Sudan's Army Says It Has Retaken Key Highway Toward El Obeid
Control of the Al Sadarat road could slow the paramilitary RSF's push into North Kordofan
By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Sudan's army says its forces have regained full control of the Al Sadarat highway, the road linking the capital, Khartoum, to El Obeid, according to Al Jazeera. The army says the highway's recapture will help it block the Rapid Support Forces' attempt to seize El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state.
The claim comes from Sudan's military and has not been independently verified in the reporting reviewed here; battlefield claims from both sides of Sudan's civil war have repeatedly proven difficult to confirm in real time. Still, if it holds, the highway is a significant supply and movement corridor in a war that has ground on for more than two years between the army and the RSF, splitting the country and displacing millions.
El Obeid has been a target of RSF advances as the paramilitary force tries to extend its reach beyond Darfur and into central Sudan. Losing or holding that highway shapes how each side moves troops, fuel and weapons across a vast, arid stretch of the country — the kind of unglamorous infrastructure fight that rarely makes headlines abroad but decides who controls territory on the ground.
The war has already produced one of the world's largest displacement crises, with famine conditions reported in parts of Darfur. Any shift in control along key roads carries consequences well beyond the fighters holding the checkpoints — for aid convoys, for civilians trying to flee, and for a population already stretched past its limit.
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— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.
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