Full story
War fronts widen
Sudan’s most active battlefronts stretch across a wide arc from Blue Nile state near the Ethiopian border through three Kordofan states to Darfur, with control divided among the army, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and armed groups allied with each side.
“Sudan’s most active battlefronts stretch across a vast arc from the Blue Nile state near the Ethiopian border”
In Blue Nile, the army said on Friday it repelled an attack by the RSF and SPLM-N on Al-Baraka, with the army’s 4th Infantry Division saying its forces inflicted personnel and equipment losses and forced attackers to retreat toward the Sudan-Ethiopia border.
Bakori in the Geissan locality is described as a key hotspot because it hosts a military base and the headquarters of the army’s 14th Brigade, while the SPLM-N led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu has controlled Yabus since 2011.
In North Kordofan, Bara is described as strategically important because of its location on the national highway linking it to Omdurman, west of Khartoum, and the army retook Bara, Jabra al-Sheikh and Um Sayala in late July to secure the highway.
The Anadolu explainer also says drone attacks have increasingly carried the war into towns and villages far from traditional front lines, including repeated drone attacks in North Kordofan alongside similar strikes in South and West Kordofan.
Diplomacy, drones, displacement
Rapid Support Forces Commander Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo arrived in Addis Ababa in an unannounced visit on August 26, as the Blue Nile state front was raging along Ethiopia’s border and reinforcements were amassing on both sides.
Mada Masr reports that Ethiopia’s immediate concern is keeping Sudan’s war from spilling across the border, while Sudanese intelligence sees another layer in Ethiopia’s interest in the RSF, including that Ethiopia could factor the paramilitary group into its own military arrangements amid renewed tensions with Tigray.
The Anadolu and Al-Jazeera Net fighting maps both describe drone attacks moving the fighting to towns and villages far from the front lines, with Al-Jazeera Net highlighting areas such as Al Burka near the Ethiopian border and Bakouri as a contested military base.
In South Kordofan, the IOM said on Thursday that 6,420 people had been displaced from nine villages in Al-Abbasiya because of worsening insecurity from Sept. 1 to 2, according to Anadolu’s explainer.
The UNRIC page on the Sudan crisis quotes Tom Fletcher saying, "Sudan is the stage of a humanitarian emergency of a horrific magnitude," as it describes nearly two-thirds of the population needing urgent aid.
Humanitarian stakes
The UNRIC account says clashes erupted on 15 April 2023 in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as Hemetti.
“"worst humanitarian crisis and displacement in the world."”
It adds that almost 13 million people have been forcibly displaced since April 2023, including 8.6 million inside the country and more than 4 million in neighboring countries, and it calls the situation the “worst humanitarian crisis and displacement in the world.”
UNRIC also says the seizure of El Fasher on 26 October 2025 by the RSF paramilitaries and the escalation of violence in northern Darfur and in the states of Kordofan plunged Sudan into a new phase of instability.
In the same UNRIC update, the International Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan warns on 3 September 2026 that recruiting fighters abroad and external support fuel the conflict and worsen violence against civilians.
As the fighting map coverage emphasizes shifting positions and drone strikes, UNRIC says on 2 September 2026 an airstrike destroyed two trucks carrying 50 tons of aid for the World Food Programme, with the cargo to feed thousands in South Kordofan State.