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The military’s offensive in Kordofan continued this week with the capture of the strategic Jabal al-Dayer area near Rahad, building on last week’s gains that brought five towns and the Saderat Road linking Khartoum and Kordofan back under military control.

Military sources told Mada Masr the latest advance consolidates the military’s hold over southern and western North Kordofan while placing key routes into Rapid Support Forces-held areas in South Kordofan and West Kordofan under its control.

A senior military officer said that air strikes on remaining RSF positions in North Kordofan over the past week are also part of preparations for a simultaneous advance into the neighboring state.

Along the Chadian border, the RSF launched successive attacks on Bir Saliba and Hagar al-Marfaeen in West Darfur this week, but the military and allied forces repelled the assault after more than 12 hours of fighting. The area forms a key cross-border supply corridor linking the military’s positions in West Darfur with its operational bases in North Darfur.

In South Kordofan, a years-long dispute between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North — the RSF’s ally led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu — and one of its oldest constituencies, the Otoro tribe, has reached the movement’s seat of power.

Armed clashes broke out inside Kauda, its political and military headquarters, forcing residents to flee or shelter in their homes as markets, schools and public services shut down and transport into and out of the town came to a halt.

The confrontation is the latest stage in a dispute that began in 2022 over the SPLM-N’s moves to redraw administrative boundaries and reorganize tribal land ownership across the Nuba Mountains.

Since then, the disagreement has widened to include demands for greater political representation and participation in governing the movement’s territory, a member of the Otoro council of notables and a Kauda resident told Mada Masr.

Sudan’s grid collapsed for the third time in a week after a fault on a transmission line connected to the Merowe Dam triggered another nationwide outage.

Because damage from an RSF attack last year disabled voltage-control equipment at the dam and the war destroyed the grid’s central control facility, engineers said failures at individual stations can bring down the entire national network.

Those vulnerabilities were supposed to be addressed months ago, utility executives, engineers and officials in the energy and finance ministries told Mada Masr. But rehabilitation plans have remained frozen.

Merowe’s plan is not an exception. Across Sudan’s electricity sector, repair projects have piled up because public funds are absorbed by military operations and humanitarian response, and administrative reshuffles sometimes force procurement and approval procedures to start over.

Even if funding were released, the sector has steadily lost the engineers needed to carry out the work, driven out by the fighting and the rising cost of living, depriving the electricity system of what a former Energy Ministry official described as its “technical memory.”

Merowe’s electricity crisis is also putting the government’s wartime agricultural recovery plan at risk. Officials and engineers told Mada Masr that the plan to restore agricultural production in northern and eastern Sudan hinges on the same electricity infrastructure that has remained unrepaired, leaving farming dependent on electric-powered irrigation increasingly exposed to blackouts and load shedding during the peak growing season.

As the power crisis threatens irrigated farming, fighting that broke out in neighboring Ethiopia over the weekend is putting pressure on Gadarif, Sudan’s largest rain-fed farming state. Agricultural officials told Mada Masr that deteriorating insecurity along the border could disrupt planting, delay the movement of farming inputs and discourage financing at a critical stage of the growing season.

Military builds on North Kordofan gains, prepares push into West Kordofan

An air force strike on Tina in North Kordofan, August 4. Courtesy: @sport6780 on Telegram

The military captured a strategic area near the town of Rahad in North Kordofan on Sunday, building on last week’s major territorial gains in the state and setting the stage for what military sources describe as the next phase of the campaign against the RSF in West Kordofan.

A military source told Mada Masr that …