The UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday, January 6, that around 65,000 people have been displaced since late October in Sudan’s Kordofan region, which has become the center of fighting in the civil war nearing a thousand days.
After consolidating control over Darfur, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues its eastward advance into the Kordofan region, killing at least 10 civilians with a drone strike on a residential area in North Kordofan state’s capital, El Obeid, on Monday, January 5.
Earlier on Sunday, January 4, another drone strike by RSF on the power station in El Obeid plunged the city into darkness.
In the meantime, the RSF is also tightening the siege of South Kordofan state’s famine-struck capital, Kadugli, and its second-largest city, Dilling. 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,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) had reported in November.
Later on December 30, the RSF and a faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – North (SPLM-N) allied with it, took over the road connecting the two besieged cities, overrunning the positions of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
The siege has tightened since, “with both locations increasingly cut off, supplies rapidly dwindling and prices of food and other essentials spiralling,” the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement on January 2.
In the absence of medical supplies, doctors in Dilling are reportedly forced to perform surgeries without anaesthesia amid the mounting “daily civilian casualties” as the RSF and SPLM-N “continue their intensive bombardment”, Sudan Doctors Network said in January 3.
Civilians are also bearing the brunt of SAF’s bombardment of RSF-controlled areas. After hitting a hospital in North Darfur’s town of Zarq, an SAF drone attacked a market in the Ghurair area of the state, killing over 64 civilians, according to the RSF.
Over 150,000 civilians have been killed in the war that began in April 2023 when the SAF and the RSF, former ruling partners in the military junta, turned on each other, unleashing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the North African country.
In North Darfur state’s El Fasher alone, the RSF killed tens of thousands, depopulating the city after overrunning its defenses in late October 2025, after besieging the city for over 500 days and starving its population.
Read more: El Fasher’s last stand: “The city has fallen, but its dignity has not”
Similarly starved and besieged, civilians in South Kordofan’s Kadugli and Dilling fear a similar fate as the RSF closes in.
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