The RSF Is Bombing Sudan's Hospitals and Killing Its Doctors

Picture a hospital in West Kordofan at night. The lights are on. Patients are on their beds, some still on drips. Then the staff are ordered out, the patients are dragged onto the road, and the building is taken over by armed men who need a place to treat their own wounded. That is not a hypothetical. It is one of the documented incidents in a war that has now produced 807 attacks on health care in Sudan since fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began in April 2023.

Let that number settle. Eight hundred and seven times, someone decided that the people who stitch wounds, deliver babies, and keep children alive with oxygen were legitimate targets, or simply stood aside while others did it.

We are told this is a "war between two generals." We are told both sides are equally to blame. The data does not support that lazy symmetry. Insecurity Insight's tracking, compiled and reported by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, attributes more than 55 percent of these attacks to the RSF. Health facilities have been attacked and damaged at least 232 times. At least 222 health workers have been killed. 144 have been arrested and 16 kidnapped. Behind each of those numbers is a doctor who went to work and did not come home, a nurse whose family still does not know where she was taken, a village that lost the only clinic within a hundred kilometres.

Now look at where the violence is concentrating. Since January 2026, the Kordofan states have accounted for 51 percent of all recorded incidents. In the first nine months of this year alone, 45 health-care incidents were recorded across North, South, and West Kordofan. That is more than the full-year totals for 2025 (35), 2024 (7), and 2023 (24). The war is not winding down in the health sector. It is accelerating, and it is aiming at the places where civilians have nowhere else to go.

The method matters, too. Just over half of the 2026 Kordofan incidents involved aircraft or drone strikes that damaged facilities and killed or injured health workers. Most of those were attributed to the RSF, particularly in North Kordofan, and to RSF-allied groups including the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North in South Kordofan. Looting of medical stores has been reported. And in at least one West Kordofan incident, the RSF reportedly converted a hospital into a field hospital for its own fighters, forcibly evacuating civilian patients to make room. Think about that. Sick children and old women were pushed out of their beds so that an armed group could heal its gunmen. That is not collateral damage. That is a choice, made repeatedly, by people who knew exactly what a hospital is for.

To be precise and fair, the Sudanese Armed Forces are not clean. Incidents attributed to the SAF are fewer, and they were concentrated in West Kordofan. Fewer does not mean acceptable. A soldier who shells a clinic is no less a war criminal because his rival has a worse record. Revvmark's standard has never been "our side is the lesser evil." Our standard is that protected spaces stay protected, no matter whose uniform is on the other side of the door.

But let us not pretend this is a purely Sudanese tragedy with no outside hand. Drones do not drop from nowhere. Armed groups in this war are sustained by supply chains, financiers, and political patrons who prefer that the fighting continues because it keeps resources in play and rivals off balance. Africa has seen this movie before. In Congo, in Libya, in the Sahel, foreign capitals fund the warlords, then express concern at the funerals. Every government and company that sells weapons, launders gold, or looks away from war crimes in exchange for access to Sudan's resources is writing its name on those hospital walls.

And where is the international community's outrage? The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on medical facilities and personnel. Security Council Resolution 2286, adopted in 2016, condemned attacks on health care in armed conflict and called on states to end impunity. The International Criminal Court has had jurisdiction over Darfur since the Security Council referred the situation in 2005. Yet the gap between the legal language and the lived reality in Kordofan is so wide it could swallow a convoy. The law exists. Enforcement is what is missing, and missing enforcement is a decision.

So what must change? Start with what works. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies on a foundation of institutional discipline, clear rules, and a military that answers to civilian authority. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a credible services economy by insisting on transparent institutions and rule of law. Senegal showed in 2024 that a population organised around the ballot box can force a peaceful transfer of power when its leaders try to cling on. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove the same thing: when power is accountable and institutions are respected, people stop dying for the ambitions of men who answer to no one.

Sudan needs that logic applied to its war. The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start naming, sanctioning, and tracking commanders responsible for attacks on health workers, with a public list and a deadline. The UN Security Council should adopt a standing mechanism to verify attacks on hospitals in Kordofan and Darfur in near real time, using the very data that organisations like Insecurity Insight have already built. Regional bodies should guarantee humanitarian corridors that are protected by enforcement, not just by optimism. Sudanese civil society, including the neighbourhood emergency response rooms that have kept the lights on through this war, deserves direct funding and a seat at every negotiating table. Those who have kept their people alive without a state should not be treated as an afterthought in the peace.

Above all, citizens must demand accountability from their own governments. Ask your ministers what their country is selling to the parties in Sudan. Ask your parliament whether it has sanctioned commanders responsible for hospital attacks. Ask your media why a hospital bombing in Kordofan gets a single paragraph while a football match gets a full page. Share the figures. Name the perpetrators. Refuse the cowardly phrase "both sides."

We are Africans. Sudan's doctors are our doctors. Sudan's children are our children, and the old women being pushed out of their hospital beds are our mothers. If we accept that a hospital is a legitimate target, we accept that no one is safe, including us. Eight hundred and seven attacks is not a statistic to be filed away. It is an indictment. Demand the arrests. Demand the sanctions. Demand that the people who turn hospitals into battlefields be treated as what they are: war criminals. Then keep demanding it until the next patient can sleep without hearing the engines overhead.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB