RSF fighters mass around El Obeid as UN investigators are ordered to open an urgent inquiry
Security Council Report describes a significant build-up around North Kordofan’s capital and repeated strikes on power and fuel that have closed medical and water facilities. The city sits on the road from RSF-held Darfur to the army’s east.
El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, is a city of roughly half a million hosting nearly 100,000 people displaced by the war, according to Al Jazeera’s 3 July report. It sits on the route linking RSF-held Darfur to army-held eastern Sudan; CFR judges that its fall would open a direct corridor to the capital. The army broke a prolonged siege in February 2025 but has struggled to prevent the RSF reimposing a blockade by drone. Security Council Report describes mounting pressure, “a significant build-up of RSF and allied fighters around the city,” repeated strikes on power and fuel stations forcing medical facilities and water stations to shut, and expanding displacement sites inside the city. On 12 August the RSF launched simultaneous kamikaze drone attacks on El Obeid, Atbara, Omdurman and Khartoum; a renewed assault in late August killed two, per Reuters cited by CFR.
The Human Rights Council has instructed its independent international fact-finding mission for Sudan to conduct, “within its existing resources,” an urgent inquiry into violations allegedly committed in and around El Obeid. The 3 July urgent debate that preceded it was requested by the United Kingdom on behalf of a group of countries. UN News reported that IOM recorded newly displaced people across Kordofan rising by nearly two-thirds in three months, and more than 100 forced-displacement incidents in under nine months. NPR, on 7 August, described sustained drone strikes, critical water shortages, a worsening cholera outbreak and high reported rates of sexual violence. The Christian Science Monitor reported on 21 July that several hundred thousand civilians depend in part on relief organised by local activists rather than international agencies.
Assessment: Two cautions on the numbers. The IOM figures are ratios, not counts — a two-thirds rise from an unpublished baseline tells you the direction and not the scale. And the running tally of drone deaths in Kordofan originates almost entirely with the Sudan Doctors Network, a Sudanese medical monitoring group, sometimes reaching readers through three intermediaries; the RSF denied the 7 February El Rahad strike outright and called the accusation “a disinformation campaign.” The instruction that the fact-finding mission work “within its existing resources” is the Human Rights Council’s usual way of ordering an investigation without paying for one. The drone ban in the US draft is aimed at precisely this front.