Second drone attack in a week hits El Obeid, with an IDP shelter among the reported targets

Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service reported that loitering munitions struck sites in the north and centre of El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, giving a headline figure of 22 civilians killed and wounded combined. Per local sources cited by the outlet, the bombardment hit an IDP shelter next to the Police Hospital, a fuel station, a bus carrying civilians and a house in the Arafat neighbourhood. The outlet described it as the second such attack within a week on the largest city in Kordofan. Two caveats belong on the record: the targeting detail rests on unnamed local sources, and 22 is a combined dead-and-injured figure with no published breakdown. The only on-the-record element is a condemnation from the North Kordofan state government and state security committee — a SAF-aligned authority. An earlier strike in the same week was put by the Arabic outlet aajeg.com at two killed and 20 wounded, citing the Sudan Doctors Network.

The pattern is now wire-confirmed. Reuters reported on 24 September, syndicated by Arab News and TimesLIVE, that the RSF have intensified deadly drone attacks on government-held towns in North Kordofan, disrupting normal life and causing a deep sense of insecurity according to residents, and that drones have increasingly become the weapon of choice in Sudan’s three-and-a-half-year war. Omnia Aboul Gassim, a student who sat exams at El Obeid’s College of Development and Technological Sciences the day before it was struck, told Reuters from the ruins: “As you can see, the entire faculty is destroyed, and we feel that our dreams are destroyed, and our future is destroyed.” Reuters photographer El Tayeb Siddig documented the collapsed roof of a lecture hall after an attack attributed to the RSF on 15 September; the wire also carried imagery of a police officer guarding the Um Rawaba City Court after a strike on the courthouse earlier this month. Note the wire’s own hedge — “attributed to”, not established.

Sudan Tribune reported separately on 23 September that both the army and the RSF are pouring millions of dollars into an aerial arms race, deploying hundreds of sophisticated foreign drones that have reshaped combat across Kordofan and Darfur and displaced hundreds of thousands. It cited a UN fact-finding mission report released in early September finding that drone strikes killed more than 1,000 civilians in the first five months of 2026, with grave breaches of international law by both sides. That figure is Sudan Tribune’s characterisation of the FFM text, which we have not read directly. An earlier OHCHR count gives the scale locally: UN News reported on 4 July that High Commissioner Volker Türk’s office documented 15 drone strikes on El Obeid and surrounding areas in three weeks, killing at least 45 civilians, with Türk calling the attacks “relentless”.

Assessment: The question the strikes do not answer is what they are for. Al Jazeera reported in July that half a million people are trapped in El Obeid and CFR’s tracker calls the city besieged, its fall opening a corridor to Khartoum. But Sudan Tribune’s Arabic service reported the army took full control of the Omdurman–El Obeid “Export Road” in late July. Drone-only pressure on a city the attacker cannot encircle is a different proposition from the El Fasher siege. Resist the El Fasher analogy on the same grounds ACLED’s Eltayeb gave The Africa Report: El Obeid’s demographics differ, so the ethnic-cleansing template travels badly even if looting and sexual violence do not. Also watch UNHCR’s weekly update: a twentyfold jump in crossings into eastern Chad, to over 400 a day, is either a new Darfur shock or a registration artefact.