Sudan's civil war has found its fulcrum. The Kordofan region — three states spanning North, West, and South Kordofan — sits precisely where SAF-controlled central Sudan meets RSF-held Darfur. After el-Fasher fell to the RSF in October 2025, Kordofan became the corridor both sides must control. The SAF has pushed the RSF out of much of North Kordofan, but the RSF retains positions in the west, and the battle is increasingly fought from the air. The numbers are stark. ACLED data through September 2026 records 14,648 attacks since April 2023, with Kordofan's three states accounting for 2,876 — nearly 20 percent of the national total, second only to Khartoum. North Kordofan alone saw 1,205 attacks, with Sheikan locality (home to el-Obeid) absorbing 497 of those. El-Obeid is the prize: a commercial and administrative hub whose capture would open a route east toward Khartoum for the RSF. The attack balance tells its own story. The SAF is associated with 52 percent of all recorded attacks nationally, the RSF with 34.7 percent, and other actors with 13.3 percent. But this ratio has shifted over time — the RSF overtook the SAF in monthly attack counts from late 2024 to mid-2025 before the gap narrowed again. In Kordofan specifically, the SAF accounts for 46 percent of attacks versus 32 percent for the RSF. At least 12,314 fatalities have been recorded in Kordofan since April 2023. Drone warfare is now the dominant mode in North Kordofan. A September 9 strike on a college in el-Obeid killed a security guard and destroyed the building. Civilian infrastructure across the region is being hit with increasing frequency. The air campaign signals that neither side can achieve decisive ground advantage, so both are degrading the other's capacity to hold territory — and destroying civilian life in the process. Displacement figures reveal the human toll and the war's trajectory. About 8.6 million Sudanese remain internally displaced, down from a January 2025 peak of 11.6 million as roughly 5.1 million have returned to areas retaken by the army — 2.7 million to Khartoum alone. But the Kordofan trend moves in the opposite direction: new displacement since the October 2025 escalation surged 65 percent in four months, from 132,000 in February to 219,000 by late June. El-Obeid shelters 500,000 people, including 83,000 already displaced. The strategic logic is geographic. Kordofan is not merely another front — it is the connective tissue between Sudan's east and west. Whoever controls it determines whether the country can function as a single entity or fractures permanently along the Darfur-central Sudan divide. The RSF-allied SPLM-N holds pockets in the south, complicating any clean territorial settlement. South Kordofan remains contested, and the oil-rich Abyei area on the South Sudan border adds another layer of strategic interest. IOM Director General Amy Pope's warning that 'the warning signs are impossible to ignore' is diplomatic understatement. El-Obeid faces what the IOM calls a looming threat of full-scale invasion. If it falls, the RSF gains the corridor it needs to project power eastward. If it holds, the SAF preserves the geographic integrity of its half of Sudan. Kordofan is where this war will be decided — or where Sudan's permanent partition will be sealed.
