An RSF drone cut North Kordofan’s power line while the Quad truce still has no agreed text

Sudan Tribune reported on Tuesday 20 October that an RSF drone struck the Tendelti power transformer station in western White Nile state, knocking out the main transmission line to North Kordofan. The report is single-outlet and has not been confirmed by a wire. Its significance is at the end of the line: El Obeid, North Kordofan’s capital, which NPR documented in August as under critical water shortages, a cholera outbreak and sustained drone attack, with the International NGO Safety Organisation ranking North Kordofan highest in Sudan for drone attacks in 2026. Grid power is what runs water pumps. Separately on Tuesday, the army announced from Ed Damazin that it had repelled a coordinated RSF and SPLM-N assault — the faction led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu — in the Sally area of eastern Blue Nile and seized combat vehicles. That is a belligerent’s claim about its own success, unverified independently. Al Jazeera reported 5,500 displaced in Blue Nile on 7 October; the UN blamed the RSF for a 10 October strike near a displacement site there that killed at least 31 civilians, mostly women and children.

The diplomacy is not keeping pace. African Arguments reported on 19 October that the truce proposed by the Quad — the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — has still not been agreed. Burhan said on 6 October there would be no negotiations with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s RSF or any other party, and that the war would continue until victory; a day earlier, Trump’s envoy Massad Boulos had disclosed a meeting with Burhan in Egypt. At the Security Council on 16 October, Jeff Bartos, the US Representative to the UN for Management and Reform, called for a humanitarian truce and urged the Council to expand the arms embargo and strengthen sanctions, while Sudan’s ambassador Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed said his government was committed to peace and had submitted proposals on civilian protection, a ceasefire and monitoring. Those documents have not surfaced. On 13 October in Addis Ababa, Sudanese civilian and anti-war groups met the Quintet mechanism — including UN envoy Ramtane Lamamra, the AU’s Mohamed Ibn Chambas and the EU’s Annette Weber — and asked for the arms embargo to be extended to all of Sudan and external support halted. Meanwhile the UN, relayed by Sudan Tribune and allAfrica on 19–20 October, put roughly 20 million people in acute hunger, and the IPC’s 12 October alert warned of rising famine risk in Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan.

Assessment: Three of the Quad’s four members — Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt — are also named in the public record as aligned with one side or the other, the UAE as the RSF’s principal sponsor by Crisis Group’s assessment and in UN Fact-Finding Mission findings it denies. That is the structural reason the text remains unsigned: the guarantors are parties. Note also what the IPC alert does not say. Its Famine Review Committee stated it lacks the survey data for a full analysis, so anyone reporting that famine has been declared in Darfur or Kordofan is overstating the document. And watch the Burhan ledger — no talks on 6 October, commitment to peace at the Security Council on 16 October. One of those is operative; the strikes suggest which.