After consolidating control over Darfur, Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces are pushing east into Kordofan, stepping up attacks on El Obeid - a strategic city blocking their return route to the capital, Khartoum.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) once again attacked El Obeid, North Kordofan State's capital city, with multiple drone strikes on Friday, January 30.
Air defenses of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which have a strategic airbase in this city, reportedly intercepted 20 aerial targets.
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However, drones managed to hit the base, the premises of a telecom company, the police headquarters, and the regional parliament in this city, largely encircled by the RSF, which has intensified the bombardment this year. Civilian casualties are mounting.
A hundred new burial mounds have appeared in this city between January 2 and 14, according to the satellite-imagery-based situation report from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) on January 16.
The SAF, the report added, is preparing "for siege warfare" with "newly created berms, or earthen walls, along key exit points... and around some critical infrastructure." About 350 kilometers southwest of the national capital, Khartoum, El Obeid is strategically located on the route to Khartoum from Darfur.
Except for its remote northern reaches on the border with Chad, into which this conflict is spilling over, the RSF has consolidated control over Sudan's vast western region of Darfur after taking over El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state.
Read: El Fasher's last stand: "The city has fallen, but its dignity has not"
It was the last city in the five states of Darfur where the SAF, its allied armed groups, and the local self-defense had together held fort against the RSF's onslaught.
After laying siege on the city for over 500 days and starving its population, RSF overran its defenses in late October 2025 and depopulated the city, killing tens of thousands.
It was potentially "a mass casualty event that rivals the initial death toll after the atomic bombing in Nagasaki... during World War Two," Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of Yale's HRL, told Radio Dabanga in a recent interview.
After thus consolidating its hold on Darfur, the RSF has been pushing westward into the region of Kordofan, from where over 88,000 people have since fled, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
"Atrocities in Darfur must not repeat in Kordofan"
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has been repeatedly pleading for action by the international community to ensure that the atrocities committed by the RSF in El Fasher will not repeat in Kordofan.
Residents in two of its cities, South Kordofan State's capital, Kadugli, and its second largest city, Dilling, have been starving under the RSF's siege. The UN, which has declared a famine in Kadugli, maintains that hunger levels in Dilling "are likely similar to Kadugli, but cannot be classified due to insufficient reliable data - a result of restricted humanitarian access and ongoing hostilities."
Breaking the nearly two-year-long siege on Dilling, on January 26, the SAF took control of major supply lines. On January 28, RSF drones killed dozens in the city, striking the central market and the headquarters of the SAF's 54th Brigade, before yet another attack further north two days later on El Obeid, which stands in the way of RSF's march back from Darfur to Khartoum.
Fighting nears Khartoum again
The Khartoum state - consisting of Khartoum city, Khartoum North, and Omdurman - was overrun by the RSF soon after it went to war in April 2023 against the SAF, its former ally in the military junta.
Evacuating from Khartoum, the SAF-led de facto government had relocated to Port Sudan on its northeastern coast, close to its ally, Saudi Arabia, further northeast across the Red Sea.
After the SAF recaptured Khartoum from the RSF last March, about 1.2 million residents had returned to their damaged homes by October, and survived a cholera epidemic in the city whose sanitation infrastructure was destroyed by the fighting.
Read more: Cholera ravages Sudan's war-torn capital
They are now threatened by violence again, as fighting nears from the west. Earlier this year, on January 18, just a week after the government announced its return to Khartoum, the RSF launched an attack on SAF positions on the western reaches of Khartoum State near Omdurman in the border areas with North Kordofan State. Should its capital, El Obeid, fall to the RSF, the paramilitary, notorious for its atrocities on civilians, will practically be at the gates of Khartoum again.
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"2026 has the potential now to be the bloodiest year"
A "cessation of hostilities, a humanitarian truce going into the new year" is an "immediate goal" of the US, its State Secretary, Marco Rubio, had said in his year-end press conference.
However, Yale professor and researcher Nathaniel Raymond warned in his interview that with the RSF inching closer to the national capital again, "2026 has the potential now to be the bloodiest year in the almost three years of war," whose death toll had already reached 150,000 back in 2024, after which the count was lost.
Amid the world's largest internal displacement crisis, with 14 million forced to flee their homes and crowd the camps across the country, Sudan is also in the throes of the world's worst hunger crisis, with over half the population suffering high levels of acute food insecurity.
Read also: The war in Sudan is "between two wings of a comprador parasitic capitalist class"
