Drones hit El Obeid’s army headquarters and airport as SAF claims eleven villages retaken

Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service reported that one-way attack drones struck several sites inside El Obeid at dawn around 20 September, naming as targets the command of the army’s 5th Infantry Division — its main base in North Kordofan — sites around El Obeid airport, and a Ministry of Finance facility. The account is attributed to unnamed local sources, carries no casualty figure, and includes no claim of responsibility from the Rapid Support Forces. In the same report, an army spokesman said SAF air defences downed a hostile drone of the FH-95 type north of the Al-Kuwaiti area. That is an SAF claim and nothing more: the type designation has not been independently verified, and the inference the announcement invites about where such an airframe comes from is precisely the inference the army would like made on its behalf.

Three days earlier, on 17 September, a spokesperson for the SAF general command said government troops and allied forces had retaken 11 areas in North Kordofan after fighting along the Forty Days Road corridor, naming Kajmar, Sharshar, Al-Baniyah Al-Kurayniyah, Al-Qulay’at, Awlad Hazmah, Magwildat, Rayshan, Al-Qaa and Ghabat Al-Laqad among them. Minni Minawi, the Darfur regional governor whose Joint Force fights alongside the army, praised the advance on X. Sudan Tribune stated that the RSF did not immediately respond and that it could not independently verify the battlefield account. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logs for the same date that SAF and allied forces “reportedly took control of” Al-Farshaya and Al-Mamsouka in South Kordofan and Sharshar in North Kordofan — aggregation that overlaps the army’s list rather than confirming it.

Assessment: Read the target list, not the claims. Earlier RSF aerial operations in and around El Obeid hit markets and displacement shelters; a divisional headquarters, an airport and a finance ministry building are a different kind of set — that contrast is our reading of the reported targets, not an assessment anyone offered us. What both sides published this week is an argument about momentum: the army says it is rolling up villages along the Forty Days Road, the strikes say the city’s command infrastructure is still reachable from the air. Neither claim has a neutral witness. Al Jazeera reported in July that half a million people are trapped in El Obeid; CFR’s standing note is that the city’s fall would open a direct corridor to the capital. That is what the fighting is about.