THE WORLD NEWSREEL
Evening Edition — October 20, 2026
OUR COMMENT / WORLD AFFAIRS
SUDAN — THE OTHER FAULT LINE
More than eighty dead in Kordofan as drone warfare spreads — and a forgotten civil war begins to reveal a much larger geopolitical fracture
KHARTOUM / KORDOFAN — Sudan's war entered another deadly phase as drone attacks struck targets from the capital to the country's western and southern battle zones, killing scores of civilians and pushing a conflict already responsible for one of the world's gravest humanitarian emergencies still further into the age of remote warfare.
At al-Dibab, in West Kordofan, a drone struck a transport point near a market where villagers were waiting for rides home. At least 80 people were initially reported killed. Witnesses and medical personnel said civilians made up much of the toll. A further 47 wounded were taken to al-Mujlad; according to medical sources cited by AFP, 30 later died of their injuries.
Sudanese groups aligned against the army accused the Sudanese Armed Forces — SAF — of carrying out the strike. That attribution has not been independently established.
In Khartoum, meanwhile, a drone attack attributed to the opposing Rapid Support Forces — RSF — killed three children, aged two, four and six. Other attacks have struck Nyala in South Darfur and targets in Blue Nile, while drones launched by the RSF have increasingly reached government-held towns and infrastructure far beyond the older front lines.
Then came Abyei.
On Monday a drone strike hit a market in the disputed territory between Sudan and South Sudan. South Sudanese officials now say more than 150 people may have been killed. The Sudanese military was blamed for the attack; officials said the apparent target was a fuel depot allegedly associated with RSF activity. Thousands were displaced by the ensuing fires. The allegation and the claimed RSF presence remain contested.
The numbers are becoming difficult even to absorb.
The United Nations says millions have been driven from their homes since fighting began in April 2023. UNICEF estimated in mid-2026 that around 15 million people had experienced displacement, while 19.5 million people were facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse. More than 825,000 children were threatened by severe acute malnutrition.
And yet Sudan remains, in much of the world, the war one hears about after the other wars.
That may be a mistake.
Because Sudan is not merely another civil war.
It lies directly across one of the emerging fault lines of the twenty-first century.
NEWSREEL COMMENT
THE OTHER FAULT LINE
Look at the world map differently tonight.
Do not begin in Ukraine.
Begin on the Atlantic edge of the Sahara.
Move east.
Across the Sahel.
Mauritania.
Mali.
Burkina Faso.
Niger.
Chad.
Then Sudan.
Continue toward the Red Sea.
Across it lies Yemen.
Beyond Yemen lie Saudi Arabia, Oman and eventually the Persian Gulf.
It forms no formal alliance.
It has no treaty.
There is no line on any diplomatic map identifying it.
But increasingly it behaves like a geopolitical fracture zone.
One great strategic fault line of our time can already be traced from the Baltic through Ukraine and the Black Sea toward the Middle East and the Gulf.
There is another.
It begins close to the Atlantic and runs eastward across the Sahara and Sahel until it meets the Red Sea.
Sudan sits almost exactly at its hinge.
HOW THE WAR BEGAN
The immediate explanation of Sudan's war is deceptively simple.
There are two generals.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan commands the regular Sudanese Armed Forces.
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemedti — commands the Rapid Support Forces.
They were not originally enemies.
They were partners.
Both belonged to the military-security system that survived the fall of Omar al-Bashir. In 2019 they participated in the political order that followed Bashir's overthrow. In October 2021 their forces cooperated in ending Sudan's attempted transition toward civilian government.
Then came the question every revolutionary coalition eventually discovers:
Who commands whom?
The proposed return to civilian rule required the RSF eventually to be incorporated into the regular armed forces.
But incorporation raised the question of timetable.
And timetable raised the question of command.
And command raised the question of power.
Burhan possessed an army.
Hemedti possessed another army.
