El-Obeid, the Sudanese city that fears reliving El-Fasher's horror

Introduction: a city of 500,000 souls caught in a vise

Heat, thirst and fear of an imminent assault

In a displacement camp on the outskirts of El-Obeid, in North Kordofan, Agsam Hamad, a 35-year-old mother of seven, walks long distances every day under scorching heat to draw murky water from a distant well. "We walk long distances for this water and it is undrinkable," she told the AFP news agency, one testimony among dozens of others painting the portrait of a Sudanese city sliding toward an announced humanitarian catastrophe.

El-Obeid, a city of nearly 500,000 residents that also hosts nearly 100,000 refugees displaced by other violence elsewhere in Sudan, has endured in recent weeks the most intense attacks since the start of the conflict pitting the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary confrontation now in its third year.

A siege methodically closing in

After breaking a long siege in February 2025, the Sudanese army is now struggling to prevent the RSF from reimposing a blockade around the city, through repeated drone strikes targeting civilian infrastructure and the main highway leading out of it. According to Nohad Eltayeb, an analyst with the research group ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), troop movements have been observed roughly 60 kilometers north, south and west of the city over the past month.

The eastern road leading to Kosti, about 300 kilometers from the capital Khartoum, remains under army control but is deemed "extremely dangerous" by analysts on the ground, leaving civilians an increasingly narrow and perilous evacuation window.

El-Fasher, the precedent that haunts every conscience

Six thousand dead in three days, a chilling figure

The fear hovering over El-Obeid carries a precise name: El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which fell to the RSF last October after an 18-month siege. According to the United Nations, more than 6,000 people were killed in just the first three days after the city's fall, a bloodbath the UN described as bearing the "hallmarks" of mass crimes, in its own official terminology.

Survivors of El-Fasher told the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, that they had seen piles of lifeless bodies along the roads leading out of the city, in scenes one of them compared to a "day of judgment," according to remarks reported directly by the UN.

A hospital turned into a scene of carnage

The month after El-Fasher fell, RSF fighters stormed the city's Saudi hospital, killing more than 450 people according to the World Health Organization, before carrying out house-to-house raids marked by killings and widespread sexual violence, according to reports documented by several UN agencies. The independent Sudan Doctors Network also reports that the RSF has held 20 doctors, including four women, since the city's fall, their fate still unknown to this day.

This documented precedent, however hard it is to read, stands as the required reference point for any serious analysis of the threat now hanging over El-Obeid: the same encirclement tactics, the same drone strikes on vital infrastructure, and the same silence preceding the final assault.

A red alert sounded from Geneva

Volker Türk raises the alarm before the Human Rights Council

On July 3, 2026, High Commissioner Volker Türk issued what he himself called a "red alert" before the UN Human Rights Council, convened in an urgent debate in Geneva. "The signs coming from El-Obeid are clear and unambiguous: another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan, this time in the capital of the strategic state of North Kordofan," he said, according to Al Jazeera.

Volker Türk said civilians have faced "siege-like conditions" for 18 months, pounded by relentless drone strikes while the Sudanese army and the RSF fight over control of the areas surrounding the city, a chilling assessment coming from the UN's top human rights official.

An urgent debate requested by five Western countries

This urgent debate follows a formal request filed by a group of countries including Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, which warned that roughly 500,000 civilians risk being targeted in large-scale atrocities, according to Reuters. British human rights ambassador Eleanor Sanders spoke of "siege conditions" leaving thousands of people trapped and cut off from humanitarian aid.

The Sudanese delegation refused to address the Council during the initial session, an eloquent silence that illustrates the Sudanese government's delicate position when facing accusations it can neither confirm nor seriously refute before the international community.

The weapons reshaping the nature of this war

More than a thousand civilians killed by drone strikes in five months

According to the UN human rights agency, more than 1,000 civilians were killed by drone strikes between January and May 2026 across Sudan, a figure illustrating the central role this relatively new technological weapon has taken in this paramilitary conflict. Between June 6 and 28 alone, at least 45 people were killed and 41 others wounded in 15 separate drone strikes targeting El-Obeid and its immediate surroundings.

These strikes directly targeted the city's main power plant and fuel depots, plunging entire neighborhoods into darkness and paralyzing water pumps, causing critical shortages of drinking water that echo, almost point for point, the scenario documented in El-Fasher before its fall.

A rainy season that could change the military calculus

Analyst Ashraf Ali, cited by broadcaster Deutsche Welle, notes that the start of the rainy season in July makes combat drone flight paths less predictable, which could push the RSF to accelerate their ground offensive before weather conditions further complicate their aerial operations. This climate dynamic adds a further layer of urgency to an already critical timeline for civilian protection.

