in five North Kordofan localities, on unnamed local sources.

Somoud spokesman Bakry Eljack says the coalition sent the UN-AU-EU-IGAD-Arab League mechanism critical observations on its methodology and asked for a Sudanese-led process starting with a humanitarian truce.

The RSF released the recording on 30 July. Its recording date is not established, and the capital has been in army hands since 2025.

Reuters says it has reviewed a draft UN Panel of Experts report finding that Boeing 727s flew RSF fighters and weapons from N’Djamena into Darfur. The document is confirmed; the allegation inside it rests on two eyewitnesses and two member states, none of them named.

The RSF accepts a truce but refuses to withdraw from captured territory. Burhan will not accept a truce that is not preceded by that withdrawal. The American paper is on the table and neither reply moves an inch of ground.

Sudan’s army declared control of the 400km Omdurman–El Obeid export road on Tuesday. A day earlier, drones hit El Obeid at dawn, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo told his commanders they no longer need to wait for orders.

WFP calls El Obeid the epicentre of Sudan’s displacement and hunger crisis. Every published aid figure for the city predates this week’s military shift.

The SAF and its allied Joint Force claim Bara and four surrounding localities, and with them the 350-kilometre highway from Omdurman to El Obeid. The RSF denies losing the towns, and an AFP journalist watched drones strike the city on Monday.

CNN, citing UN-recorded data, puts drone strikes at more than 80 percent of civilian deaths logged in the first four months of 2026. The pattern now reaches across the Chadian border.

Sudan’s General Command claims five North Kordofan locations and 73 destroyed RSF vehicles. The RSF has said nothing, and one of the towns was declared liberated once already in June.

Yasir al-Atta told troops in Omdurman the advance would move “in successive waves” to Um Dafuq. That is the far southwestern corner of Darfur, roughly the whole width of the country from where the fighting is.

A named researcher has put the first hard number on an offensive that has emptied villages on the Sudan–Chad frontier and pulled the Darfur Joint Forces into a new front.

The alleged perpetrator this time is the SAF, not the RSF — and the claim rests on one rights group reaching us through a digest, not a wire.

The army chief has converted a procedural set of conditions into a flat no, telling a domestic audience there will be no place for the militia "or those who supported and backed them." Massad Boulos now has no counterparty.

UN Women says strikes on water infrastructure in daylight push women and girls to collect water after dark — when a second kind of violence operates. There is no safe hour.

A near-daily drone campaign is knocking out power, water and hospitals in a city of half a million — the same sequence that preceded the El Fasher massacre, now running on North Kordofan.

Both sides have now formally answered Washington's truce plan — and the answers expose the deadlock. The RSF will freeze the front; Burhan will only sign if the RSF leaves. The gap is structural.

The RSF will accept a ceasefire that freezes its conquests; the army will accept one that reverses them. The gap is structural, and both use the talks as cover to keep fighting.

A drone campaign is cutting water, fuel and power to half a million trapped people — and the El Fasher precedent means siege, then massacre, is the realistic case, not the worst one.

The RSF is running the same siege-and-drone script that preceded last year's El Fasher massacre — this time against half a million people in North Kordofan — while a truce it has already gutted absorbs the diplomatic oxygen.

The EU banned Sudanese gold on July 13 but declined to designate the RSF or name the UAE — the precise distance between a parliamentary vote and an act of leverage.

The RSF has accepted Washington's 90-day truce — and rejected the withdrawal that would give it meaning. A pause that freezes today's map is not a step toward peace; it is the siege of El Obeid, notarized.

Khartoum's military claims two weeks of heavy RSF losses across five theaters. Read it less as a scorecard than as a negotiating position.