Two drone strikes on El Obeid kill ten as SAF claims a turning point in Kordofan
A student dormitory and a displacement shelter were hit on consecutive days in North Kordofan’s capital. The dead are multi-sourced; the wounded, the weekday and the attribution are not.
Sudan Tribune, datelined El Obeid on 1 October, reported five civilians killed and 47 wounded in a drone strike on a student dormitory at Kordofan University, citing a local medical group. Radio Tamazuj carried the same toll, attributed it to the Sudan Doctors Network and named the Rapid Support Forces as responsible. UNI of India reproduced the identical five-dead, 47-injured figure but dated the strike to Wednesday rather than Thursday. Darfur24, reporting on 2 October, named the target as the Shikan dormitory, said the drone was “believed to belong to” the RSF rather than asserting it, and put the wounded at 27, including women and children, on local sourcing. AFP, carried by Arab News Pakistan, aggregated this strike with a second one the following day on a centre sheltering families displaced from across Kordofan — five killed and 13 injured — for a combined toll of ten.
The attribution of the second strike rests, by AFP’s own framing, on a North Kordofan government official and a medical source at a local hospital; it is the official who accuses the RSF. One further caution for anyone building imagery off these reports: the photograph accompanying Radio Tamazuj’s account is a file image of a Kordofan University hall damaged in an RSF strike on 28 February 2026, not of this week. The wider frame is better measured than the incident. AFP, citing United Nations figures, reports that drones deployed by both the army and the RSF killed more than 1,100 people in the first five months of 2026 — a January-to-May sample that makes stand-off attack, not ground manoeuvre, the dominant civilian killer of the year.
Assessment: Two numbers from two source classes — a national medical network and a Darfur-based outlet working local contacts — cannot both be right, and the spread between 47 and 27 wounded is wide enough that one of them is a re-reported wire rather than a count. The weekday discrepancy points the same way. Read the dead as established and the wounded as unsettled. The more useful question is why El Obeid is being hit from the air at all this week. AEI’s Critical Threats has recorded that the RSF prioritised the city from the start of the war and besieged it until the army broke through; a force that cannot re-impose a siege can still reach the city with drones.