In April 2023 the constitutional problem became artillery fire in the streets of Khartoum.
But even that description is incomplete.
For the RSF was not simply another military unit.
Its genealogy leads backward into the militias of Darfur — the Janjaweed formations mobilised by the Bashir regime during the wars of the early 2000s. Over time that militia system acquired a formal organisation, international connections, gold revenues, commercial interests and military experience extending beyond Sudan, including participation in the Yemen war.
Thus, when Sudan collapsed into war, it did not divide neatly into government and rebels.
It divided between two competing centres of armed sovereignty.
That distinction matters.
THE MAP BENEATH THE WAR
Now look at Kordofan.
It lies between the army's principal territories to the east and the RSF's western strongholds in Darfur.
That makes Kordofan not peripheral but central.
Whoever controls it possesses the bridge between western Sudan and the Nile system.
That is why places such as El Obeid, Bara, Dilling, Kadugli and West Kordofan appear repeatedly in dispatches.
Darfur is the RSF's strategic depth.
Khartoum and the eastern state apparatus form the SAF's political and institutional depth.
Kordofan is the hinge between them.
But widen the map once again.
To Sudan's west lie Chad and Libya.
To its north, Egypt.
To its east, the Red Sea.
Across that water lie Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
To the southeast lie Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
Sudan is therefore simultaneously:
an African state,
a Sahelian state,
a Nile state,
a Red Sea state,
an Arab-world state,
and a gateway to the Horn.
Few countries sit at the intersection of so many strategic systems.
That is why everybody has an interest in Sudan.
And why almost nobody possesses enough power to end its war.
TWO PLATES
The geological metaphor must not be pushed too literally.
There are no two tidy alliances sliding apart like Africa and South America.
But there are two political environments separating from one another.
On one side is an increasingly fragile interior Sahelian belt.
It runs from Mali and Burkina Faso through Niger and Chad toward Darfur and western Sudan.
Across much of that belt, the old post-Cold War security architecture has weakened dramatically. French influence has receded. Military governments have grown stronger. Russian security networks have expanded. Borders have become routes for weapons, gold, fighters and contraband as much as lines of effective state administration.
The authority of the internationally recognised state remains visible on maps.
On the ground, sovereignty is increasingly divisible.
On the other side lies the Nile–Red Sea–Gulf system.
Egypt regards Sudan as part of its immediate strategic hinterland.
Saudi Arabia regards the western shore of the Red Sea as essential to its security.
The United Arab Emirates has developed a network of commercial, political and security interests extending across the Red Sea, the Horn, Libya and parts of the Sahel.
Iran has rebuilt ties with the Sudanese military.
Turkey, Russia and others possess their own Red Sea ambitions.
The result is not two disciplined blocs.
It is something less orderly and perhaps more dangerous:
two geopolitical ecosystems meeting inside states too weak to keep them apart.
WHO BACKS WHOM?
Here the map becomes especially revealing.
Egypt has generally been associated with support for Burhan and the regular army. Its reasons are understandable: Egypt prefers a conventional Sudanese state and conventional Sudanese armed forces on its southern border.
Iran has also strengthened military relations with the SAF.
Saudi Arabia has maintained relations with Burhan while attempting to operate as a mediator, notably through the Jeddah process.
The UAE, by contrast, has repeatedly been accused of providing support to Hemedti's RSF. Abu Dhabi denies accusations that it arms the paramilitary force. European and other analyses nevertheless describe extensive RSF commercial and logistical connections stretching through Chad and Libya and linking Sudanese gold, Gulf markets and regional military networks.
Russia illustrates how little this resembles the Cold War.
Russian-linked networks historically developed relations with the RSF and Sudan's gold economy.
Moscow has simultaneously cultivated relations with the Sudanese state and sought access to the Red Sea.
The great powers no longer necessarily choose one client and remain with him.
They hedge.
They bargain.
They buy access.
They change sides.
This is not bloc politics.
