Sudan Crisis Monitor

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.