The El Fasher Playbook Moves to Kordofan, and Everyone Can See It Coming
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.
El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan and the hinge between Khartoum and Darfur, is being softened the way El Fasher was before it fell. Attack drones now hit the city on a near-daily basis, working through a target list — power substations, fuel stations, water plants, hospitals, a market, a funeral procession — that reads less like combat than like a plan to render a city uninhabitable before a ground assault. The UN counted at least 45 civilians killed in three weeks in June alone; the city has gone roughly a month without electricity. Half a million residents remain trapped, among them close to 100,000 already displaced from somewhere else. WFP now describes El Obeid as the emerging epicentre of Sudan's displacement and hunger crisis — its food stocks are projected depleted by September and exhausted in October, which means the starvation curve and the siege curve are converging on the same weeks.
Running alongside is a truce the RSF has already hollowed out. US envoy Massad Boulos's framework, reworked with Saudi input, links a 90-day humanitarian pause to phased withdrawals; the RSF accepted the pause and rejected the withdrawal — the only part that would lift the siege. Burhan's Security and Defence Council answered separately on July 12, holding to full RSF withdrawal from cities before any ceasefire. The predictable result is a process whose existence is invoked to justify inaction while the drones keep flying.
Assessment: Watch for the pivot from siege to ground assault: massing of RSF armour around Umm Sumeima and Bara, a cut of the Omdurman highway, and — the El Fasher tell — strikes concentrating on the routes civilians would use to flee. A “tactical withdrawal” by the SAF 5th Division would signal the same sequence that produced the El Fasher killings. On the humanitarian axis, the observable is whether any negotiated corridor actually moves WFP tonnage into the city before the September depletion date; absent that, the truce is rhetorical. The narrative marker to track: whether Western capitals name El Obeid pre-emptively as an atrocity risk, or wait, as with El Fasher, to condemn it afterward.