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Two and a half years into Sudan’s brutal civil conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), civilian communities across the country have been left with no choice but to take up arms to defend their homes, families and lives. As fighting shifts to the resource-rich Kordofan region south of Darfur, this pattern of civilian mobilisation has repeated – drawing in pro-democracy activists, former regime opponents, and ordinary people united by the shared threat of RSF violence, even as political divisions over the movement persist.

This wave of civilian self-defence is not a new development. From the earliest months of the war, which broke out in April 2023, communities have risen up to repel RSF incursions when central military defences failed. In summer 2023, Masalit fighters in Darfur’s al-Geneina launched a counteroffensive against advancing RSF and allied militias that were rampaging through the city. Villages in al-Jazira state, south of Khartoum, fought off invading RSF fighters even as surrounding neighbourhoods and towns fell. Most infamously, residents of el-Fasher – the besieged capital of North Darfur – helped hold RSF forces at bay for more than 550 days, until defensive lines collapsed in October 2025, leading to a massacre that killed an estimated 60,000 people.

Today, the epicentre of the conflict has moved south to Kordofan, and civilians here too have joined the fight. Most have aligned with Popular Resistance units, organised to fight alongside the SAF. The Popular Resistance was formally established by SAF chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in June 2023, with the military providing tens of thousands of civilian volunteers with weapons and basic combat training. Its ranks include a diverse cross-section of Sudanese society, even counting pro-democracy revolutionaries who once opposed Burhan and his military government.

But the movement has not escaped political controversy. Sumood, a bloc of civilian political parties led by former Sudanese prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, argues that the Popular Resistance is dominated by religious conservatives who seek to use the movement as a vehicle to restore political figures from the authoritarian regime of former president Omar al-Bashir to power.

For civilians on the frontlines in North Kordofan, however, politics have been set aside in the face of existential violence. Mustafa Karam al-Din, a pharmacist from the strategic city of Bara, joined the Popular Resistance under SAF command after RSF fighters killed his brother and ransacked his family home in 2024. “They raided our house, killing my brother and others in my neighbourhood, so I had no option other than taking up weapons to protect myself and my family and neighbours,” Karam al-Din explained in an interview with Middle East Eye in el-Obeid, capital of North Kordofan. “The RSF was very brutal with everybody when they entered the city. That wasn’t just against armed people but against all citizens, including the civilians.”

According to Karam al-Din, the RSF launched a campaign of collective revenge when it recaptured Bara in 2024, after the SAF briefly seized control of the city and residents celebrated the RSF’s expulsion. “They had videos and lists of some people, including the agents of the Popular Resistance,” he said. For civilian communities across Bara and wider Kordofan, this brutality made clear that self-defence was a necessity. “They entered police stations and weapons stores and took up weapons. They also got others from the SAF. Then the Popular Resistance was organised, including in Bara, el-Obeid and other areas in Kordofan,” Karam al-Din added.

Bara has been one of the hardest-hit areas in the latest phase of the war, changing hands between the SAF and RSF multiple times over the past three years due to its position along Kordofan’s critical Export Road. Since July 2025, the city has been held by the SAF. “Since October last year we have been fighting with the SAF against the RSF until we liberated our city, and I’m very proud of that,” Karam al-Din said.

Karam al-Din frames the conflict not just as a domestic civil war, but as a fight against foreign intervention: the RSF has been widely backed by the United Arab Emirates, which has continued to supply the paramilitary with weapons and foreign mercenaries despite global condemnation and widespread accusations of RSF war crimes, including genocide in Darfur – a charge already formally leveled by the U.S. government and multiple leading human rights organisations. “This conflict has become a war against the UAE’s foreign invasion, which is using the RSF as a tool,” said Karam al-Din, who now mans frontline checkpoints. He added that SAF forces recovering Bara found evidence of UAE-origin weapons and supplies in captured RSF positions, and that resistance fighters have arrested foreign mercenaries from Colombia, South Sudan and other countries fighting alongside the RSF in towns including Um Syala and Gabrat al-Shiekh.

Godat Abdul Hadi, a senior Popular Resistance leader, told MEE that the organisation now runs military training programs for hundreds of young people displaced from Bara to el-Obeid. “The Popular Resistance in el-Obeid, Bara and other areas began at the start of the war and even before the SAF officially declared and expanded it under SAF command,” he explained. “The number was initially small, but it has hugely increased in response to the RSF invasion of the majority of North and West Kordofan and with the widespread atrocities it committed.”

Not all civilian activists in Kordofan have embraced armed resistance alongside the SAF, however. Mohammed Adam, a pro-democracy activist and member of the Resistance Committees network that led the 2019 revolution that ousted Bashir, long questioned whether aligning with the military was the right response to RSF aggression. When the RSF overran Bara in October 2024, Adam was sheltering a group of armed young resistance fighters in his home, and faced immediate danger when the paramilitary advanced.

“I can never forget that day. Some of the armed youths were with me in my house, and they were unable to join their units because of intensive RSF fire. So, we lay under beds for hours, and when the crossfire stopped, we realised the SAF had been defeated and RSF fighters were starting to attack civilians,” Adam recalled. The group quickly hid all weapons and military uniforms, and Adam provided civilian clothes for the fighters before they attempted to flee. Even after RSF fighters entered the home, accused the group of being associates of the former “deep state” and searched the property, they did not discover the hidden arms, allowing Adam and the fighters to escape that night to el-Obeid.

Looking back on the chaos, Adam described scenes of widespread carnage: dozens of civilian bodies left in the streets, with wounded and displaced residents relying on help from nearby village communities for basic food, water and emergency medical care. He recalled a particularly brutal incident that turned even hesitant residents in Bara completely against the RSF: paramilitary fighters killed a local neighbour, then opened fire on his funeral the same day, killing dozens more unarmed civilians for no reason.

