Sudan’s army says it has pushed back into West Kordofan as both sides widen the drone war

Sudan Tribune, datelined El-Khwei, reported that fighting intensified on Sunday 8 November between the Sudanese Armed Forces, “backed by allied forces,” and the Rapid Support Forces in West Kordofan, with the army side described as capturing new territory and downing a third long-range drone. The outlet hedged its own framing: its photograph of a burning vehicle is captioned as taken during an operation “they stated was to clear opposing forces.” No second source carried the advance, no settlements were named, and the identity of the “allied forces” is not established. The baseline matters: West Kordofan has been effectively RSF-held since the 22nd Infantry Division headquarters at Babanusa fell on 1 December 2025, documented at the time by Sudan War Monitor and by the Centre for Information Resilience’s open-source team.

The air war is the better-evidenced half of the week. The Critical Threats Project’s Africa File of 5 November assesses that “the SAF has intensified its own drone attack campaign in densely populated areas in RSF-controlled Sudan since October 2026, increasing the humanitarian toll on civilians,” and carries a mapped dataset of RSF strikes inside army-held territory. On 1 November, Sudan Tribune reported RSF drones knocking the Al Dabbah and Abu Hamad power stations in Northern State out of service, with a civilian killed at a fuel station; CFR’s tracker logs the same outage via AP, noting the attribution to the RSF is a government accusation. The following day the cabinet under Prime Minister Kamil Idris declared a “maximum state of alert” and threatened severe punishment for anyone supplying the RSF with strike coordinates.

Assessment: Read the cabinet’s threat against its own citizens as an admission: Port Sudan believes the RSF has a spotting network inside government-held territory, and has chosen to say so publicly. On the West Kordofan claim, apply the standing rule — a territorial gain announced by one belligerent on the day of the fighting is an announcement, not an event, and El-Khwei claims have outrun reality before. What is verifiable is the trajectory of the drone campaigns, and a Sudan Tribune commentary this week makes the defensible point that both sides' long-range strikes are structurally poor at killing commanders and reliably good at killing civilians in markets and at power stations.