4,250 people flee three North Kordofan villages in two days, UN agency says

The International Organization for Migration said on Sunday that more than 4,000 people have been driven from three villages in North Kordofan state, in central Sudan, as security conditions there deteriorated over two days.

It put the figure at 4,250, based on estimates by its Displacement Tracking Matrix teams, and named the villages as Um Arda, Tamid and Al-Khor Al-Abyad, all in Shikan locality. The families left on Friday and Saturday, some for other parts of Shikan itself and others for Omdurman, the city that sits west of Khartoum.

The agency described the situation as tense and volatile and said it was continuing to watch it closely.

The flight followed reported violence in one of the same villages. The independent rights group Emergency Lawyers said on Friday that an assault by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces around Um Arda, southwest of the state capital El-Obeid, had left 14 civilians dead and dozens more hurt. The Sudanese army separately said it had pushed back RSF attacks in that area and at Jabra Al-Sheikh.

Kordofan's three states have been a front line since clashes between the army and the RSF spread there in October 2025. The war itself began in April 2023 over plans to fold the paramilitary force into the regular military, and has since killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 13 million, by UN estimates — a scale against which a two-day count of 4,250 reads less as an incident than as the rate at which the war keeps working.