Al-Atta Promised No RSF Fighters by Year’s End, and the RSF Has Claimed Three Towns Since

On 3 August the army chief of staff, Yasser al-Atta, told an assembly of fighters that the armed forces were advancing on all axes and that no RSF fighters or foreign mercenaries would remain in Sudan by the end of 2026, according to Sudan Tribune, which based its account on videos posted by army supporters on social media rather than on a press conference; the location was not specified. Al-Atta spoke flanked by the Mahamid tribal leader Musa Hilal and the RSF defector Maj. Gen. al-Nour al-Gubba. Eleven days later, on Friday 14 August, the RSF mounted a dawn ground assault on Umm Arada and the Hashaba Hills, roughly 25 km southwest of El Obeid, with army artillery around the city shelling units advancing between al-Iyara and the contested approach roads, Sudan Tribune reported from El Obeid.

The RSF said the same day that it had taken Umm Arada, calling it “a significant shift in field operations.” That is a party claim, published by the RSF; the army did not concede the town and no independent confirmation had surfaced by Sunday. The only casualty figure, at least 14 killed and dozens wounded, comes from Emergency Lawyers, an anti-RSF Sudanese lawyers' collective working through local volunteers, which said in a statement that “the Rapid Support Forces attacked the Umm Arda area on Friday, southwest of El Obeid” (AFP, via Arab News). Earlier in the week the RSF and SPLM-N claimed Geissan in Blue Nile, which the army contested while saying it held the main military base there, and on 13 August the RSF announced it had taken Al Kurmuk near the Ethiopian and South Sudanese borders (CFR conflict tracker; The National).

The city the pledge is measured against is under siege conditions. UNFPA’s flash update of 2 July described near-daily drone attacks on El Obeid systematically hitting power substations, fuel stations, water facilities and health infrastructure “as part of a sustained campaign to impose siege-like conditions on the city.” Al Jazeera, citing OHCHR, put half a million people trapped there on 6 July. On 12 and 13 August the RSF struck Khartoum and army-held cities in what AFP called its largest coordinated drone attack in months, with The National describing the drones only as “suspected” RSF. The war’s aggregate figures did not settle in the same week: The National reported “tens of thousands killed, about 14 million displaced”; AFP’s Arabic wording circulating on 13 August gave more than 200,000 killed on aid workers' estimates and more than 12 million displaced.

Assessment: Two things are being counted here and only one is being confirmed. Al-Atta’s deadline was delivered to a crowd and reached the record through supporters' phones; the RSF’s captures reach it through the RSF’s own communiqués. Neither is verification. The staging matters more than the deadline: putting Musa Hilal and an RSF defector beside the chief of staff is a recruitment offer aimed at the Rizeigat and Mahamid base the RSF draws from, which is a slower instrument than a December date implies. Treat the 14 dead at Umm Arada as provisional until OCHA, OHCHR or a hospital produces a figure, and treat the displacement and death tolls as publisher-specific: they were written in the same week and do not reconcile.