200,000 More Displaced in Sudan's Kordofan as War Enters Third Year

The numbers out of Sudan keep getting worse, and almost nobody in the U.S. is paying attention.

The UN's International Organization for Migration said Wednesday that more than 200,000 people have been newly displaced across Sudan's Kordofan region since late 2025, driven by intensifying fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. IOM Director General Amy Pope said: "The warning signs are impossible to ignore. Across Sudan, families are fleeing violence, losing access to water, electricity and healthcare, and now facing the added burden of destructive floods."

This war has been grinding since April 2023, when a power-sharing arrangement between army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the two men who jointly ran the 2021 coup, collapsed into open combat. According to Al Jazeera, the conflict has killed at least 59,000 people and displaced roughly 14 million. The IOM's own tally, cited by Al Jazeera and confirmed across multiple outlets, puts total internal displacement at 8.6 million and says more than 4.2 million people have fled the country entirely.

El-Obeid is going dark

The worst of the new displacement is centered on North Kordofan, where fighting has raged since October 2025. The IOM reported that displacement in the Sheikan district, home to the regional capital el-Obeid, has jumped 25% in the past eight months.

Drone strikes attributed by the IOM to the RSF have repeatedly hit el-Obeid's main power transformer, according to news.un.org and multiple outlets that cited the same IOM alert. These strikes have cut electricity needed to pump water, run hospitals, and keep phone networks operating for an entire city.

Anadolu Agency reported specifics on the pace of the collapse: IOM field teams estimate about 11,000 people fled the villages of Umm Sumayma and Abu Haraz in Sheikan locality between August 16 and 18 alone because of deteriorating security. Days earlier, on August 16, the IOM had reported roughly 4,250 people fleeing three other Sheikan villages over a two-day span. The Sudanese army says it shot down two drones in the state on August 18, according to Anadolu.

Floods on top of war

As active combat and infrastructure attacks continued, North Darfur got hit with heavy seasonal rains that destroyed or damaged nearly 1,350 homes in the Tawila area in the past week, displacing more than 1,000 families, according to the IOM. Additional flooding in Kabkabiya and Shangil Tobaya pushed even more families into temporary shelters.

In Blue Nile state, clashes in and around Geissan displaced roughly 7,800 people, with some crossing into Ethiopia. West Darfur saw about 18,000 people displaced in just the first half of August.

Aid pipeline is also breaking down

The IOM flagged relief access disruptions caused by delays in global supply chains, specifically through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Middle East shipping disruptions are creating knock-on effects in a humanitarian catastrophe thousands of miles away.

Despite that, the IOM says it moved 1,750 metric tons of supplies in the last 72 hours, including 17,750 hygiene kits and 850 tents, reaching 110,750 people so far, with plans to reach more than 400,000 in the coming days.

More than 4.5 million people have returned to Sudan over roughly the past 18 months, including significant numbers back to Khartoum, according to the IOM. Many are returning to neighborhoods stripped of water, electricity, healthcare, and schools. People are going home to nothing because staying displaced is worse.

Where the coverage diverges

Breitbart's reporting leans on an older UN displacement figure of 3 million total displaced, a number that's now badly out of date compared to the IOM's current 8.6 million internal displacement figure plus 4.2 million refugees abroad. Breitbart's piece also emphasizes UN Secretary-General António Guterres's warning of a "full-scale civil war" and cites UN special envoy Volker Perthes raising the possibility of International Criminal Court involvement over alleged atrocities in Darfur, including reports of mass killings of non-Arab populations and sexual violence documented by survivors. Those are serious, credible allegations from UN officials, but no ICC charges have been filed and no war crimes tribunal has been convened as of this writing. Perthes himself stopped short of formally requesting ICC action, saying only "the ICC of course is watching."

The fundamental picture is not in dispute across the sourcing: a war between two generals who once ran a country together is now starving, drowning, and displacing millions of their own citizens. The machinery to stop it, from ceasefire talks to war crimes accountability, isn't moving nearly as fast as the death and displacement numbers are climbing.

The open question is whether the world does anything about it. Guterres has been warning for weeks about regional destabilization risk. No major power has announced new intervention, sanctions escalation, or peace-process breakthrough as of August 20, 2026.