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Paramilitary drone strikes shook Sudan’s flashpoint city of al-Obeid on Monday, an AFP journalist reported, hours after the army regained control of the city’s highway to the capital Khartoum.

The army’s former ally, now rival, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have for months amassed troops around al-Obeid, attempting to encircle it ahead of an apparent large-scale assault.

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Following a days-long advance across North Kordofan state, the Sudanese army on Sunday managed to push the RSF west, off the 400-kilometer (250 mile) highway that connects Khartoum with the embattled Kordofan region’s largest city, two army sources told AFP Monday on condition of anonymity.

At dawn, RSF drone strikes tore through two municipal buildings in al-Obeid in apparent retaliation, leaving the local lawyers’ association and a branch of the Agricultural Bank of Sudan in ruins, an AFP reporter saw.

No casualties were reported. Since the start of the year, drone strikes by both forces have killed over 1,000 people in Kordofan alone, according to the UN.

Since April 2023, the war between Sudan’s army and their former allies, the Rapid Support Forces, has torn the country apart and killed over 200,000 people, aid workers estimate.

It has also created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, with over 33 million people in need of humanitarian aid.

Breaking a stalemate?

For months, each side has sought to cut off the other’s supply lines around al-Obeid, which sits at the crossroads of Sudan’s central axes.

Its north-south highway runs from Khartoum through Kordofan to the southern border, while its east-west axis connects RSF strongholds in the Darfur region to army-controlled central and eastern Sudan.

The highway to Khartoum remains closed to civilians, who have for most of the war relied entirely on the eastern road to the White Nile, where the RSF regularly launches deadly drone strikes.

The army advance “opens a second supply route to al-Obeid and beyond,” said one of the army sources.

Inside the city, where the UN says hundreds of thousands are in need of aid, relieved al-Obeid native Sabreen Mohamed told AFP that “the highway opening means goods can flow.”

Praising the army’s advance in North Kordofan, Mohamed brushed off the RSF’s dawn drone strikes as “death throes.”

“We’re used to it, every time the army advances, they retaliate against North Kordofan,” she said.

Though both sides have reportedly committed war crimes including indiscriminate bombing, the army is generally regarded more favorably by civilians who have faced a litany of horrors at the hands of the RSF.

As the RSF mobilized on al-Obeid, the UN has for weeks warned of a repeat of atrocities committed during the RSF’s takeover of the Darfur city of al-Fashir in October last year, which a UN inquiry found bore the “hallmarks of genocide.”

A city of about half a million people which the UN says has doubled in size because of displacement, al-Obeid has been caught in the crossfire since the war began.

It was under paramilitary siege from April 2023 until February of last year, when the army broke through.

Ever since, RSF attacks on roads, neighborhoods and critical infrastructure including power stations have worsened a humanitarian crisis, where the UN says only a fraction of the city has reliable access to food.

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