More than 36,000 Sudanese civilians have fled towns and villages in the Kordofan region, east of Darfur, as fighting intensifies between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the United Nations said on Sunday.
Gatekeepers News reports that the UN’s migration agency reported that 36,825 people fled five localities in North Kordofan between October 26 and 31, amid escalating clashes that have turned the region into the latest frontline in Sudan’s 18-month war.
The Kordofan area — a strategic corridor between the Darfur provinces and Sudan’s Khartoum-Riverine heartland — has become the new focus of the power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF, which have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023.
Both sides are now battling for control of El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan and a critical logistics hub linking Darfur to Khartoum. The city also hosts an important military airport.
“Today, all our forces have converged on the Bara front here,” an RSF member said in a video released by the group late Sunday, referring to a town north of El-Obeid that the RSF claimed to have captured last week.
Residents have reported a surge in both RSF and army movements in surrounding areas.
“We stopped going to our farms, afraid of clashes,” said Suleiman Babiker, who lives in Um Smeima, west of El-Obeid. Another resident said there had been “a big increase in army vehicles and weapons west and south of El-Obeid” over the past two weeks.
Martha Pobee, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Africa, last week warned of “large-scale atrocities” and “ethnically motivated reprisals” by the RSF in Bara, saying the patterns resembled those seen in Darfur.
The ongoing conflict has killed tens of thousands, displaced nearly 12 million, and triggered what the UN describes as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis.
