Sudan: Kordofan at a Crossroads The Fate of El Obeid Uncertain

Overview

Sudan’s civil war has left the smoking ruins of Khartoum behind and now rages across the dusty plains of Kordofan. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), buoyed by their hard-won victory in the capital, are pressing west in the hope of reopening the Omdurman–El Obeid highway and smashing the Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) foothold in Darfur. The RSF—financed by Abu Dhabi and reinforced by foreign fighters from as far afield as Colombia and South Sudan—has counter-attacked with equal determination. Each side believes that control of Kordofan will dictate whether Sudan is stitched back together or permanently split in two.

How the battle reached Kordofan

After a two-year siege, the SAF finally broke the RSF ring around Khartoum, Bahri and Omdurman in April. Tanks rolled west almost immediately, but in May the RSF struck back by capturing En Nuhud, the main road hub in West Kordofan, creating a wedge between the army and its forward base at El Obeid. In June the RSF hurled its 223rd assault at the besieged city of El Fasher in Darfur; the garrison held, yet famine tightened its grip on more than a million civilians. By early July, SAF convoys had fought their way into El Obeid, while RSF raiding columns fanned out along the Bara corridor, torching villages and ambushing supply trucks. A near-successful RSF offensive on the isolated SAF pocket in Babanusa underscored how fluid the front remains.

Forces in the field

Roughly 120 000 SAF soldiers—equipped with ageing Chinese tanks, Soviet-era artillery and a handful of MiGs and Sukhois—now hold the key towns of El Obeid, Kadugli, Dilling and Babanusa. Iran supplies loitering munitions, Türkiye provides battlefield command-and-control links, and Egypt discreetly shares intelligence and ammunition.
Facing them are an estimated 100 000 to 110 000 RSF fighters who rely on swarms of “technical,” shoulder-fired air-defence and a growing drone fleet. Emirati cash keeps fuel, ammunition and mercenary wages flowing, while Chad, Libya and the Central African Republic offer cross-border safe havens.

Current front lines

In North Kordofan, El Obeid is firmly in SAF hands but ringed by RSF probes toward Umm Sumeima, Bara and the Omdurman highway. West Kordofan remains split: En Nuhud is an RSF stronghold; Babanusa, though half-burned, still shelters an SAF garrison that survives only because nightly cargo-planes drop food and shells onto the runway. South Kordofan is fragmented. SAF columns recently reopened a tenuous land link to Dilling, yet RSF-aligned militias and SPLM-N splinters still harass Rashad, Abu Jubayhah and the farming belt between the Nuba Mountains and the White Nile.

Darfur is an even bleaker picture. El Fasher, once a bustling market city, has endured twenty-four months of siege. More than half a million displaced people are crammed into its outskirts, rationing food that aid convoys can no longer deliver. The RSF is massing to the west in preparation for a fresh assault timed to coincide with its push on El Obeid.

Humanitarian toll

The war’s shift into Kordofan has been devastating for civilians. More than 300 people were killed along the Bara corridor in the first half of July alone. Entire neighbourhoods of Babanusa now lie in ashes. Across Greater Kordofan, at least 350 000 people have fled since May, flooding camps in White Nile and Gedaref states. In El Fasher, malnutrition rates have reached emergency thresholds; without immediate relief, famine will follow.

Strategic stakes

Everything now hinges on El Obeid. If the SAF can keep the city supplied and push fresh armoured columns up the reopened Omdurman highway, it will have a springboard for a final drive on Darfur. Should the RSF cut that road and re-encircle the city, momentum will swing decisively in its favour and a de facto east-west partition of Sudan will loom. The SAF’s air force still outranges RSF pick-ups, but jet readiness is poor and each day only a handful of sorties fly. Conversely, RSF drones harry armour columns, erode morale on static front lines and offset the army’s heavy-weapons advantage.

Foreign lifelines now dictate the tempo as much as local logistics. Emirati cargo flights into western Chad, Iranian shipments rolling east from Port Sudan, and Russian advisers setting up in Shendi all feed the war machine. Meanwhile, the RSF’s promise of an “Arab Darfuri” state is deepening ethnic fault lines; the SAF’s response—arming non-Arab tribes—risks kindling a wider communal bloodletting.

Outlook for the next ninety days

A grinding stalemate remains the most probable short-term outcome. Both sides face supply constraints that may prevent a knock-out blow, yet neither can afford to back down. A sudden SAF breakthrough, enabled by Egyptian airstrikes and a concentrated armour push, would reopen the highway and allow the army to march west, but at the cost of heavy urban fighting in En Nuhud and stretched supply lines. Conversely, an RSF encirclement of El Obeid—still a lower-probability scenario—would cement the group’s claim to a western proto-state and leave Khartoum’s rulers confronting a partition they cannot easily reverse.

Risks to monitor

Satellite sightings of large RSF convoys south or west of El Obeid, new Egyptian F-16 deployments to Wadi Halfa, the denial of UN aid to El Fasher, or a collapse of the Sudanese pound in Port Sudan’s black market would all signal a dramatic shift in the conflict’s tempo—and an even darker chapter for Sudan’s civilians.

African Security Analysis (ASA) will continue live monitoring through satellite imagery, frontline HUMINT and targeted social-media scraping, providing immediate alerts on decisive battlefield movements, changes in foreign supply chains and openings for humanitarian relief.