The United Nations is again warning that a Sudanese city is about to become a crime scene, and this time it is describing the crime as it happens. In el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, up to forty drones at a time hang over a city of more than half a million people, plus at least 100,000 displaced. UN experts say the pattern around el-Obeid is the pattern around El Fasher, where some 6,000 people died in three days last October, in what investigators now describe as acts bearing the markers of genocide.
The drone has become the weapon of this war. In three weeks of June, the UN human rights office verified fifteen strikes in and around el-Obeid that killed at least 45 civilians, and said the real toll was likely higher. The bombs have come down on markets, schools, fuel stations, water pipes and cars in the street. Both sides fly drones; the Rapid Support Forces, which surround the city, fly the most. North Kordofan has recorded the highest number of drone attacks in Sudan this year.
The siege is eighteen months old. The RSF controls every road out of the city except the one to the east. Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, told the Human Rights Council in July that residents are selling off their possessions to pay for a way out, and that for many the cost of transport and the constant attacks on the exit routes make leaving impossible.
What the drones are doing to daily life is the part that has no military logic. Water has become a trap. The cholera outbreak spreading across western Sudan, with more than 1,300 confirmed cases and 114 deaths, is concentrated in North Kordofan. Women and girls collecting water in el-Obeid now face what the UN describes as an impossible choice: fetch it in daylight and risk a drone strike, or wait for dark and risk assault. The UN Women’s office says women collecting water at night have been harassed, raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence. The city’s health system, already stripped by war, is collapsing under the strain, and hunger is closing in around it: nearly 400,000 people in the district around the city are at emergency levels of food insecurity.
The horror of El Fasher is that it was warned about. The UN documented the encirclement, the strikes on infrastructure, the starvation, the killings, and warned publicly for months. In June, Secretary-General António Guterres said the horrors of El Fasher must not be allowed to repeat in el-Obeid. The warnings were not heeded; the city fell; 6,000 people died in three days.
Now the same machinery is turning around el-Obeid, and the same voices are being raised. The UN Fact-Finding Mission said the city must not become the next crime scene. The International Criminal Court’s deputy prosecutor warned the Security Council that grave international crimes could be imminent, and that no one would be able to claim ignorance afterward. On August 4, more than twenty US senators wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging action to prevent mass atrocities. Even the army’s recent gains, including the reopening of the road toward Khartoum, have not moved analysts who watch the city: there is, in their reading, no prospect of a military rescue.
Sudan’s representative at the Human Rights Council, a native of el-Obeid, said the wounded city would never fall as long as its people were alive. The drones are cheap, which is the point. A war that has already killed at least 59,000 people, according to ACLED, is being fought with weapons that cost less than a used car, over a city the world has been told, in detail, is next.