Sudan’s army says it is pushing west of El Obeid, and Russian state media carried the claim first

A report dated around 17 September, carried by RT Arabic, cited unnamed Sudanese military sources saying army forces had taken the Al-Mamsuka area roughly 60 km west of El Obeid in North Kordofan, a move those sources described as consolidating field deployment. The same report says the SAF then repelled RSF loitering-munition attacks on El Obeid itself, with strikes hitting the College of Developmental Sciences and no casualties reported, and that the army had earlier confirmed control of Al-Farshaya, between Dilling and El Obeid. It describes the remaining fronts — the rest of North Kordofan, North and West Darfur, Blue Nile — as under “cautious calm,” and says military sources reported on Thursday that the SAF and allied forces had opened a broad ground operation on several axes across Kordofan. A second RT Arabic item dated 18 September carries an SAF statement claiming the “liberation” of a list of North Kordofan locations including Kajmar, Sharshar, al-Qulai’at, Awlad Hazma, Rishan and the area around al-Mazroub.

What is being fought over is documented even where the front line is not. The CFR Global Conflict Tracker, updated 17 August 2026, records the SAF holding a recaptured Khartoum, the RSF holding much of Darfur and besieging El Obeid, a city “whose fall would open a direct corridor to the capital.” Sky News Arabia reported on 19 June that El Obeid sits about 370 km from Omdurman, the SAF’s command centre, and was then besieged from three sides; Youm7 noted the same week that the city hosts the Fifth Infantry Division headquarters and the world’s largest gum arabic market, and that 29 states had warned the RSF against attacking it. NPR put the population at about 500,000 on 7 August. A North Kordofan state official told Sudan Tribune that more than 100,000 displaced people are held in eight overcrowded camps there; IOM’s Zoe Brennan said on 3 July that new displacement across Kordofan had risen by nearly two-thirds in three months.

The region’s other economy surfaced this week in a different register. An allAfrica press review by Melody Chironda, dated 17 September, reported that an informal gold mine in West Kordofan — named as the Al-Zaraa pit, in an area controlled by the RSF — collapsed with at least 60 people “reportedly killed” and dozens more feared trapped, with miners digging their own colleagues out using basic tools in the absence of heavy machinery. The item is an aggregation and does not, in the portion available to The Files, identify the originating outlet; the toll should not be treated as established. allAfrica’s own framing — that gold is a major revenue source in Sudan’s conflict economy, that most of it comes from small-scale operations and that significant volumes are smuggled across borders — is a causal claim by an aggregator, not a finding.

Assessment: The place-name list is the tell. Eleven villages announced in a single communiqué cannot be checked by anyone outside the SAF’s own chain of command, and this theatre has produced near-identical cycles before: in June the army, again via unnamed “military sources,” announced it had foiled an imminent RSF assault on El Obeid. That Moscow-aligned outlets are the fastest carriers of these claims is a fact about the information environment rather than about the front. The verifiable indicator is logistical, not territorial: whether convoys can move the El Obeid–Dilling–Kadugli road. Until they can, treat westward advances as an announcement.