SAF Says the El Obeid Road Is Open; Dabanga Reports Locals Dispute the Reopening

Sudan War Monitor recorded the offensive that began on Saturday 25 July as one of the army’s largest of the year, taking settlements along the Al-Sadarat Highway — also rendered the Al-Ingaz Al-Gharbi Highway — which links greater Khartoum to El Obeid via Jabra al-Sheikh and Bara. By Sunday morning army-aligned forces held the main settlements, restoring a direct road link severed since April 2023. Al Jazeera reported the army’s claim of control on 27 July. Ahram Online notes that Bara, North Kordofan’s second city roughly 45 kilometres east of El Obeid, has changed hands several times in the war. Security Council Report’s What’s In Blue uses the careful verb: SAF “announced” recapture of the highway and five key towns, and the Council assesses the gain significantly improves the army’s ability to reinforce positions around El Obeid.

The gain and its usability are separate questions. A cross-outlet comparison by the aggregator NewsCord records Al Jazeera framing the story as regained access while Radio Dabanga reported that locals dispute the road reopening — The Files could not open the Dabanga original, and flags the contradiction as second-hand. Meanwhile the siege of El Obeid is being prosecuted from the air, where a road matters less. MSF, citing the International NGO Safety Organisation, reports North Kordofan recorded the highest number of drone strikes in Sudan in 2026, at least 141 attacks between 1 January and 8 July. UNFPA’s 2 July flash update described near-daily drone attacks on El Obeid systematically targeting power substations, fuel stations, water facilities and healthcare infrastructure.

Both commands converted the same week into mobilisation announcements. Long War Journal — a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, with a declared posture on Gulf and Iranian arms flows — assessed on 6 August that Al Sadarat is the army’s most significant success against the RSF in the war’s fourth year, and reported a 31 July speech in which Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo called on supporters to assemble fighters for a renewed offensive toward Khartoum and announced mobilisation for Kordofan. Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service, reporting from Nyala on 4 August, framed the same turn toward tribal mobilisation in Darfur on a single informed RSF source. On 3 August in Khartoum, Sudan Tribune reported Yasser al-Atta telling an assembly of fighters the army was applying a doctrine of “moving on all axes” to eliminate the RSF before the end of this year.

Assessment: A corridor is verified by traffic, not by communiqués, and nobody has yet published a convoy that used this one. Watch for that before treating the reopening as a humanitarian fact. Note too that the two sides' announcements are complementary rather than contradictory: an army promising eradication by December and a paramilitary summoning tribal levies are both recruiting, and both need the road to sound decisive. The gold ledger above is the other half of this page — the drone counts over North Kordofan are the expenditure line for which Juba and Dubai supply the revenue.