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Sudan’s prime minister orders fuel released to Khartoum stations as drones hit the distribution chain

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.

Sudan Tribune reported from Khartoum on 30 September that Prime Minister Kamil Idriss had ordered additional supplies of petroleum products released to service stations, after acute shortages took hold in the capital and in regional states, producing long queues and price rises. Idriss was photographed visiting a filling station in Khartoum the same day. What is established is the order, not the delivery: the account available to this desk does not show fuel reaching pumps, and no price-per-gallon figure or queue measurement was published alongside it. A government announcing supply during a shortage is performing a political act as much as a logistical one, and the photograph at the station is part of the announcement rather than evidence of its effect.

Three days earlier, on or about 27 September, Dabanga reported that Rapid Support Forces drones struck a fuel depot in El Gezira state that stores and distributes petrol and diesel across the state. The outlet based its account partly on video circulating online showing flames across parts of the site and partly on Civil Defence statements, which said teams had contained the fire, prevented it spreading to other tanks, and limited damage to the petrol and diesel tanks. No wire confirmation of the strike has been seen here, and no source connects the depot fire to the Khartoum queues. In the same report, the Sudanese Armed Forces said its air defences downed an FH-95 drone northeast of El Kokiti in North Kordofan, the second of that type it claimed to have shot down in a week; the claim is the army’s and is not independently verified.

The drone campaign’s documented centre is North Kordofan. North Kordofan state authorities said an RSF drone attack on 25 September killed two civilians and wounded 20 in El Obeid, hitting a displacement shelter and civilian infrastructure. On 26 September Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Abdulaziz Al-Wasil, lodged a complaint with the Security Council by diplomatic letter accusing the RSF of striking a King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre truck near the entrance to El Obeid. The letter is a primary document; the attribution of the strike within it is Riyadh’s. Of an attack attributed to the RSF on 15 September against El Obeid’s College of Development and Technological Sciences, in which the dean Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh said a security guard was killed and eight classrooms damaged, a student who had sat exams there the previous day, Omnia Aboul Gassim, told Reuters: “As you can see, the entire faculty is destroyed, and we feel that our dreams are destroyed, and our future is destroyed.”

Assessment: Read the week as a campaign against distribution rather than against front lines. Depots, aid trucks, shelters and a college are targets that degrade the state’s ability to supply and be seen supplying — which is why a prime minister at a pump matters to both sides. Distrust the causal chain that suggests itself: nobody has shown the El Gezira fire produced the Khartoum queues, and Sudan’s fuel economy has older problems. Distrust equally the shoot-down counts, which are belligerent claims. The Saudi letter is the significant item: a Quad member formally accusing the RSF at the Council in the same week Washington is squeezing the army over a visa.

Burhan rejects the American condition as the Quad and Quintet meet jointly for the first time

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.

In an exclusive published 22 September, Reuters reported that the United States is withholding a visa from Sudan’s leader, with issuance appearing contingent on General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan agreeing to sign a 90-day ceasefire proposed by Massad Boulos, the US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs. The story rests on two unnamed sources — a Sudanese diplomatic source and a Western analyst described as close to American and Sudanese officials — one of whom is an analyst rather than an official. On 26 September Burhan answered publicly from a crowded stadium in Khartoum. The renderings in circulation are not identical: AFP, carried by Daily Trust, and Responsible Statecraft both have him saying “we do not want a visa to any country,” but their fuller quotations diverge, and this desk has not verified either against video of the speech. The refusal is clear; the exact words are not.

What the parties have not settled is what a truce would freeze. Fox News, citing an analyst it did not name in the material available here, framed the central dispute as whether the RSF would be required to withdraw from civilian areas it holds, and argued that locking in current lines risks converting a temporary ceasefire into de facto partition. Asharq Al-Awsat, which is Saudi-owned and not neutral on the Jeddah record, reaches the same point differently: the Quad’s September 2025 roadmap remained a mediators' proposal and never became an agreement between the belligerents. The same piece reports that Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo accused Lieutenant General Shams al-Din Kabbashi of backing away from a document, and that Kabbashi did not comment on why the process halted. Crisis Group’s August 2026 briefing judged the roadmap yet to get off the ground, with the army appearing to reject it while equivocating under pressure from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and key Burhan allies strongly opposed.

