Reuters films aftermath of intensified RSF drone attacks on North Kordofan towns

Reuters, in a report carried by Arab News on September 24, said the Rapid Support Forces have intensified drone attacks on government-held towns in North Kordofan, and filmed the aftermath of major strikes on two frontline cities this month. The characterisation of this as a new campaign following several weeks of scaled-back strikes comes from residents, not from the wire’s own analysis — a distinction worth keeping. The UN figure cited in the report is the hardest number available: more than 1,000 civilians killed by drone attacks in the first half of 2026, and the count covers strikes by both belligerents, not the RSF alone. Reuters dates the war at three and a half years. A strike on the courthouse in Um Ruwaba on September 8 killed around ten people and injured dozens, according to a source rendered in the retrieved text only in abbreviated form.

Salah Bakheit, recovering in an Um Ruwaba hospital with a broken arm and shrapnel wounds from the courthouse strike, had fled to the town from El Obeid. “Once I heard the sound of the blast, I knew it was a strategic drone,” he told Reuters. “I have been living with drones of all types, strategic drones and suicide drones.” Separately, Radio Tamazuj reported on or around September 21 that two people were killed and 22 injured in RSF drone attacks on El Obeid; that figure is single-sourced and was not cross-checked. A Sudan Tribune special report dated September 23 places the tactical shift toward deep precision strikes in Kordofan and Blue Nile, but its hardware claims rest on anonymous army and RSF sources describing their own capabilities, and should not be treated as established.

In the same Reuters text sits an unresolved line: the RSF bombarded El Obeid “for months earlier this year in an attempted siege.” The past tense and the word attempted sit awkwardly against Al Jazeera’s July framing of El Obeid as potentially Sudan’s next El Fasher, and against its August footage of civilians fleeing Kordofan fighting into the city for relative safety. Nothing in the available reporting settles whether the encirclement was broken, paused, or is re-forming. Bakheit’s own trajectory — displaced from El Obeid by drone bombardment, then hit by a drone in the town he fled to — is the more reliable indicator of what the campaign is achieving on the ground.

Assessment: The question the drone file poses is capability, not cruelty. If the RSF is striking El Obeid and Um Ruwaba from the air because it could not close a ground encirclement, the air campaign is a substitute for a siege it failed to complete — a materially weaker position than the July coverage implied. Treat the 1,000-death figure with care: it is a UN number reaching readers through a wire, and its both-sides breakdown is where the story actually sits. Distrust the hardware lists circulating this week; belligerents briefing anonymously on their own arsenals have every reason to inflate. The Blue Nile placement needs a second source before the war’s map is redrawn.