By Eltayeb Siddig
EL OBEID, Sudan, Jan 21 – Drone strikes have intensified in and around al-Obeid in central Sudan as the country’s devastating civil war closes in on the army-controlled city, causing significant civilian deaths in at least two cases, residents say.
The city is one of Sudan’s most important and the capital of North Kordofan state, part of the wider Kordofan region that stands between the RSF’s Darfur stronghold and the army-controlled eastern half of the country.
After the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) tightened their grip on the westernmost Darfur region in late October, they shifted their focus to Kordofan and drones have struck weekly in and around al-Obeid, residents say.
At around the same time, the paramilitary’s ground forces began taking over towns and villages across the Kordofan region, while also besieging cities in South Kordofan state, according to residents.
The force has not yet approached al-Obeid, where daily life has continued despite the looming threat and an exodus late last year as the war intensified.
The army and allied forces have positioned themselves on the outskirts of the city.
FUNERAL CROWD HIT
Sudan’s war erupted in April 2023 after the army and RSF clashed over their roles in a planned political transition. It has driven half the population into hunger and famine and decimated the country’s economy. Drones have come to play an increasingly dominant role, with the RSF in particular using them to usurp the army’s early air dominance.
Overall deaths from the conflict are hard to estimate, though researchers say at least tens of thousands have been killed.
More than 100 civilians were killed in the first half of December across the Kordofan region, according to the U.N. human rights office.
In al-Obeid, satellite imagery from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab shows the appearance of about 100 new burial mounds in two cemeteries in the two weeks between January 2 and 14.
The imagery also shows evidence of bombardment of the city’s power station, as well as the construction of berms around the city, a possible defense against future RSF encirclement.
In the al-Obeid area, residents say the worst of the incidents happened on November 5 in al-Luweib village.
Dozens had gathered from afar for a funeral when an ambulance belonging to the army-aligned Joint Forces drove past, and soon after a drone followed.
The drone, which residents assumed was directed by the RSF, fired on the funeral gathering, killing 65 people, all of them women and children, according to four al-Luweib residents who spoke to Reuters.
The incident echoes frequent attacks documented by Reuters in al-Fashir, Darfur, near or against ambulances and clinics alleged by the RSF to be harbouring enemy forces.
“We were sitting, and all of sudden the drone hit us. I went outside and felt something hitting me and I didn’t know what it was. They told me it was a drone,” said one of the witnesses, Safaa Hassan, who had burn marks on her arms and a shrapnel injury on her leg. “The yard was full of women,” she said.
Victims’ bodies, some of them torn apart by the impact, were later buried in a mass grave, the residents told Reuters.
Reuters could not independently verify the accounts. The RSF did not respond to a request for comment.
‘CHILDREN UNDER THE RUBBLE’
More recently, in early January, a drone strike killed Abdallah Mohamed Ahmed’s wife, seven of his grandsons, and two other female relatives when it hit the home in al-Obeid they had rented after fleeing their village following an RSF attack.
They are among about 43,000 who fled their homes in North Kordofan and about 65,000 who have fled the region as a whole between late October and December 31, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
“We found the children under the rubble, under the iron, under the beds. Only God knows the state of the children,” said Moussa Adam, a neighbour present at the time of the attack.
“[They] could not achieve their goals they are looking for, so they started killing the citizens and terrorising the citizens,” Ahmed said of the RSF.
Imagery obtained by Yale researchers corroborated the targeting of the home.
(Additional reporting and writing by Nafisa Eltahir; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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