Sudan's Generals Are Bombing and Jailing El Obeid's Civilians

Imagine being locked in a cell measuring roughly 2.5 by 2 metres with up to 40 other people. There is no room to lie down, the air is heavy with sweat and fear, and the only crime you committed was to help your neighbours or speak your mind. This is not a dystopian novel. It is El Obeid, in Sudan, in 2026, and the people inside those walls are our brothers and sisters.

The UN-appointed Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan has now put this on the record. Its investigators say civilians in El Obeid live under two threats at once. From the sky, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rain down drone strikes. On the ground, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) run a campaign of mass arrests. Ordinary Sudanese are caught between a paramilitary force that bombs them and an army that jails and tortures them. Neither side has earned the right to call itself a protector.

Consider the numbers the Mission has documented. Thousands have been arrested by SAF-linked security cells and held in unofficial locations where torture is routine. Others are sent to El Obeid Central Prison, which reportedly holds some 2,000 people in a facility designed for about 450. One former detainee described cells packed with as many as 40 people. Those are not prison conditions. They are a slow method of killing, and the state that runs them is supposed to be defending the nation.

The violence from the air is just as merciless. RSF drone strikes continue to kill and injure civilians in El Obeid. They have damaged homes, schools, displacement sites, and the electricity and water systems that keep people alive. The Mission says these attacks may amount to war crimes. Only about 30 per cent of the city's hospitals remain operational. Think about that. When a mother's child spikes a fever in El Obeid, the odds are that the nearest working hospital is a long way off, if it exists at all. Every drone that hits a water pump is a sentence handed to the children who drink from it.

The Mission also points to an attack on a market in Abyei on 19 October. Reportedly carried out by forces of the military government, it killed at least 80 people. Separately, reported Egyptian airstrikes on gold mining sites near the Sudan-Egypt border reportedly killed at least 72 miners. Two more bodies of evidence, two more reasons why the claim that this is a simple two-sided fight collapses under its own weight. When a market full of traders becomes a crater, who is protecting the civilians?

Chair Mohamed Chande Othman said October saw the highest number of drone attacks on civilians since the war began in April 2023. Let that sink in. The war is not winding down. It is getting deadlier, more technologically sophisticated, and more geographically spread. And the men who started it still speak of victory.

Who is feeding this machine? The investigators say they found evidence that individuals and entities in Chad, Puntland in Somalia, southeastern Libya, and the United Arab Emirates are part of a transnational network supplying the RSF. They were careful to say they had not linked any neighbouring State to the supply chain. That caution is fair, and we respect the discipline of the investigators. But caution is not an alibi. Othman put it bluntly: states supplying weapons "cannot say that they are unaware." We are asking the question that every African government should be asking. If a drone that kills a child in El Obeid came from a supply chain that runs through your territory, what exactly did you do to stop it?

The Mission's Joy Ngozi Ezeilo has called for the UN arms embargo, currently limited to Darfur, to be expanded to all of Sudan. Her words should ring across this continent: "Sovereignty should not shield mass atrocity crimes." For years, some leaders have hidden behind the language of sovereignty to avoid scrutiny of their own abuses. Sovereignty means the right of a people to govern themselves under law and to be protected by the state. It was never meant to be a licence for generals to torture their own citizens in secret cells.

This is also the anniversary of the RSF's takeover of El Fasher. Ezeilo reminded us that one year later, accountability remains absent. The passage of time, she said, should remind us of the cost of impunity. She is right. Every month that passes without a courtroom, a sanction, or an arrest warrant tells the next warlord that the price of mass atrocity is zero. We have seen this movie in Darfur, in Libya, in the Great Lakes region. Each time, the victims were promised justice later. Later never came for most of them.

Sudan's tragedy is not inevitable. It is the product of choices made by men with guns, backed by foreign money and foreign weapons, and enabled by the silence of governments that should know better. Africa has examples of how a different path looks. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies by protecting property rights, funding institutions, and keeping its army under civilian control. Mauritius turned itself from a sugar-dependent island into a respected financial and services hub by enforcing rules that investors could trust. Senegal showed in 2024 that a peaceful transfer of power is possible when citizens and courts refuse to let a leader rewrite the constitution to stay in office. These are not perfect countries, but they prove that strong institutions, independent courts, and accountable security forces produce better outcomes than the cult of the gun.

So what must happen? First, the UN Security Council must extend the arms embargo to all of Sudan and enforce it with real inspections, real tracking of financial networks, and real penalties for any state or company that breaks it. Second, the African Union must stop treating Sudan's crisis as someone else's problem. The AU's Peace and Security Council should demand unhindered access for independent monitors to every detention facility in El Obeid, starting with the Central Prison and the unofficial sites where people vanish. Third, the International Criminal Court and national courts willing to exercise universal jurisdiction should open files on the drone strikes, the Abyei market massacre, and the El Fasher atrocities, and they should name commanders on both sides. Impunity dies when names are read in open court.

And what should Sudanese citizens demand from their own leaders? They should demand an end to secret detention, an immediate halt to arbitrary arrests, and a civilian-led path back to constitutional rule. They should demand that hospitals be protected and that humanitarian workers, human rights defenders, and peace activists be freed from surveillance and harassment. Civil society groups, lawyers, doctors, and the private sector can also play a role by documenting abuses, supporting local medical networks, and refusing to do business with any entity tied to the arms pipeline. A market trader, a lawyer, a nurse, and a teacher can each be a witness, and a witness is the first thing a tyrant fears.

To the generals in Port Sudan and in the field, and to every foreign capital that profits from their war: you cannot bomb your way to legitimacy, and you cannot torture your way to peace. History will not remember you as saviours. It will remember the 2,000 souls packed into a prison built for 450, the children who drank from broken pipes, and the traders who never came home from the market at Abyei.

To the rest of us, the question is simple. Will we keep scrolling past El Obeid, or will we say its name until the guns fall silent? Write to your parliament. Ask your foreign minister where the weapons came from. Support the journalists and human rights defenders still reporting from inside Sudan. El Obeid's civilians are not a statistic. They are our people. And we have a duty to refuse the silence that lets their killers continue.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS