Sudan’s military has scored its most significant territorial gains in months, recapturing key towns and a critical highway in North Kordofan, but the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shows no sign of ending soon.
The decisive moves came last Saturday when the SAF and its allies retook the town of Bara along with the strategic localities of Al-Baraka and Um Sayala after heavy fighting with the RSF. The following day, the army announced full control of a 350-kilometre road linking the capital, Khartoum, with North Kordofan.
The strategic value of that road lies in its logistics. The RSF had controlled most of the route since the early months of the war, using it as a supply artery between the west of the country and Khartoum. Recovering it secures the eastern flank of El Obeid, where the army’s central Sudan headquarters is based, and expands the defensive perimeter west of the capital.
Emboldened by the advance, army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on July 26 ordered a new offensive aimed at clearing the country all the way to the border with the Central African Republic, what may be his most ambitious operation to date.
SAF operational reports claimed 73 armoured vehicles destroyed and said the enemy had suffered heavy losses, figures that cannot be independently verified. What is not in dispute is that the Centre for Information Resilience has confirmed the army’s presence in Bara, Umm Qarfa and Jabra al-Sheikh in recent days.
RSF Leader Signals Loss of Control
The reaction from RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, suggested alarm. On Monday July 27, following a security meeting with partners from the Sudan Founding Coalition, he announced that his field commanders would have full autonomy to launch offensive operations without waiting for central orders.
In his first public appearance since the defeats, Hemedti told his fighters to change their way of fighting immediately, including an order to stop filming their movements, since such videos were providing valuable intelligence to the army. He also called for an increase in purges of suspected infiltrators within the ranks, saying the moment called for action or death.
The RSF has framed the decentralisation of command as a tactical decision intended to give the frontline greater speed and agility. But a more realistic reading points in the opposite direction. Delegating offensive decisions to individual commanders immediately after losing a key logistics corridor, while simultaneously ordering internal purges, does not suggest confidence in the chain of command.
That fragility has deep roots. The RSF and its allies have never been a unified actor but rather a coalition of tribal commanders with uneven loyalties, supplemented by the movement of Abdelaziz al-Hilu and a constellation of regional forces. African Arguments recently noted that commitments made at the top do not automatically bind every faction, and cited an estimate from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies suggesting that close to 150 armed groups are operating in the conflict.
The UAE’s Strategic Calculus
The RSF has received more external backing than any other armed actor on the continent, according to the source. The United Arab Emirates has been its principal patron, with satellite imagery, weapons serial numbers, flight data and dozens of sources pointing to Emirati supplies of Chinese drones, artillery and Colombian mercenaries. Abu Dhabi denies this outright, with its foreign ministry insisting it has not provided and does not provide military or financial support to any party in the war. The evidence, the source states, is nonetheless overwhelming.
Yet no Emirati drone can correct a tribal coalition that is losing cohesion. Crucially, Abu Dhabi’s strategic objective was never North Kordofan but Darfur. The fall of El Fasher consolidated RSF dominance over that region, giving the Emirates a partner that controls a vast territory, a large share of Sudan’s gold, and trade routes toward Libya and Chad.
When Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Somalia began denying Emirati overflights, the support did not diminish but was rerouted through Ethiopia, where RSF drone launch sites and training camps now operate with the approval of the Addis Ababa government.
That raises the possibility that the UAE is not backing a loser but managing the loss of a peripheral theatre in Kordofan while keeping its core interest in Darfur intact. A war involving 150 armed groups, a fragmenting but undefeated enemy, and two Gulf powers pushing in opposite directions will not be resolved by the recovery of a single road corridor.
