Drones hit a courthouse and a college as Sudan’s famine projection window runs out

On Tuesday 8 September a drone struck the courthouse in Umm Ruwaba, eastern North Kordofan. Emergency Lawyers, an independent Sudanese documentation group, gave a preliminary toll of 10 dead and dozens injured; Sudan Tribune and Sudan Horizon reported at least 13 killed. Emergency Lawyers called the targeting of judicial facilities a grave breach of international humanitarian law and demanded an independent investigation. The attribution to the RSF is Sudan Tribune’s; no RSF comment has been reported. The following day drones hit a university college in El Obeid, killing a security guard and damaging several buildings, according to college officials including the dean, Abdel-Aziz al-Amin, in an account carried by Radio Tamazuj alone. On 6 September the army seized Hamrat al-Wiz in North Kordofan, tightening its hold on the Export Road. On 2 September an air strike destroyed two clearly marked trucks carrying UN food outside Dilling in South Kordofan — more than 50 tonnes of cereals, split peas, oil and salt, a month’s rations for 5,800 people. The WFP, which reported the loss, did not assign responsibility.

The food-security clock is the part nobody is watching. The IPC’s special report published in early June placed 19.5 million people — about 41 percent of the population — in Phase 3 or worse for February to May 2026, including roughly 135,000 in Phase 5 and more than 5 million in Phase 4, with a risk of famine identified in 14 areas of North Darfur, South Darfur and South Kordofan. Its projection for June to September put the Phase 5 population at about 200,000, concentrated in North and South Darfur and South and West Kordofan, and expected 825,000 children under five to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year, up 7 percent. That projection window closes this month. The analysis covered 195 localities and settlements, and the IPC itself states the true scale is highly likely to exceed what the data captures.

Assessment: Kordofan is where the embargo argument stops being abstract. The weapon of this phase is the loitering drone against courthouses, campuses, water plants and food convoys, and neither a Darfur-only arms embargo nor a countrywide one addresses the drone supply chains that both sides have built. Watch for the IPC update: if the June–September projection lapses without replacement, the 200,000 figure will keep circulating long after it has stopped describing anything. Keep the series straight, too — 19.5 million food-insecure and 24.6 million, 11.8 million displaced and 13 million, come from different publishers and different dates. Mixing them produces numbers nobody can defend.