Control of El-Obeid would also give the RSF an ideal advanced logistics base to project their drone operations toward other Sudanese targets, a strategic advantage that largely explains the paramilitary group's determination to seize this particular city rather than consolidate its gains elsewhere.

El-Obeid's strategic weight in Sudan's civil war

A crossroads linking the entire country

El-Obeid sits at a strategic crossroads linking army-held areas in central and eastern Sudan, including Khartoum, to territories controlled by the RSF in Darfur to the west. The city hosts an infantry division, an air base, a key oil pipeline and a major gum arabic market, making it both a military and economic prize of the first order for whoever controls it.

According to several analysts cited by AFP, the capture of El-Obeid would consolidate RSF control over western Sudan and could potentially open the way for an advance toward the capital Khartoum itself, a prospect that explains the urgency of international calls for restraint.

Kordofan, an oil-rich region at the heart of every calculation

The Kordofan region holds some of Sudan's largest oil deposits, making it a major economic stake for both warring camps, well beyond the conflict's symbolic or humanitarian dimension alone. This economic dimension, often underestimated in Western media coverage, partly explains the determination of the RSF and their most powerful paramilitary allies to maintain a sustained military presence in this particular region.

Control of these oil resources will likely determine the long-term financing capacity of whichever side wins this civil war, adding a crucial geoeconomic dimension to a conflict too often reduced, in Western media, to its immediate humanitarian dimension alone.

The foreign backers fueling the fire

Precise accusations against the United Arab Emirates

The organization Human Rights Watch has documented how Colombian mercenaries, apparently recruited by a company based in Abu Dhabi, reportedly passed through two Emirati military facilities before being deployed alongside the RSF, according to a statement published in June 2026. These contractors were reportedly even present during the RSF assault on El-Fasher, an assault the UN's fact-finding mission described as bearing the "hallmarks" of serious international crimes.

This accumulation of evidence is fueling growing calls, notably from former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, for targeted sanctions against identified RSF leaders as well as their alleged foreign financial backers, a measure several Western governments still hesitate to fully adopt.

Official support for the Sudanese army from camps rivaling the West

The Sudanese army, for its part, receives official backing from Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Iran, a diplomatic configuration that further complicates Western efforts at neutral mediation in this conflict. This involvement by Russia and Iran, two actors the West considers major strategic threats elsewhere in the world, shows how much this African conflict fits into a far broader geopolitical competition for influence than its purely local dimension suggests.

This dynamic of crossed alliances is, once again, a reminder that the West cannot afford to treat the Sudanese crisis as a purely humanitarian file isolated from its global strategic rivalries with Moscow and Tehran.

Humanitarian organizations sound the alarm

The International Rescue Committee delivers a chilling assessment

The humanitarian organization International Rescue Committee (IRC) warned on July 2, 2026 that drone strikes on El-Obeid's fuel depots and water stations are paving the way for a ground offensive that would put hundreds of thousands of people in grave danger. The organization notes that should evacuation routes to Kosti become blocked, civilians could find themselves simply trapped inside the besieged city.

Nearly 2,000 people have already fled toward White Nile state in recent weeks, but the IRC warns that the conditions that normally allow populations to move, functioning roads, available fuel and physical safety, are rapidly disappearing as fighting continues.

The International Organization for Migration warns of an imminent total siege

Mohamed Refaat of the International Organization for Migration has warned that the city is approaching a total siege, with civilians soon unable to leave or return. UN agencies have already suspended their access as security deteriorates, even as humanitarian needs far exceed the aid stocks already prepositioned on site.

Without immediate assistance, Mohamed Refaat said, conditions in El-Obeid could, within a matter of weeks, come to mirror those seen in El-Fasher, where civilians survived by eating food normally intended for livestock during the 18-month siege.

The information battle in a city cut off from the world

Journalistic access nearly entirely closed

The fighting and severe restrictions imposed on the ground have practically cut off access to the city, making independent reporting increasingly difficult, according to AFP correspondents struggling to confirm certain firsthand accounts. This information vacuum structurally benefits alleged perpetrators of violations, who operate with minimal outside visibility into their actual conduct on the ground.

Water prices have doubled and food costs have surged by as much as 300% while transport fares have also soared, leaving many residents in a state of near-total economic and physical encirclement, according to testimony gathered by AFP from local residents.

Crossed accusations between the army and paramilitary forces

A source close to the RSF accused the Sudanese army of using civilians as human shields, demanding their evacuation, while a government source claimed the army is trying to slow the RSF's advance by destroying equipment in their path. These crossed accusations, impossible to independently verify in the current context, illustrate the extreme difficulty of establishing a reliable factual account of unfolding events.

This deliberately maintained informational confusion by both sides considerably complicates the task of international observers trying to anticipate and prevent the next, potentially deadliest, phase of this regional conflict.

