Fighting in Sudan’s Kordofan region has swelled over the past year into one of the main battlegrounds of the civil war, with one in five recorded attacks since April 2023 falling there, according to an Al Jazeera analysis published on Thursday.
The region, split into North, West and South Kordofan states, lies exactly where the two sides meet. The Sudanese Armed Forces hold Khartoum and most of the north, east and center. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces control nearly all of Darfur and parts of Kordofan, with allied armed groups holding pockets in the south. After the fall of el-Fasher, the army’s last major foothold in Darfur, in October 2025, the war’s center of gravity shifted to the corridor between the two heartlands. The army has since pushed the R.S.F. out of much of North Kordofan.
According to the analysis, which drew on data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, an independent conflict monitor, Sudan recorded 14,648 attacks between April 15, 2023, and Sept. 19, 2026. Khartoum saw the most, 5,719, or 39 percent — nearly three times as many as North Darfur, with 1,999. Gezira state had 1,435. Kordofan’s three states together counted 2,717 attacks, 2,878 including Abyei, the disputed oil-rich border area historically part of the region — about 19.7 percent of the total and, taken as one region, second only to Khartoum.
The army was associated with just over half of all recorded attacks, 52 percent, against 34.7 percent for the R.S.F. and 13.3 percent for other actors, though the balance has swung: the paramilitaries carried out more attacks than the army from late 2024 to mid-2025, and the counts have run close since August 2025 even as the overall number of attacks has fallen sharply. In Kordofan itself, the army was linked to 1,323 attacks, or 46 percent, and the R.S.F. to 920, or 32 percent.
Within North Kordofan, 41 percent of the attacks, 497 in all, fell on the single locality of Sheikan, home to the state capital, el-Obeid, a commercial and administrative hub whose capture would open the R.S.F. a road east toward Khartoum. The fighting there comes increasingly from the air. On Sept. 9 a drone strike on a college in the city tore the roof off the building and killed a security guard, the dean, Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, told Reuters. “As you can see, the entire faculty is destroyed and we feel that our dreams are destroyed, our future is destroyed,” Omnia Aboul Gassim, a student who had sat her exams there a day before the attack, told Reuters.
In South Kordofan, the locality of Dilling saw the most attacks, 242, followed by Kadugli with 107. In West Kordofan the strikes were scattered, with Babnusa, En Nuhud, Al Khiwai and Abu Zabad each recording more than 110. ACLED has counted at least 12,314 reported fatalities in Kordofan since the war began.
The displacement follows the front lines. About 8.6 million people remain uprooted inside Sudan, the United Nations says, down from a peak of 11.6 million in January 2025 as millions went home to areas the army retook. Returns reached about 5.1 million by August, 2.7 million of them to Khartoum. In Kordofan the flow runs the other way. The International Organization for Migration says the number of people newly displaced there rose 65 percent in four months after fighting escalated last fall, from more than 132,000 in February to at least 219,000 by late June, and it has warned that el-Obeid, sheltering some 500,000 people including more than 83,000 displaced, faces the looming threat of a full-scale invasion.
“The warning signs are impossible to ignore,” the agency’s director general, Amy Pope, said this month. “Across Sudan, families are fleeing violence, losing access to water, electricity and healthcare, and now facing the added burden of destructive floods.”