Drone attacks blamed on the Rapid Support Forces ripped through El Obeid, Sudan’s North Kordofan capital, for a second consecutive day on June 12, killing and injuring civilians in repeated strikes that hit homes, a funeral gathering and aid routes. The Emergency Lawyers group documented at least 23 civilians dead and 19 wounded, with warnings that the toll could rise as drones continued to fly over the city and access to medical care remained strained. The first round of strikes killed five civilians and injured twelve. A second strike followed shortly after, hitting mourners gathered at Dalil Cemetery during a funeral for the earlier victims, killing four more and injuring seven.
Counting incidents across North and South Kordofan during the same period, drone attacks attributed to the RSF killed at least 30 civilians and five soldiers, with seven additional civilian deaths reported in separate incidents across the region.
Why El Obeid is the decisive node
The strikes are not random. El Obeid is the single most important city the RSF does not yet control in central Sudan.
Its capture would secure Sudan’s central east-west axis, linking RSF strongholds in the Darfur region to the army-controlled east, and bring the paramilitary closer to Khartoum. El Obeid stands directly in the way of the RSF’s march back from Darfur to the capital. The SAF maintains a strategic airbase in the city, and the paramilitary group has been attacking it with drone strikes as it advances eastward through Kordofan.
The surrounding terrain makes the city’s supply lines as strategically important as the city itself. The SAF has maintained control of El Obeid and reinforced its presence along main roads linking it to Bara to prevent RSF infiltration. Maintaining control in central and eastern parts of the state secures a vital supply line to White Nile state to the east, which connects to central and eastern Sudan. A severed El Obeid cuts the army’s western position off from its eastern supply base.
The drone campaign in numbers
The June 12 strikes are not an isolated escalation. They are part of a documented, intensifying pattern.
Drones caused more than 80 per cent of civilian deaths in Sudan’s war during the first four months of 2026, killing at least 880 people, according to the UN human rights chief. Most of those deaths were recorded in the Kordofan region. Health facilities have been hit at least 12 times in that period, with some forced to close entirely. Fuel stores and supply routes have also suffered repeat strikes. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that drone-related deaths in 2025 alone marked a 600 per cent increase over the previous year.
The rainy season, historically a period of reduced fighting, is no longer providing that buffer. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that increasing reliance on drones allows hostilities to continue unabated in the approaching rainy season, which in the past had brought about a lull in ground operations.
Infrastructure warfare: from Kordofan to the Red Sea
What is happening in El Obeid belongs to the same strategic logic the RSF applied to Port Sudan in May 2025, and to Sudan’s oil infrastructure across multiple fronts before that.
The RSF’s use of drones for infrastructure attacks has turned basic services into targets. By cutting power or water, the RSF can cripple entire cities, weaken the army’s grip, and spread panic. In Port Sudan, that logic was applied directly to Sudan’s only functioning Red Sea outlet. The RSF launched a wave of drone strikes on the city hitting its port, fuel depots and the only international airport. Sudan imports 80 per cent of its fuel, which is stored in large depots in Port Sudan for national distribution. The week following those drone strikes saw a spike in food prices across several states, including Al Jazirah, Kassala and River Nile, attributed to power outages and disruptions in fuel supplies.
The oil corridor dimension is direct. South Sudan, which has one of the largest crude reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, relies entirely on Sudanese pipelines and infrastructure to transport its oil to Port Sudan for export. Oil sales account for over 90 per cent of the country’s revenue, making the export route vital to its economy. That corridor has already been severed once. In October 2025, Sudan’s Ministry of Energy ordered the immediate shutdown of key oil infrastructure shared with South Sudan following RSF drone attacks on facilities in Heglig, citing systematic targeting of energy infrastructure and damage to fuel storage tanks. South Sudan resumed exports only after drone attacks forced an emergency shutdown, with officials engaging a third-party country to prevent further RSF strikes on oil infrastructure located in Sudanese territory.
Sudan’s oil transit deal with South Sudan, up for renewal in 2026, has underpinned post-secession cooperation. Continued attacks risk unravelling that arrangement and dragging both countries into deeper instability.
The connection between what is happening in El Obeid today and what happened in Port Sudan last year is not incidental. It is the same campaign, applied at different nodes of the same logistics chain: degrade the internal corridors in Kordofan, pressure the export gateway on the Red Sea, and compress the army’s operational and fiscal room simultaneously.
What the trajectory signals
An RSF encirclement of El Obeid would cement the group’s claim to a western proto-state and leave Khartoum’s rulers confronting a partition they cannot easily reverse. That outcome remains a lower-probability scenario. But the June strikes confirm the RSF is sustaining pressure through air rather than ground assault — a tactic that degrades civilian infrastructure, exhausts medical capacity and erodes the population’s ability to endure a prolonged siege without requiring a costly direct assault.
The UN has warned that unless action is taken, the conflict — which has killed tens of thousands, displaced over 11 million and thrust several areas into famine — risks entering yet another new, even deadlier phase. For operators, logistics actors and investors with exposure to the Horn of Africa and Red Sea corridor, the question is no longer whether Sudan’s infrastructure war has regional consequences. The oil shutdown of October 2025 and the Port Sudan strikes of May 2025 already answered that. The question now is how much further the campaign extends before external actors move beyond condemnation.