The UN Security Council, between alarm and powerlessness

A June 20 statement adopted with no apparent deterrent effect

The UN Security Council adopted a statement on June 20, 2026 expressing concern over the "imminent risk of mass atrocities" and demanding that the RSF immediately halt its offensive against El-Obeid. This statement, however symbolically important, does not appear to have deterred the RSF from continuing their troop movements around the city in the weeks that followed.

This apparent powerlessness of the world's highest collective security body once again illustrates the structural limits of the current multilateral system when facing conflicts involving paramilitary actors largely unresponsive to conventional diplomatic pressure and benefiting, moreover, from substantial outside support.

A British resolution awaited with caution

The United Kingdom plans to submit a motion before the Human Rights Council, though the precise details of its content had not yet been made public at the time this report was written. Previous Sudanese files before this same body have generally resulted in resolutions whose language was deemed insufficiently binding by several human rights organizations, a track record that tempers expectations for this new British initiative.

The real test of this diplomatic move will lie in its ability to translate words of alarm into concrete civilian protection mechanisms, rather than becoming yet another symbolic statement added to a long list of warnings that produced no real effect on the ground.

What the West can and must do concretely

Targeted sanctions still hesitant

Several experts, including the Dutch academic cited by Deutsche Welle, are calling for immediate sanctions directly targeting RSF leaders, stressing their command responsibility for the paramilitary group's documented crimes. Such sanctions would send a clear message that these individuals will have no legitimate role in Sudan's political future, regardless of the current conflict's military outcome.

The West's slowness in adopting such targeted measures, despite evidence accumulated over months if not years, illustrates a form of strategic hesitation I find difficult to morally justify given the documented scale of ongoing violations.

An arms embargo extension, demanded for months

High Commissioner Volker Türk has for months called for extending the arms embargo, currently limited to Darfur, to the whole of Sudanese territory, a measure that could limit the continuous inflow of weapons fueling this conflict from abroad. This extension, though technically complex to enforce on the ground, would send a strong political signal of international determination to contain this conflict.

The persistent absence of such a measure, despite repeated calls from the UN's top human rights official, speaks volumes about the current limits of collective political will in the face of a crisis that continues to worsen before the eyes of the entire world.

A forgotten conflict that should not be forgotten

Media coverage disproportionate to the scale of the tragedy

The Sudanese conflict, now in its third year since erupting in April 2023, remains largely under-covered by major Western media compared with other international crises of lesser human scale in terms of victims and displaced people. The World Health Organization puts the conflict's overall death toll at at least 40,000, while the United Nations estimates 12 million people have been displaced, figures several humanitarian organizations consider significantly understated relative to conditions on the ground.

This disproportion between the documented scale of the crisis and its relative Western media visibility raises a fundamental question about our own collective editorial priorities, at a time when Western public attention is being pulled by numerous other simultaneous international flashpoints.

A neighboring crisis already spilling into South Sudan

The Sudanese conflict is also generating major regional repercussions, with more than 1.3 million people originally from South Sudan having fled Sudan to return to their home country, according to the International Organization for Migration. This cascading displacement dynamic shows how a national Sudanese crisis can quickly destabilize an entire already-fragile region, with humanitarian and security consequences far exceeding the borders of the country of origin.

This regional dimension of the conflict strengthens, in my view, the case for more sustained Western engagement: letting this crisis drag on further risks destabilizing an entire region of Africa already facing multiple simultaneous security and humanitarian challenges.

Testimony as the last bulwark against forgetting

Local voices that refuse to be silenced

Despite the considerable risks faced by anyone speaking publicly in this wartime context, residents like Agsam Hamad continue to speak to journalists who can still reach them, refusing to let their daily ordeal go unheard amid widespread international indifference. These individual testimonies, however modest they may seem against the statistical scale of the crisis, humanize a conflict too often reduced to cold numerical data in institutional reports.

This willingness to bear witness, despite the danger, is in itself an act of resistance against a war that seeks, precisely through its maintained information opacity, to smother any future accountability for its alleged perpetrators.

A collective responsibility that extends beyond local actors alone

Responsibility for what could happen in El-Obeid in the coming weeks will fall not only on the RSF and their direct backers, but also on an international community that, possessing all the necessary warning signals documented for months, would nonetheless choose not to act with the firmness the situation objectively demands.

This shared responsibility, however uncomfortable to collectively bear, must guide Western action in the crucial days and weeks ahead for the immediate future of this besieged Sudanese city.

The ambiguous role of neighboring regional powers

Egypt, a pivotal but cautious actor

Egypt, Sudan's direct neighbor and an official supporter of the Sudanese army, has adopted a cautious posture toward the escalation around El-Obeid, aware of the potential repercussions of a massive influx of additional refugees onto its own territory, already under economic strain. This Egyptian caution illustrates the complex calculations neighboring regional powers must make, torn between political solidarity and national security realism.