The diplomacy kept moving anyway. On 23 September in New York, the African Union and the United States co-chaired what Sudan Tribune described as an unprecedented first joint meeting of the Quad and Quintet groupings, convened to unify fragmented international initiatives; it demanded an immediate humanitarian truce, civilian protection and an arms embargo. AU Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf warned, in the paraphrase available here, that the crisis requires immediate operational coordination rather than diplomatic rhetoric, and repeated that there is no military solution. Five days later, the Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy Pekka Haavisto told UN News that intensified diplomatic efforts offer cautious grounds for hope. Separately, Security Council Report notes that some Sudanese civilian groups, including Somoud and Tasis, declined to join a recent round of talks.

Assessment: The visa is leverage applied to the cheapest possible target: a travel document, not arms or money. That it produced a stadium speech rather than a signature tells you how Burhan prices domestic standing against access to Washington, and the Reuters story’s two anonymous sources mean the pressure itself is better established than its terms. Watch the withdrawal question, because it decides whether a 90-day truce stabilises Sudan or ratifies the map. The Quad–Quintet merger consolidates mediators, not combatants; a demand co-chaired by everyone is still a demand. Haavisto’s optimism arriving in the same week as the refusal is the gap worth holding onto.

Port Sudan extends the Adre crossing to December as a displaced-persons group reports child deaths in Jebel Marra

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 Tribune reported from Khartoum on 30 September that the government had extended the opening of the Adre crossing with Chad by a further three months, to 31 December 2026, to facilitate UN aid deliveries into Darfur; the report was illustrated with WFP trucks at the crossing. This is a confirmed government decision and a date-certain commitment, which makes it checkable — Adre has been renewed in three-month increments before, and the next expiry is now a calendar item. It also restates the structural politics of the corridor: the Port Sudan authorities control the legal permission to cross, while the RSF controls much of the road on the Darfur side. Tonnage figures through Adre, which WFP and OCHA publish monthly, would settle whether permission has translated into volume. This desk does not yet have them.

Separately, Sudan Tribune reported from Jebel Marra on 30 September that at least 30 children have died from complications linked to malnutrition in the Suni area of eastern Jebel Marra, and that the General Coordination for Displaced Persons and Refugees in Darfur said it had documented more than 100 cases of severe acute malnutrition among children in an area it says lacks functioning medical facilities. The group is a displaced-persons advocacy body, not a clinical surveillance system, and it has an interest in the figure being heard; the account is single-sourced and unverified. The wider frame is firmer. The IPC’s September 2025 analysis confirmed famine in El Fasher town and Kadugli with at least 20 further localities at risk, and put 21.2 million people in Phase 3 or worse. In February 2026 it flagged famine-level acute malnutrition in Um Baru and Kernoi in North Darfur — an alert, it stressed, not a formal classification — and projected nearly 4.2 million acute malnutrition cases across Sudan in 2026, including more than 800,000 severe. FEWS NET’s March update kept a risk of famine standing in South Kordofan and North Darfur. Human Rights Watch, citing WFP, counts 24.6 million people in acute hunger and 11.8 million displaced.

Assessment: Keep the two halves of this story in separate evidentiary boxes. A ministry decision with a date on it and an advocacy group’s body count from an area with no clinic are not the same kind of fact, and pairing them in one number would flatter both. The thing to test by 31 December is not whether Adre is open but what crossed it: permission is the cheap part, and Port Sudan knows that granting access into territory it does not hold costs it little while earning diplomatic credit. Note too that the 4.2 million projection predates this year’s Kordofan displacement, which makes it a floor rather than a forecast.