The Rapid Support Forces launched eight drone and ground attacks across El Obeid in North Kordofan, with two people reported killed. Measured against the scale of Sudan’s war, it is a small entry in a long list. Measured against what it does to a city that people have already fled to, it is not small at all.

Why El Obeid

El Obeid is the capital of North Kordofan and sits on the routes connecting Khartoum and central Sudan to Darfur in the west. Cities in that position are not chosen at random. They are where roads meet, which makes them where supplies pass, where displaced people arrive, and where aid convoys have to travel through.

Attacking a junction city is therefore a way of attacking movement itself. A road does not have to be captured to stop being usable — it only has to become a road nobody is willing to drive on. That applies equally to a family trying to leave and to a lorry carrying food.

Displaced twice, or three times

Sudan is the largest displacement crisis in the world, with around fifteen million people driven from their homes since April 2023 — a figure we have written about in more detail here. Numbers that size stop registering, so it is worth converting one part of them into something concrete.

Many people now in North Kordofan arrived there from somewhere else. They left Khartoum, or Darfur, and stopped in a place judged safer. When that place is attacked, they move again — and each subsequent displacement is worse than the last. Savings are gone. Documents have been lost. Whatever was carried the first time was sold or used. Host communities that absorbed people once have less to give the second time.

Aid agencies working on repeat displacement make a consistent point about this: the funding system treats displacement as an event, while for the people in it, it is a state that persists for years.

What drones changed

The use of drones by both sides in this war has altered the geography of risk. A front line used to be a place you could be behind. Cheap aerial weapons extend reach well past any front, which means a city hundreds of kilometres from active fighting is no longer categorically safer than one nearby.

That has a practical effect on displacement decisions. Advice about where to go becomes unreliable, people move shorter distances or not at all, and humanitarian organisations find it harder to designate anywhere as a stable location to base operations. We have reported the same pattern on other fronts, including attacks on infrastructure far from any battlefield.

Why this rarely gets reported

Two people killed does not clear the threshold at which international coverage engages, and the events are frequent enough that even Sudanese outlets cannot cover all of them. The war is also dangerous and expensive to report from, and access for foreign journalists has been limited throughout.

The result is a conflict whose scale is documented in aggregate figures while its individual days go largely unrecorded. That gap is not neutral: funding follows attention, and a crisis that produces no reporting produces no pressure. Publishing the small entries is the only way the large number ever means anything.

Sources

• Current events summary — RSF drone and ground attacks across El Obeid, North Kordofan