Open-source trackers put the army ahead in North Kordofan while drones keep hitting El Obeid

The Centre for Information Resilience’s Sudan Witness project published a geolocation-based assessment on 15 October finding that the SAF and SAF-aligned Joint Forces advanced in North Kordofan over September and early October, while UAV strikes continued to hit civilians and infrastructure in El Obeid as the city’s displaced population grows. This is open-source verification from imagery and footage, not wire reporting, and it is uncorroborated by other outlets in the window — but it tracks with Security Council Report’s October forecast, which has the SAF holding the reopened Khartoum–El Obeid corridor and the towns retaken in late July while the RSF contests the road and strikes the city from the air. Al Jazeera reported in July that roughly half a million people were trapped in El Obeid as the RSF moved to consolidate Kordofan and Darfur, and framed the siege as a possible repeat of El Fasher.

The air war cuts both ways and the verification is thin on both sides. The Sudan Doctors Network said a drone strike near the Abu Shandi displacement camp at Wad al-Mahi in Blue Nile on 9 October killed at least 31 civilians who were prospecting for gold, blaming the RSF and calling for an international investigation; the Council on Foreign Relations' tracker notes the toll could not be independently verified. On 15 October, Al Arabiya English carried agency copy reporting that an airstrike killed five children in a paramilitary-held town in North Kordofan, attributed to a rights group that blamed the army. The copy available to us named neither the town nor the group, and no SAF response was reported. We are not treating that one as established.

Underneath the fighting, the food data is deteriorating and the data itself is thinning. The IPC issued a Food Insecurity and Malnutrition Alert on 12 October warning of growing famine risk across parts of Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan. It is an alert, not a famine classification: the Famine Review Committee said there is not enough survey data for a full analysis. The IPC said “an El Nino-induced drought, affecting roughly half of the country, is compounding the impacts of conflict and displacement, reducing food availability, driving up prices and affecting livelihoods,” with poor vegetation growth across nearly two-thirds of cropland in North Darfur and about half in South Darfur, West Kordofan and South Kordofan. UN News reported that as of 8 October, less than half the humanitarian appeal for Sudan had been funded.

Assessment: The two findings from North Kordofan point in opposite directions and both can be true: territorial gain for the SAF, aerial attrition against the city it holds. Whether the El Obeid corridor survives the week is the better predictor of the dry-season campaign than any communiqué out of Switzerland. On the famine file, resist the compression that turns an alert into a declaration — and note that the missing survey data is itself a product of the war, so the absence of a classification is not reassurance. Baseline displacement and hunger figures diverge widely by publisher and date; do not blend them. El Fasher’s anniversary falls on 26 October, and the advocacy cycle around it has already begun.