UN investigators find RSF drone strikes and SAF mass arrests inside the same besieged city
The Fact-Finding Mission’s El Obeid report charges the army with arbitrary detention in a city it is defending, a week after the first anniversary of El Fasher’s fall.
UN-appointed independent investigators said on Wednesday 28 October that civilians in El Obeid live in constant fear of drone attacks by the RSF and of a wave of arbitrary arrests by the SAF, UN News reported. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan found that RSF drone strikes continue to kill and injure civilians in the city, damaging homes, schools, displacement sites and electricity and water systems, and may amount to war crimes — the Mission’s formulation, not a court’s. The New Arab reported on 30 October that SAF-side bodies have increased surveillance and “targeted people engaged in humanitarian, human rights and peace work.” El Obeid is held by the SAF; Al Jazeera’s 1 October mapping of the Kordofan corridor noted that in recent months the army has pushed the RSF out of much of North Kordofan.
The findings land a week after the first anniversary of El Fasher’s fall on 26 October 2025. The Darfur Network for Human Rights called on 27 October for concrete action on missing persons, survivor support and accountability; SIHA said on 31 October that survivors continue to live with the consequences of mass killings, sexual violence, forced displacement and destruction. A coalition statement reported on 26 October found that civilians there still face arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings and restricted humanitarian access a year after the RSF takeover. The death toll remains contested: figures from “more than 10,000” to upwards of 60,000 circulate, with the higher end untraceable to a citable source. As the essayist in Africa Is a Country put it, the fight over how many died has become part of the crime.
Assessment: The value of the El Obeid report is that it refuses the shape the war is usually reported in. A city under RSF drones is also a city where, the Mission says, thousands have been detained by the force defending it — and the people targeted are the humanitarian and human-rights workers who would otherwise document the siege. Expect Port Sudan to amplify the drone half and ignore the rest. On El Fasher, the discipline is to publish the range and its owners, not a number: a single confident toll, in either direction, is currently a political instrument rather than a count.