At least 21 people, including women and children from the Otoro tribe, were killed in attacks on the Debi and Luweri areas near Kauda in Sudan’s South Kordofan region this week, according to the Sudan Doctors Network. The assault marks one of the deadliest single incidents in a land-dispute conflict that has simmered alongside Sudan’s wider civil war.
The Sudan Doctors Network attributed the attack to forces aligned with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, the faction led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, which the group says is allied with the Rapid Support Forces. The RSF has been fighting Sudan’s army in a separate, nationwide civil war since 2023, but the South Kordofan violence stems from a distinct, longer-running dispute over land and grazing rights in the Nuba Mountains region.
This land-dispute front has now killed at least 158 people since March, according to local monitoring groups, a toll that has drawn far less international attention than the main civil war despite the mounting civilian casualties in Kauda and surrounding communities.
The attack adds to what is already one of the world’s largest displacement crises. Sudan’s civil war has displaced roughly 13 million people nationwide and left an estimated 33.7 million in need of humanitarian aid, figures that make South Kordofan’s parallel land conflict especially difficult for aid groups to track and respond to given how thinly resources are already stretched.
The violence is a reminder of how conflict in Sudan has fractured into overlapping fronts that complicate any single ceasefire or peace process, a dynamic echoed elsewhere on the continent where armed groups controlling territory have made it harder for responders to reach people in need, whether the crisis is violence, disease or displacement.
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