The battle that could lead to Sudan’s next catastrophe
Army-held El Obeid has come under growing drone assault in offensive by the country’s feared paramilitaries
The Sudanese city of El Obeid has come under intensifying drone attack as paramilitaries battle to prise control of central Sudan from the army, in what international officials warn could mark a grim next chapter of the civil war.
The Rapid Support Forces have targeted water, electricity and fuel supplies in and around El Obeid, a major commercial centre in Sudan’s Kordofan provinces and trading hub for livestock and gum arabic, which is used in products from make-up to Coca-Cola.
The city, which has a population of half a million and an additional 100,000 internally displaced people, lies six hours by road from the capital Khartoum.
The United Nations and western countries have repeatedly warned of the threat of massacres on a par with those in the city of El Fasher in Darfur — which the RSF over-ran last October — should the paramilitaries seek to capture El Obeid.
Sudanese analysts, aid agencies and experts monitoring the war say the bigger danger in the immediate future is of a cholera outbreak, with the disease already spreading in other areas of North Kordofan, of which El Obeid is the capital.
“The situation is horrific. There is a lack of fuel, lack of water, lack of electricity. Water plants are being hit, gas stations are being hit, electricity stations are being hit,” said Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst whose mother is from the city.
Khair said the price of transport, on top of attacks along the roads, has made it much harder for people to flee the city should they choose. “There is one road in and one road out. Both are facing heavy bombardment.”
The region around the city has been the subject of intense fighting since the onset of the civil war in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and their erstwhile allies in the RSF, led by renegade general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
El Obeid was under a prolonged siege that was only broken by the SAF in February last year and is now cut off again from three sides.
According to data from the International NGO Safety Organisation, North Kordofan has had the highest number of drone attacks in 2026 in a war that has increasingly been fought from the air.
The attacks have intensified over the past month, with more than half of 141 strikes recorded to July 8 taking place since June. The vast majority of these were concentrated on El Obeid and the main road leading to the city from the east, which is still controlled by the army.
“Drone attacks are impacting basic services, rising transport and fuel costs, and limiting access to safe drinking water and healthcare,” said Liesbeth Aelbrecht, emergency co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières in Sudan.
She was able to visit the city recently and described desperate scenes at hospitals, with dwindling supplies of medicines and shortages of fuel to run backup power generators.
“There are almost no remaining functional fuel stations and the price of one litre of gasoline has reached nearly $15,” she said.
Researchers have repeatedly accused the United Arab Emirates of supplying weaponry including drones to the RSF, which the US under the Biden administration accused of genocide. The UAE has repeatedly denied evidence of its involvement in the Sudan war.
The capture of El Fasher in Darfur last year marked one of the bloodiest episodes of the civil war in which both sides have repeatedly been accused of atrocities.
Some 6,000 people were slaughtered by the RSF in just three days, according to a UN fact-finding mission, which said the massacres bore the hallmarks of genocide.
“We have seen this modus operandi by the RSF before,” Mona Rishmawi, a member of the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, said this month when warning of the paramilitaries’ tactics in and around El Obeid.
Experts on Sudan, however, say there are important differences between the two cities.
Residents of El Fasher had already been living in famine conditions by the time the RSF captured it last October. The city was also the last redoubt for Black African Zaghawa and Fur ethnic groups that had been driven from other parts of Darfur during years of ethnic cleansing by the RSF, which grew out of the primarily Arab Janjaweed militia.
El Obeid, though strategically important in the war, did not have that ethnic dimension, said Khair. Aid agencies are still able to reach El Obeid, the army and affiliated militias are well supplied, and there has been no recent evidence of a build-up of RSF forces to suggest an imminent attack, said Nathaniel Raymond, head of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
Raymond has closely monitored the war using satellite imagery, open-source intelligence and witnesses on the ground, and issued clear warnings about what was coming in El Fasher months beforehand.
“Right now drones have exacerbated conditions for a cholera outbreak in El Obeid,” he said. “That could spread like wildfire.”