IOM counts more than 200,000 newly displaced around El Obeid as the rural belt empties

More than 200,000 people were newly displaced in Kordofan as fighting continued, the International Organization for Migration said in reporting carried by Al Jazeera on 20 August, with displacement specified in Sheikan district — the locality that contains El Obeid. The same report put the death toll since the war began in 2023 at at least 59,000, a figure that varies widely by methodology and should be read as one estimate. The August sequence around the city, as reported by Sudan Tribune and Al Hadath and largely on unnamed security sources: an RSF ground attack repelled at al-Ayyara, 40 km west, on 13 August; an assault on Umm Arada and Jibal al-Hashaba, 25 km south-west, on 14 August; and attacks on Um Dareisa and Al-Shaqla, 40 km south-west, that killed six civilians and pushed hundreds into the state capital. Reuters confirmed renewed RSF drone strikes on El Obeid on 12 August that killed two.

The humanitarian frame behind those movements has not changed in the window. The IPC analysis covering February to May 2026, with projections to January 2027, places nearly 19.5 million people — about 41 per cent of Sudan’s population — in high levels of acute food insecurity, and projects 825,000 children under five with severe acute malnutrition this year, up 7 per cent on 2025 and 25 per cent above pre-conflict levels. UNICEF’s read of the same analysis counts nearly 135,000 people in Catastrophe, IPC Phase 5, across 14 hotspots, with areas of Darfur and South Kordofan at risk of famine. Famine conditions are already confirmed in El Fasher and Kadugli. Sudan’s 2026 response plan, requiring $2.87 billion, was 40.4 per cent funded when Security Council Report wrote up the Council’s 5 August closed consultations.

Assessment: The number to hold onto is not 19.5 million. It is the roughly 841,000 people whose outcomes the IPC left unchanged because conditions were too volatile to classify — the honest measure of what nobody knows, and the population most likely to be counted after the fact. Two things deserve more attention than they are getting. IOM is now flagging destructive floods as a compounding driver on top of displacement, in the middle of the rainy season, in exactly the districts emptying around El Obeid. And nearly every ground outcome in the Kordofan file is claimed by one belligerent and reported by one outlet. The drone strikes are the part that wires can verify.