It is market politics conducted with armies.
THE GREAT RIFT
So what, precisely, is moving away from what?
The deepest separation may be this:
The interior belt from the western Sahel toward Sudan is moving away from the political order that Europe and the United States assumed would dominate Africa after the Cold War — civilian governments, Western security assistance, multilateral mediation and internationally supervised transitions.
It has not moved toward one alternative system.
That is the point.
It has fragmented.
Into juntas.
Private armies.
Paramilitary forces.
Jihadist insurgencies.
Russian security relationships.
Turkish weapons.
Gulf money.
Chinese infrastructure.
Gold networks.
Local war economies.
Across its eastern edge, meanwhile, the Red Sea and Gulf are becoming a strategic system of their own, dominated increasingly not by European powers but by regional states with money, ports, drones, shipping interests and military ambitions.
Sudan is where these two movements meet.
The Sahel arrives from the west.
The Gulf arrives from the east.
Egypt descends from the north.
The Horn presses from the southeast.
And the Nile runs through the middle.
WHY THE WORLD LOOKS AWAY
There is another uncomfortable question.
Why has a catastrophe of this scale attracted so little sustained attention?
Part of the answer is competition.
Ukraine commands Europe.
Israel, Gaza, Iran and the Gulf command the Middle East.
Sudan falls between editorial maps.
It is African when foreign desks are concentrating on the Middle East.
It is Arab when African desks are looking farther south.
It is therefore perpetually at the edge of somebody else's page.
But there is a more disturbing reason.
Sudan is difficult to narrate.
There is no easy ideological division.
No NATO confronting Russia.
No Israel confronting Iran.
No simple government-versus-insurgency structure.
The two principal armed camps were once allies.
Foreign powers overlap rather than divide cleanly.
Militias change affiliations.
Local wars lie inside the national war.
And underneath everything remain older fractures inherited from Darfur, the long north-south conflict, the secession of South Sudan and decades of rule from Khartoum.
Complex wars receive less attention than simple ones.
They do not produce good slogans.
They nevertheless produce bodies.
The Council on Foreign Relations has described Sudan as one of the world's most neglected major conflicts; humanitarian organisations continue to describe displacement and hunger there on a scale unmatched by almost any other contemporary emergency.
FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE GULF
Take the map one last time.
Begin near the Atlantic.
The western Sahara and Sahel form the first edge.
Move through Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — countries where the old relationship with Europe has sharply weakened.
Continue into Chad, the corridor between the Sahel and Sudan.
Enter Darfur.
Cross Kordofan.
Reach the Nile.
Continue to Port Sudan and the Red Sea.
Across the water, the same strategic world continues through Yemen and finally into the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf.
This does not constitute one war.
It constitutes something potentially more important:
one connected zone of instability.
Weapons cross it.
Money crosses it.
Drones cross it.
Mercenaries cross it.
Gold crosses it.
Refugees cross it.
Political influence crosses it.
The frontier separating Africa from the Middle East exists far more clearly in atlases than it does in strategy.
Sudan demonstrates why.
THE DRONE ABOVE THE MARKET
And so we return to al-Dibab.
A market town in West Kordofan.
People have finished shopping.
They gather around trucks that will take them back to their villages.
Some carry packages.
Some wait.
Some talk.
Some are simply trying to get home.
Above them is a drone.
Who manufactured it matters.
Who supplied it matters.
Who ordered the strike matters.
Who controls Kordofan matters.
Who ultimately controls Sudan matters.
Egypt cares.
The Emirates care.
Saudi Arabia cares.
Iran cares.
Russia cares.
The governments of the Sahel care.
Europe may discover eventually that it cares as well.
Because the strike on the market is not an isolated flash on a distant map.
It lies on a line.
And that line now stretches almost from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.
We have become accustomed to looking north-east, toward the great fault line running from the Baltic to the Black Sea and beyond.
We might occasionally look south.
Another plate is moving.
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