Drones over El Obeid, a mine in Babanusa, and the quiet arithmetic of Kordofan

Sudan Tribune, filing from El Obeid on 9 October, reported that about ten one-way attack drones entered the city’s airspace sequentially from roughly 03:30 local time, that army air defences engaged them, and that several struck residential neighbourhoods, wounding six civilians and damaging homes and vehicles. Every one of those details — the count, the timing, the casualty figure and the attribution of the attack to the Rapid Support Forces — comes from military sources who spoke to the paper on condition of anonymity. The single on-the-record element is a statement from the North Kordofan state government condemning the targeting of civilian areas and accusing the RSF of violating protections for civilians; the state government is a party to this war, not a verifier. No RSF comment is recorded.

Radio Dabanga reports that four displaced people were killed this week when an unexploded landmine detonated in Babanusa, West Kordofan. Howaida Abdelrahman Saleh, executive director of the Muznah charitable organisation, told the outlet the four had come to Babanusa to settle after hearing relief aid had arrived there. Dabanga puts the cumulative reported mine-related death toll in the town at about 35, with more than twenty amputations among children and adults and some seventy cattle killed; the same report references five people killed in a strike on an El Obeid displacement shelter the previous week and a separate strike that destroyed six vehicles. These are running local tallies carried by a Netherlands-registered exile outlet with local stringers, not official or independently audited counts.

The structural picture behind both items is documented. The Security Council Report’s October forecast records that El Obeid’s population has roughly doubled from displacement inflows while the city remains under siege-like conditions, with worsening water shortages, a cholera outbreak and mounting reports of sexual violence. In July, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said his office had documented fifteen drone strikes on El Obeid and surrounding areas in three weeks of June, killing at least 45 civilians, and that drones launched by both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces “have repeatedly struck markets, schools, fuel stations, water infrastructure and civilian vehicles.” Some residents, he said, “are selling their belongings to finance their escape from the city.” The International NGO Safety Organisation told NPR that North Kordofan has recorded the highest number of drone attacks in Sudan in 2026.

Assessment: Note the asymmetry in who gets quoted. In El Obeid, the only people answering a reporter’s phone are SAF-aligned officers and a state government that is itself a belligerent, so almost every strike enters the record as an RSF strike — while the UN’s own human rights office attributes the drone campaign over North Kordofan to both armies. That gap is not evidence the attribution is wrong; it is a reason to date-stamp and source every figure. The Babanusa detail is the harder one: mines are the war’s residue, they kill after the shooting stops, and in this case the arrival of aid was itself the thing that drew people onto the ground that killed them.