The International Organization for Migration said this week that more than 200,000 people have been newly displaced across Sudan’s Kordofan region since late 2025, as fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has concentrated around the city of el-Obeid. The agency reported a rise of about a quarter in displacement within Sheikan locality, which contains el-Obeid, over the past eight months. The figures are the agency’s own, and, like all counts taken while fighting continues, they are provisional.
The season has compounded the movement. IOM said heavy rain in North Darfur damaged or destroyed roughly 1,350 shelters in the camps at Tawila, and that flooding has displaced some 20,000 people since June. Nearly 18,000 people were displaced in West Darfur during the first half of August, the agency said. Across the country it now counts 8.6 million people displaced since the war began in April 2023, alongside more than 4.5 million returns over roughly the past eighteen months — a churn of leaving and coming back that is itself a measure of how unsettled the country remains.
“Sudan is one of the world’s largest displacement crises,” said Amy Pope, director general of the International Organization for Migration.
Sudan’s war entered its fourth year in April. Estimates of the dead vary widely between sources, and none has been independently established.