Critics within Kordofan’s pro-democracy movement share the concern that the Popular Resistance has been co-opted by allies of the old Bashir regime. One anonymous Resistance Committees activist from Bara told MEE that former regime associates are leading the Popular Resistance in the region to pave the way for an authoritarian comeback. “Former regime associates are leading the so-called Popular Resistance in Bara and other places in order to pave the way for the old regime to exploit the war and return to power,” the activist said. “This war has to be stopped by all means and concessions. It destroyed the country and enabled the old regime to come back through the SAF.”

Even Adam, who has reservations about aligning with Burhan’s military, acknowledges that ordinary civilians have no other viable option to protect themselves from RSF brutality. “The RSF has attacked everybody: civilians or military, young or old, men or women. They take revenge on everybody in Bara,” he said. “Those who took up weapons in self-defence were our brothers, cousins and neighbours. Any previous political disagreements are not an issue at the moment. Let me tell you: I prefer not to carry weapons under the SAF, but I can’t tell those who have been attacked and humiliated by the RSF not to defend themselves by all means.”

Dramatic surveillance footage capturing a catastrophic flash flood tearing through Gyirong Port, a key border crossing between Nepal and Tibet Autonomous Region of China, has circulated widely across global social media and international news outlets—yet it remains almost entirely inaccessible to audiences inside China, according to a new Reuters report.

The torrential flood, which struck earlier this week, has already claimed hundreds of lives, with hundreds more still unaccounted for as of Friday. But inside China’s strictly censored online ecosystem, searches for information about the disaster and related user-generated content are heavily restricted. As of Thursday, China’s national state-run flagship news bulletin had only aired a single still image of the event, with minimal additional context.

While Beijing has launched a large-scale search and rescue operation deploying hundreds of emergency responders, and President Xi Jinping personally chaired an emergency coordination meeting to direct response efforts, the stark contrast between global access to on-the-ground footage and the controlled information environment inside China has thrown the country’s online censorship framework into sharp relief.

China’s administration of Tibet has long been marked by strict information controls. Beijing asserts full sovereignty over the region, which it annexed in the 1950s, and has repeatedly cracked down on anti-government protests, while facing widespread international accusations of severe human rights violations against the Tibetan Buddhist population. Chinese authorities have designated the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama as a separatist, and the region’s name itself is a heavily monitored term for Chinese online censors. These long-standing sensitivities have shaped the government’s response to the disaster, observers say.

State media has published incremental updates confirming the rising death toll, ongoing rescue work, and risks posed by a newly formed barrier lake at risk of catastrophic overflow. But beyond official statements highlighting rescue operations, little additional information has been released. No firsthand survivor accounts from the affected areas in Tibet have been made public, and no user-posted footage of the disaster or its aftermath has been allowed to remain online. Anxious families of missing people inside the region have also not spoken publicly, and contacting residents in the area remains extraordinarily difficult even in non-disaster times. One veteran foreign correspondent with experience covering North Korea noted that reaching interview subjects in Pyongyang is often easier than connecting to people in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital.

The information gap was thrown into stark relief Thursday evening, when China’s main state broadcaster led its flagship evening news segment not with the Himalayan flood disaster, but with the launch of a new collection of President Xi Jinping’s political writings. Foreign journalists are barred from traveling to Tibet without prior official approval, leaving international reporters with a narrow window to gather information before content is scrubbed from online platforms and local voices are silenced. Most external reporting has therefore had to rely exclusively on official state media dispatches, which have focused heavily on the dramatic efforts of rescue teams scaling cliffs and crossing raging rivers to reach hard-hit communities, with no details on the number of people saved or the full extent of damage.

Analysts emphasize that Beijing is not indifferent to the disaster: Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest ranking leader, was rapidly dispatched to the region to oversee debris removal and response efforts, an unusually quick visit for a top official following a major crisis. Instead, the muted, controlled public narrative is rooted in the Chinese Communist Party’s overriding priority of maintaining social stability, the report notes.

Party leadership fears that a large-scale, unregulated public discussion of the disaster could stoke public discontent over the response or perceived lack of pre-disaster mitigation, observers say. There are also additional concerns that the tragedy could become a organizing point for dissent, particularly in a region where Buddhist religious identity remains a core part of community life. While large-scale public protests have not occurred in Tibet for years, Tibetan exile groups have repeatedly raised alarms over expanding Beijing control, including new education policies that critics say erode the influence of monasteries and Buddhist cultural practice.

Within hours of the flood striking, local party authorities issued an internal notice calling on grassroots party members to lead relief efforts, provide psychological support to affected residents, and prioritize maintaining social order and public confidence in disaster zones. The notice explicitly states that members who perform well will receive rewards, while those who fail to meet expectations will face disciplinary action. Rights activists report that Tibetan residents can face detention or arrest for speaking to foreign journalists or posting online content that deviates from the official government narrative, a restriction that has left ethnic Tibetans living outside the region unable to confirm the safety of family members trapped in the disaster zone.

The International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group, has acknowledged the critical work of on-the-ground first responders, but has accused Beijing of systematically removing user-generated videos and firsthand accounts of the disaster from domestic social platforms. The organization has called on Chinese authorities to release full, verifiable information about the scale of casualties and damage.

Beijing has long rejected accusations of human rights violations in Tibet, pointing to massive infrastructure and economic investments that have grown the region’s tourism sector and integrated it more closely with China’s national economy. Even so, most Chinese citizens residing outside Tibet currently have little access to accurate, detailed information about the flood disaster unfolding in the Himalayan border region.