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The Rapid Support Forces and its allies launched a broad offensive across Sudan this week, opening simultaneous attacks on multiple fronts in what military officers described to Mada Masr as an attempt to offset heavy losses on the North Kordofan front and prevent military advances westward.

From an attempt to retake a strategic border area in Darfur to waves of drone strikes across northern and central Sudan that kept the military’s air defenses heavily engaged, the escalation culminated with major gains in Blue Nile.

The RSF and its ally the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, seized Geisan on Tuesday and retook Kurmuk two days later, advancing from SPLM-N-held territory in southern Blue Nile and across the Ethiopian border, three military sources told Mada Masr.

The gains reverse much of the military’s recent progress along the southeastern border, coming only weeks after it recaptured Kurmuk and disrupted the cross-border supply routes that had sustained the allies’ campaign in the region.

As the two sides were fighting in Kurmuk, an RSF force of more than 250 combat vehicles moved on Gabra al-Sheikh, one of the paramilitary group’s main logistics hub in North Kordofan, in an attempt to retake the area it lost in the military’s late-July offensive. The military and allied forces repelled the attack after several hours of fighting.

While the SPLM-N remains occupied on the Blue Nile front, an internal crisis is growing in its South Kordofan stronghold, a crisis that could, a former military source in the movement said, force it to divert forces and resources to protecting its own territory from its own people.

Clashes that broke out last week in Kauda, the movement’s seat of power, between SPLM-N forces and one of its oldest constituencies, the Otoro tribe, were brought under control within days. But this week, the confrontation spread to villages surrounding the town, where clashes and heavy artillery exchanges have driven a new wave of displacement.

SPLM-N has since deployed heavily around Kauda to prevent the fighting from reaching the town again, a buildup that has disrupted people’s daily lives and deepened the strain on communities already exhausted by months of intermittent clashes and tightening security measures, three residents told Mada Masr.

At the root of the latest violence are Otoro demands for greater representation in the movement’s civilian and military institutions — a pushback against what they see as an increasingly centralized mode of governance. Tribal notables in SPLM-N territory warn that without genuine outreach to local communities, the violence will keep recurring, testing the movement’s claim to offer a model of local governance distinct from central state rule and risking a deeper rift between its institutions and the people they govern.

The RSF-led government is facing its own internal fractures. A fourth high-profile defection hit the administrative structures it has built in western Sudan, with Hamad Khalifa, the governor of the Kordofan region in the RSF-led Tasis administration and a member of its presidential council, announcing Wednesday that he is exiting the group.

In the military-led government, Khartoum is accelerating its push for a domestic political track, targeting September for the launch of the intra-Sudanese dialogue Transitional Sovereignty Council Chair Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has spent months championing and preparing — a process he wants to use to rebuild state institutions and set the terms for the next phase of the country’s political order under state oversight. The push picked up pace after international mediation in Addis Ababa broke down in late July, giving the government an opening to move ahead with its own track inside the country, a political source informed of the process said.

The government is now working to settle the dialogue’s preparatory arrangements, from the composition of the committee that will organize it to the rules for participation and the issues to be addressed first. But those arrangements are themselves a source of contention, with the opposition Sumud coalition arguing that the forces expected to take part should have a say in shaping them, given that they will effectively determine the course of the process and its outcomes.

Khartoum is also working with Juba through security talks to build direct channels between the two …