The war’s centre of gravity moves east, and the drones follow it into Kordofan

The geography repeats itself. On 14 August the Rapid Support Forces launched a dawn ground assault on Umm Arada and the Hashaba Hills, roughly 25km south-west of El Obeid, the North Kordofan capital, while army artillery shelled RSF units moving between al-Iyara and Umm Arada; explosions were audible across the city until mid-morning, Sudan Tribune reported, and the Sudanese Armed Forces said it repulsed the attack. On the afternoon of 19 August, RSF raids on Um Dareisa and Al-Shaqla, about 40km along the same south-western arc, killed six civilians according to security sources and a North Kordofan state government official; by midday the following day more than 1,000 people from 215 families had walked into El Obeid. That casualty figure rests on Sudan Tribune alone. The pattern behind it — every reported action on the western and south-western approaches, 25 to 40km out — does not.

The air war is the part with a dataset. OHCHR recorded more than 500 civilians killed in drone strikes between 1 January and 15 March 2026, the vast majority in the three states of the Kordofan region, and more than 277 civilians killed in the first two weeks of March alone, over three-quarters of them by drones. On 12 August UN Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq, citing local sources and the IOM, said multiple drones struck El Obeid on Wednesday morning and that one hit a key water station. The targeting is not one-sided: on 2 August SAF drones struck a traditional court hearing local disputes at Garra al-Zawaya, an RSF-held village in North Darfur, killing at least 35 people according to Emergency Lawyers, a group that documents abuses by both belligerents.

The eastern flank is where the war is acquiring new borders. On 11 August the RSF and the SPLM-N attacked Geisan in Blue Nile, near the Ethiopian frontier and the Roseires Dam; the UN said the clashes killed more than 20 civilians and displaced around 2,500. The Critical Threats Project, in its 20 August Africa File, assessed that the RSF took two footholds in south-eastern Sudan “almost certainly launching the operations from Ethiopian territory” — that is the think tank’s own confidence language, not a sourced finding, and CTP writes from a defined Washington vantage point. On 31 July, according to FDD’s Long War Journal, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo called on supporters to assemble fighters for a renewed push toward Khartoum and announced mobilisation for Kordofan.

Assessment: Two things to hold apart. The RSF’s pivot east is an observable set of engagements; the Ethiopian launch-point is an American analytical inference, and Port Sudan has its own reasons to amplify it — Sudan Tribune’s 28 August front page carried headlines on both a denial of Sudanese strikes inside Chad and an army claim to have downed a drone from Ethiopia, neither of which The Files has been able to read in full. Distrust equally the SAF-sourced defection figures relayed via Anadolu and the army’s serial mass-grave announcements in recaptured towns: a belligerent’s claim about the other’s conduct is not an event. What is measurable is that the drone war has followed the front line into Kordofan, and the infrastructure keeps being hit.