The Sudan Doctors Network has recorded 158 deaths in attacks in South Kordofan. The front on which they died is not named in any of the ceasefire frameworks now being discussed for Sudan.

That omission is the story. Sudan’s war is usually described in terms of Khartoum, Darfur and the Nile corridor. South Kordofan, in the centre-south of the country, has its own war with its own history, and it has been running alongside the national one with almost no diplomatic attention.

Why this region has a separate war

South Kordofan contains the Nuba Mountains, home to dozens of distinct ethnic groups and around forty languages besides Arabic. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, the Nuba fighters who had fought alongside the southern rebels found themselves on the northern side of the new border. Fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the northern branch of the SPLM began that year and has never properly stopped.

That means the war that began in April 2023 between the army and the Rapid Support Forces arrived in a region that was already at war, with armed groups already in place and their own reasons to align with one side, the other, or neither. Negotiations designed around two national belligerents have no obvious place for them.

What a doctors’ tally is and is not

The Sudan Doctors Network has become one of the few consistent sources of casualty figures in the country, compiled through medical staff who remain in place. Its figures are counts of deaths that reached medical attention or were reported by colleagues on the ground.

They are therefore reliable as a minimum and unreliable as a total. In a region where health facilities have been repeatedly attacked and where much of the population is far from any clinic, the people who die furthest from a hospital are the least likely to be counted. A rising tally in these conditions can reflect worsening violence, improved reporting, or both, and the sources rarely permit separating them.

The war is also getting wider

Analysts tracking the conflict report rising tensions between Sudan and two neighbours, Chad and Ethiopia, both of which Khartoum accuses of backing the Rapid Support Forces. The assessment from the Critical Threats Project is that each side faces constraints that discourage escalation into open interstate conflict — but that the risk of military confrontation is now real rather than theoretical.

A war that expands across borders becomes harder to end for a simple reason: every additional state with forces or proxies involved is another party that must be satisfied by any settlement, and another party with the capacity to spoil one.

What to watch

Whether any ceasefire framework acknowledges South Kordofan as a distinct front with its own parties; whether the doctors’ tally keeps climbing; and whether aid agencies are able to publish needs assessments for the Nuba Mountains, which would be the first sign that anyone with resources is looking at it.

Sources

• Sudan Doctors Network casualty tally for South Kordofan, September 2026
• Critical Threats Project, Africa File, 3 September 2026, on Sudan’s tensions with Chad and Ethiopia
• Background on the Nuba Mountains and the post-2011 conflict in South Kordofan