The United Nations Human Rights Council convened an emergency session this week over the rapidly deteriorating situation in El Obeid, the capital of Sudan's North Kordofan region, where more than 500,000 people are trapped under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk issued a stark warning, calling the situation "code red" and urging governments to intervene to prevent what he described as an imminent human rights disaster. A draft resolution condemning RSF escalation — co-sponsored by the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway — was put before the council's 47 member states.
El Obeid lies in central Sudan, roughly 400 kilometres southwest of the capital Khartoum. RSF forces have encircled the city from the north, west, and south, massing heavily armed troops while drone strikes have cut off the only remaining exit route. Between 6 and 28 June alone, at least 45 civilians were killed and 41 wounded in such attacks, with the UN noting the true toll is likely higher. Markets, schools, petrol stations, water infrastructure, and civilian vehicles across the broader Kordofan region have all been struck. The siege has produced severe shortages of food, fuel, clean water, healthcare, and transport. Among those trapped are more than 100,000 people who had already fled violence elsewhere in Sudan, making El Obeid a city of the doubly displaced.
The fear animating the emergency session is that El Obeid could mirror — or exceed — the catastrophe that unfolded in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which fell to the RSF in October 2025 after an 18-month siege. Dr. Mukesh Kapila, a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, warned that the El Obeid crisis could prove even worse than El Fasher, while noting that sustained international attention may still serve as a deterrent. The scale of what happened in El Fasher is only now becoming fully documented: a new 200-page Amnesty International report, based on testimony from more than 200 survivors and corroborated by satellite imagery and videos posted by RSF fighters themselves, details systematic massacres, mass rape, and the deliberate targeting of non-Arab, Black African ethnic groups — particularly the Zaghawa and Fur. One UN expert panel concluded in February that the violence bore "genocidal characteristics." Researcher Nathaniel Raymond of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab estimates that at least 60,000 people were killed during the final phase of the El Fasher siege in October and November 2025 alone — a figure he notes is six times the conservative death toll of the Srebrenica massacre.
Sudan's civil war erupted in April 2023 between the national army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, known as Hemeti — two former allies who fell out over power. The conflict has taken on an acute ethnic dimension in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, where the RSF, drawing on the legacy of the Arab Janjaweed militias implicated in the Darfur genocide of the 2000s, has directed systematic violence against Black African communities. Amnesty International states that children were deliberately targeted during the El Fasher assault — killed, wounded, raped, abducted, or forcibly recruited.
The humanitarian toll extends beyond the siege zones. On Monday, 17 people were killed in an attack on a humanitarian convoy in Duk, a district in central Sudan, including five aid workers employed by a local UN partner organisation. On Wednesday, a drone destroyed a UNHCR truck carrying more than 50 tonnes of emergency relief — mattresses, blankets, and solar panels — en route to the Kordofan region. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called on the international community to act immediately, saying: "The world cannot allow El Obeid to become the next senseless tragedy."