Egypt's position could prove decisive in the coming weeks, particularly if Cairo decides to intensify its logistical support for the Sudanese army in the face of the growing threat posed by the RSF's advance in Kordofan.

Turkey, a discreet but present actor

Turkey, also mentioned among the Sudanese army's backers, is pursuing an active foreign policy in Africa that now includes a strategic interest in the outcome of the Sudanese conflict, without publicly displaying an involvement as visible as that of Russia or Iran on this particular file. This discreet but real Turkish presence deserves close monitoring by Western chancelleries in the months ahead.

All these regional dynamics confirm that the Sudanese crisis cannot find a lasting resolution without far more advanced international diplomatic coordination than current efforts, which remain too fragmented among actors with often conflicting priorities.

What this siege reveals about the state of international humanitarian law

Geneva Conventions increasingly theoretical

The methodical siege tightening around El-Obeid illustrates a worrying erosion of respect for the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly prohibit blockades aimed at starving entire civilian populations. The repeated drone strikes against the main highway and water supply infrastructure are not isolated collateral damage, but a deliberate strategy of pressure on the civilian population documented by several conflict analysts.

This tacit normalization of siege as a military tactic, already observed in El-Fasher and now replicated in El-Obeid, sends a dangerous signal to other armed actors elsewhere in the world: the diplomatic and judicial cost of such practices remains, in practice, extremely limited as long as the international community settles for condemnation statements with no real enforcement mechanism.

The near-total absence of accountability mechanisms

Despite repeated calls from humanitarian organizations and UN officials to document potential violations of international law in El-Obeid, no binding judicial mechanism is currently able to act quickly enough to deter the RSF from repeating the El-Fasher scenario. Investigations by the International Criminal Court into Sudan are progressing, but at a pace utterly disproportionate to the immediate danger facing the civilians of El-Obeid.

This chronic institutional slowness, combined with the absence of genuine Western political will to raise the real cost of such practices, fuels a vicious cycle where every unpunished siege becomes the template for the next, in a region already marked by decades of relative impunity.

Conclusion: a race against the humanitarian clock

The coming weeks will be decisive

As this report is being written, no one can predict with certainty whether El-Obeid will suffer the same tragic fate as El-Fasher, but every signal documented by humanitarian agencies, military analysts and UN bodies converges toward the same conclusion: the risk is real, immediate and fully documented in advance. The window of opportunity to prevent a new major tragedy is closing quickly, as the RSF tighten their encirclement of the city.

This race against the humanitarian clock demands international mobilization matching the documented urgency, a mobilization that, so far, unfortunately remains below the real needs expressed by organizations present on Sudanese soil.

What history will remember of our collective response

The world has already been given, with El-Fasher, a precise warning of what can happen when the international community fails to act early enough against a documented paramilitary encirclement. The question now, with only weeks or perhaps days before a possible final assault on El-Obeid, is whether this same international community will learn the lessons of that previous failure, or whether it will once again settle for belated statements of outrage once the tragedy has already occurred.

The West, in particular, bears a special moral responsibility on this file: possessing the diplomatic, economic and institutional levers needed to influence this crisis, it will not be able to claim ignorance or surprise if the worst were indeed to happen in the coming weeks in El-Obeid.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my acknowledged biases

I am a columnist, not a war correspondent present on Sudanese soil or an academic specialist on Sudan. I hold a pro-Western bias that leads me to judge international inaction toward documented humanitarian crises harshly, wherever they occur in the world. I am not affiliated with any humanitarian, governmental or paramilitary organization mentioned in this text.

What I don't know and my method

I do not have direct access to Sudanese soil, made extremely difficult for independent journalists by ongoing fighting. My method consisted of cross-referencing reports from several UN agencies, international humanitarian organizations and media outlets with correspondents or reliable sources on the ground, before formulating my analysis and the personal opinion expressed in this report.

Sources

Primary sources

UN sounds 'red alert' over human rights catastrophe in Sudan's el-Obeid — Al Jazeera, July 3, 2026

UN Human Rights Council to hold urgent meeting on Sudan crisis — Al Jazeera, July 1, 2026

UN to hold debate on Sudan's al-Obeid as Britain warns of atrocities — Reuters, June 30, 2026

Secondary sources

Sudan: An imminent RSF offensive is pushing North Kordofan toward humanitarian catastrophe — International Rescue Committee, July 2-3, 2026

In Sudan's Kordofan, a key city reels as paramilitary offensive looms — Africanews, July 1, 2026

Sudan: Fears of atrocities as RSF surrounds key city — Deutsche Welle, June 25, 2026

Sudan: Urgent Action Needed on Atrocity Prevention and Accountability — Human Rights Watch, June 15, 2026