Plan International Called El Obeid Near-Catastrophe Six Days After the Army Said Its Road Was Open

Plan International said on 1 August that the humanitarian situation in El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, was close to becoming a catastrophe because of the spread of cholera amid acute shortages of food and drinking water. The statement was carried by the Saudi Press Agency and by Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service, which put the city’s drinking-water gap at around 70 percent. Neither carried a cholera case count. Roughly 500,000 people are described as trapped in the city, a figure used consistently by Al Jazeera in July and by Saudi Gazette. UNFPA’s flash update of 2 July recorded near-daily drone attacks on El Obeid “as part of a sustained campaign to impose siege-like conditions on the city,” systematically targeting power substations, fuel stations, water facilities and healthcare infrastructure. Six days before Plan’s statement, the army announced complete control of the Omdurman–El Obeid export road, which Saudi Gazette said opened a second supply route into the city.

That announcement was contested at the time. Local sources cited by Radio Dabanga, carried by allAfrica, disputed that the route had reopened and said fighting continued along key sections. Sudan Tribune reported on 1 August that the army was consolidating along the road “despite intense drone attacks by the Rapid Support Forces,” quoting a field commander in Bara — about 60km north of El Obeid — who said there was “no room for a paramilitary return,” and an officer at Um Qirfa who ruled out further losses on the route. The same Sudan Tribune report described the army finding Bara “a ghost town as its entire population fled after RSF control.” On 30 July the RSF released video of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo telling fighters, per The National: “Think of Khartoum! We promise all our people from this spot that our target is Khartoum.” In the same address he offered new recruits wages backdated to April 2023 and rebuked fighters for location posts he called “intelligence gifts.”

Assessment: A supply road is tested by tonnage, not by press statements, and nobody on either side of this file has published a convoy count, a fuel volume or a water-truck figure for El Obeid since the highway was declared open. The only quantified number out of the city this month measures an absence. Two readings survive: the corridor is held but not yet functioning as logistics, or it is less held than announced — Dabanga’s local sources said the second on 27 July and have not been answered. Bara’s reported emptying is the unnumbered story underneath both. Hemedti’s backdated wages read as a liquidity and recruitment signal to his own ranks, not as a Khartoum plan.