The Story We’re Not Telling About El-Obeid: SAF’s Human Shields and Trapped Civilians

The battle for El-Obeid is being framed almost exclusively as a story of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) encirclement, but an honest reckoning also requires confronting how the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have trapped civilians inside the city, turning them into de facto human shields and obstructing their right to flee.

International attention has zeroed in on the RSF buildup around El-Obeid. Rights groups and aid agencies describe a familiar pattern: drone strikes, artillery, siege tactics, and encirclement reminiscent of the coverage of El Fasher. This focus is understandable, but incomplete. By privileging the external siege over the internal architecture of control, much media coverage overlooks how the Sudanese army has managed, and manipulated, the civilian presence inside the city. The result is a narrative that pits a besieging RSF against a beleaguered urban population, while largely exempting SAF tactics from equal scrutiny.

Evidence emerging since late 2025 suggests that SAF-linked forces have actively prevented civilians from leaving El-Obeid, effectively weaponizing their presence. The Sudanese Alliance for Rights, for example, has highlighted a widely circulated video that shows Abu Aqla Mohammed Kaikal, a commander of “Sudan’s Shield” affiliated with the SAF, threatening to shoot civilians attempting to flee the city. Rights lawyers note that such conduct may amount to the war crime of using civilians as human shields, as well as unlawful confinement or forced displacement under international humanitarian and criminal law.

Western and regional partners are concerned about the SAF’s operational reliance on the Muslim Brotherhood–aligned al‑Baraa bin Malik Brigade, which Washington has designated as part of a terrorist structure tied to Iran and implicated in atrocities against civilians. This entanglement leaves the SAF in an increasingly untenable position diplomatically, as reports of its forces trapping civilians in El‑Obeid and using them as de facto human shields reinforce perceptions that the army is enabling extremist networks rather than protecting Sudanese citizens.

The SAF threats to civilians did not occur in isolation. They unfolded in a city already hemmed in by RSF positions and under sustained bombardment, where fuel shortages, damaged infrastructure, and insecurity have made escape routes hazardous even without deliberate obstruction. In this context, SAF decisions to deny safe passage or intimidate those who try to leave are not merely defensive; they transform civilians into strategic assets whose physical presence helps shore up the army’s claim to control and complicates any RSF assault.

The legal framework is clear: parties to a conflict must allow civilians to leave besieged areas safely and must not use them to shield military objectives from attack. Preventing civilians from evacuating, particularly under threat of violence, runs directly counter to the obligation to protect non-combatants and can constitute a war crime. Yet much of the diplomatic language around El-Obeid tends to frame violations in terms of RSF strikes and RSF siege tactics, even while calling on “all parties” to respect humanitarian law. This asymmetry of accountability matters. It reinforces an implicit hierarchy in which paramilitary violence is treated as exceptional and criminal, while violence or coercion by a nominal state military is cast as collateral or a regrettable necessity. SAF actions inside El-Obeid are too often folded into a generic concern for civilian protection rather than named and investigated as potential crimes in their own right.

For civilians, the distinction between RSF and SAF tactics is academic. Residents of El-Obeid face acute shortages of food, fuel, and water as drone strikes and shelling degrade basic services and humanitarian access. Aid groups warn that tens of thousands risk being trapped if roads toward Kosti and White Nile State become impassable, at the very moment when displacement pressure is already stretching neighboring regions. Some have managed to flee in recent weeks, but many more are stuck. The combination of RSF encirclement and SAF control of movement produces a deadly conundrum: people are unsafe if they stay, and unsafe if they try to leave. When an SAF-affiliated commander is filmed warning that those who flee may be shot, the logic of protection collapses entirely. At that point, “protection” becomes indistinguishable from confinement.

If El-Obeid is analyzed only as an RSF siege, the policy response will revolve around restraining those forces: sanctions, pressure, referral to international accountability mechanisms, and demands to halt the offensive. Those measures are necessary, but not sufficient. A fuller picture that incorporates SAF’s role in obstructing civilian movement forces policymakers to confront uncomfortable questions about the army’s own compliance with humanitarian law and about how international engagement might be reinforcing abusive practices by treating SAF as the default, legitimate interlocutor. Future ceasefire or humanitarian corridor arrangements that assume SAF will facilitate civilian evacuation could be dangerously naïve if command structures on the ground have already signaled that movement will be punished. Any credible plan for El-Obeid must explicitly address SAF behavior: securing guarantees against the use of human shields, monitoring evacuation routes, and making clear that threats against civilians constitute prosecutable offenses, regardless of whether they are committed by the RSF or SAF-linked units.

Part of the reluctance to examine SAF conduct stems from the seductive but flawed logic of the “lesser evil.” In El-Obeid, this logic translates into a tacit assumption that preserving army control—even at the cost of trapping civilians—is preferable to RSF capture. That framing is dangerous. It normalizes the idea that some civilian suffering is acceptable if it helps forestall something worse, thereby legitimizing coercive tactics such as forced immobility, intimidation, and the use of human shields. Once this logic takes root, civilians are reduced to variables in a military equation rather than rights-bearing individuals whose freedom of movement and right to escape danger must be non-negotiable.

An alternative approach would start from the premise that the rights of civilians in El-Obeid are not contingent on which armed actor happens to be advancing. Both RSF and SAF conduct must be subjected to the same legal and moral scrutiny, and both must be treated as potential perpetrators of grave crimes when they obstruct evacuation, target civilian infrastructure, or weaponize siege conditions. For international media and policymakers, this means rebalancing coverage: continuing to document RSF actions and the risks of its offensive while also reporting, in detail, on SAF’s role in restricting movement and creating conditions in which civilians become bargaining chips and shields. It also means amplifying Sudanese rights groups and local monitors who have already called out these abuses.