World News
More than 200,000 newly displaced across Kordofan as fighting meets the floods
By Staff Writer | 22 August 2026
Drone strikes on El Obeid's main electrical transformer have cut the power that runs its water pumps and hospitals, while heavy rain in North Darfur has destroyed or damaged nearly 1,350 homes in a week.
More than 200,000 people have been newly displaced across the Kordofan region of Sudan since late 2025, the United Nations migration agency said in a statement issued from Geneva and Khartoum on 19 August. Across the country 8.6 million people are now displaced inside Sudan, with further movements across its borders.
The warning signs are impossible to ignore. Across Sudan, families are fleeing violence, losing access to water, electricity, and health care, and now facing the added burden of destructive floods
Amy Pope, Director General of the United Nations migration agency
Power, then water, then everything else
In North Kordofan the agency reports intensified fighting and drone strikes on the main electrical transformer at El Obeid. The strikes have caused prolonged power cuts, and the cuts have stopped water pumping and disrupted health facilities and telephone networks. In Sheikan locality displacement has risen by a quarter over the past eight months. The pattern is the one that turns a battle into a humanitarian emergency: an attack on a single piece of infrastructure removes the services that let a town hold its population, and the population leaves.
In Blue Nile state, clashes in and near Geissan displaced 7,800 people, some of whom crossed into Ethiopia. In West Darfur nearly 18,000 people were displaced in the first half of August alone.
The rains arrive on top
Heavy rainfall at Tawila in North Darfur destroyed or damaged nearly 1,350 homes in a single week, displacing more than a thousand families. Further flooding at Kabkabiya and Shangil Tobaya pushed dozens more families into temporary shelters. These are places already holding people who arrived with nothing from somewhere else, so a flood there does not displace a settled population. It displaces one that has already moved once.
Supply lines and the money behind them
The agency says humanitarian access is being disrupted further by delays in global supply chains, particularly through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, which is where the goods for a landlocked response arrive from. Over 72 hours it delivered 1,750 metric tonnes of supplies, including 17,750 hygiene kits and 850 tents, reaching 110,750 people directly, and expects that figure to pass 400,000 in the days that follow.
Funding for shelter work is falling sharply at the same moment. Ms Pope said the agency is committed to delivering life saving aid but that urgent support is needed to sustain shelter and pipeline operations before conditions worsen further. Some Sudanese are moving in the other direction, back into Khartoum, which the agency records alongside the displacement rather than as a sign that the war is over.