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Sudan’s three-year civil war between the national army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has pushed the strategic central city of el-Obeid to the brink of disaster, as a relentless surge of drone strikes has left hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in siege-like conditions, facing mounting death, injury, and collapsing basic services. The conflict, which began in April 2023, has turned el-Obeid, the 500,000-person capital of North Kordofan state and home to one of Sudan’s largest central military bases, into the latest deadly flashpoint. For 18 months, the city has endured growing encirclement by RSF forces, and recent months have seen a dramatic spike in aerial attacks that have targeted civilian infrastructure and left ordinary residents terrified for their lives.

One 27-year-old university student, identified only as Sarah to protect her safety, survived a recent unprovoked drone strike at a crowded city fuel station, one of the primary targets of the attacks. She described the chaotic, devastating aftermath of the blast: the entire area lit up with fire before she lost visibility, leaving wounded people bleeding in the open, burned and shattered vehicles scattered across the lot. Sarah escaped with her life but carried permanent reminders of the attack: shrapnel embedded in her leg and hand from a second missile that struck while she was outside her vehicle. Sarah is far from alone in her experience. Recent data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled), an independent violence monitoring organization, records 27 separate drone strikes on el-Obeid in June alone — the highest monthly total recorded since the conflict began three years ago.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has confirmed the staggering human cost of this escalation: between June 6 and 28, 15 documented drone strikes killed at least 45 civilians and injured 41 more. In an address to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week, Turk warned that the situation in el-Obeid is already a full-blown human rights catastrophe in progress. Beyond the immediate carnage of airstrikes, he added, 18 months of siege conditions have allowed widespread abuses to flourish along civilian escape routes, including summary executions, forced abductions, systematic torture, and sexual violence.

Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab based in the United States, explained why el-Obeid has become such a critical battleground for both warring factions. The city sits at a vital geographic chokepoint: it links RSF-controlled western Sudan to the army’s primary strongholds in the east, and controlling el-Obeid means controlling the critical highway leading to the national capital Khartoum and its adjacent twin city Omdurman. “If you control el-Obeid, you control the road to the capital,” Raymond noted, making the city a non-negotiable defensive priority for the Sudanese army, which currently holds the city but has been unable to stop the daily drone attacks.

For medical workers on the ground, the constant influx of casualties has stretched already fragile healthcare systems to a breaking point. A local hospital doctor, who also requested anonymity for her safety, described the overwhelming strain of the crisis to the BBC. “We receive injured patients after almost every drone attack,” she explained, noting that most casualties suffer devastating limb injuries, while many more face life-threatening head trauma. Through tears, she recalled one of her most tragic cases: a seven-month-old infant who required amputation of a hand to save her life, but ultimately did not survive the injury. “The situation is frightening. You leave your house as if you will never return,” the doctor said. “We are really suffering from the drones — no-one knows how and when they will die.”

International observers warn that el-Obeid could be on track to replicate the catastrophic violence that unfolded in el-Fasher earlier this year, when RSF forces captured the city after an 18-month siege. Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard pointed out that the pattern of siege and escalating attack in el-Obeid matches exactly the “playbook” used by the RSF in el-Fasher, where the United Nations confirmed the violence bore the “hallmarks of genocide.” In three days of fighting alone, more than 6,000 people were killed, with mostly Arab RSF fighters accused of systematically targeting non-Arab communities. The RSF has repeatedly denied all accusations of genocide and mass atrocities. In a recent statement responding to warnings of an impending massacre in el-Obeid, the paramilitary group claimed it would “work diligently” to guarantee full protection for all civilian residents and that all its military operations comply fully with international humanitarian law.

Raymond, however, pushed back on direct comparisons between the two crises, noting that el-Obeid does not currently have the same ethnic divides that drove the large-scale ethnic violence in el-Fasher. “Right now, we don’t see any indication of a large-scale plan by RSF to attack,” he said. Current on-the-ground reporting from Acled analyst Nohad Eltayeb confirms that while the RSF has effectively encircled el-Obeid from the north, west, and south, the Sudanese army has reinforced its positions with allied militias to maintain control of a critical supply corridor connecting the city to army-held eastern territories. “While it is very likely that the RSF will attack the city, this logistical lifeline and reinforcements render a complete RSF takeover improbable,” Eltayeb wrote in a June 30 analysis.

Satellite imagery analysis from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab confirms that most drone strikes have deliberately targeted fuel infrastructure: between late May and late June, at least eight separate fuel stations sustained damage consistent with aerial bombardment. Civilians report that even non-fuel vehicles, including water and sewage trucks, have been hit after being misidentified as fuel tankers. Beyond fuel sites, strikes have also hit el-Obeid’s main electrical substation, residential neighborhoods, and public markets in what Raymond describes as an apparent campaign to cripple normal daily life for the city’s population. The targeting of fuel and power has already created a cascading humanitarian crisis: fuel supplies are running critically low, pushing prices sharply higher, and without fuel to run generators, water pumping stations across the city are at risk of shutting down. That would leave hundreds of thousands of residents — including 100,000 internally displaced people who already fled violence elsewhere in Sudan — dependent on potentially contaminated water, opening the door to deadly outbreaks of waterborne disease.

Many of the displaced people who sought safety in el-Obeid are now facing the same violence they fled. Ahmed, a humanitarian worker who escaped conflict first in Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan, then in Khartoum, now fears he will be forced to flee for a third time as drone strikes intensify. “People are always in shock and fear. They are unable to sleep,” he said. With summer temperatures forcing many residents to sleep outdoors to escape the heat, the constant droning of aircraft overhead leaves residents in a constant state of dread. “When the drones are flying overhead, making that noise, every night becomes a sleepless night.” For long-term residents like Sarah, the constant threat has upended all normal life. “People now leave their homes saying goodbye to their families because they don’t know if they will return or not,” she said.