Army presses in Kordofan while RSF advance on the Ethiopian border and widen drone strikes

Sudan Tribune, filing from El Obeid on 14 August, reported heavy fighting southwest and west of the North Kordofan capital, with an RSF dawn ground assault on positions around Umm Arada and the Hashaba Hills, roughly 25 kilometres southwest of the city, and army artillery shelling advancing units. That the attack was repulsed is the army’s claim, carried without independent confirmation and without casualty figures on either side. Two days earlier Reuters reported witnesses in El Obeid describing eight drones over the city, triggering army air defences, with two people killed and others injured according to medical sources — both witnesses and medics unnamed. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logs the same day’s wider envelope: drone strikes on the SAF-held cities of Atbara, Bahri, El Damer and Khartoum, with civilians in Atbara and Khartoum telling Le Monde these were the first such strikes on their towns since May.

On 13 August Sudan Tribune reported the army intercepting a second consecutive day of drone attacks across the capital, with air defence units downing multiple drones over northern and western Omdurman and witnesses in western Omdurman describing low-flying suicide drones approaching from the west — the army’s characterisation, not an independently established vector. Monte Carlo Doualiya’s Arabic service reported the same night’s explosions and a drone coming down on a mosque north of the capital; an AFP photograph credited to Ebrahim Hamid shows debris cleared from a mosque complex struck in the Droushab area of Khartoum Bahri on 12 August. On the same day the drones flew, Al Jazeera with AFP reported that the RSF and allied forces had advanced into Kurmuk, on the Ethiopian border in Blue Nile state, sourced to military and government figures — that is, the SAF side confirming an RSF gain. CFR separately logs an 11 August RSF and SPLM-N claim to have seized Geissan.

The counter-narrative is Kordofan, and it is largely army-sourced. Sudan Tribune reported that the operation cutting the Omdurman–El Obeid export corridor was executed under total secrecy, with one officer describing it as “a tide with no ebb,” and that personnel involved in the Um Qirfa fighting said RSF forces collapsed and fled, leaving morning tea still brewing over fires. That is a serving soldier’s account of his own unit’s victory, relayed anonymously: colour, not evidence. On 3 August the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Yasser al-Atta, said the army was advancing on all fronts to eliminate the RSF before the end of the year and vowed that no RSF fighters or foreign mercenaries would remain in Sudan by the end of 2026. In West Darfur, Governor Minni Minnawi — himself a belligerent, commanding SLM-Minnawi — said on 8 August that the Joint Force had repelled a major RSF attack at Bir Saliba.

Assessment: Al-Atta’s December deadline is the most useful thing said on either side this month, because it is dated and falsifiable. Hold it against Kurmuk. An army eliminating its opponent within four months does not simultaneously lose a border town in Blue Nile to an RSF–SPLM-N axis and absorb drone strikes on Atbara and Bahri. Two cautions on the drone story: the “first since May” line is aggregation stacked on witness testimony at two removes, and “approaching from the west” is an army inference about supply lines dressed as observation. Treat Kordofan gains as real but army-narrated, and the south-eastern front as the thing Port Sudan would prefer the AU delegation not to price in.